Community Groups Object to View of ‘South Central’ : Television: After a screening of the first episode, critics say it perpetuates negative images.

Members of several community groups blasted the first episode of Fox’s “South Central” series, saying the show lacks strong male characters, features inappropriate language and perpetuates negative images of life in South Central Los Angeles.

The complaints erupted following a screening last Thursday at 20th Century Fox studios that was hosted by the show’s creators, Michael J. Weithorn and Ralph Farquhar. The discussion escalated several times into loud denouncements from audience members who said they would tell their friends not to watch the premiere Tuesday.

The fervor of the reaction caught Weithorn and Farquhar by surprise, since they have received letters of praise for the episode from Los Angeles Urban League Director John Mack, Brotherhood Crusade President Danny Bakewell, pastors from the First AME Church and other community leaders.

“South Central” centers on a single mother (Tina Lifford) struggling to raise her three children amid poverty and gangs in riot-torn South Central Los Angeles.

Gloria Gray of the Black Health Services Action Committee said she was bothered that the central family in the show had no father figure. The father does not live in the home and neither the mother nor the children know his whereabouts.

“There are plenty of fathers in South Central, so why does every story we see about the area have the father absent?” Gray said.

*

Other audience members, including members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Community Build and the Black Women’s Lawyer Assn., complained that the show was based too much on negative circumstances. “Why does every show have to start with a family in disarray, in crisis?” asked one angry viewer.

Other invitees accused the producers of not doing enough research in the community and protested the teen-age son using the word bitch while watching a television program. They also criticized a scene in which the son refuses to relinquish a beeper to his mother when she demanded that he hand it over.

Farquhar and Weithorn defended the series, saying the audience had seen only the first episode and that the story lines and characters would evolve as “South Central” continued. But their comments were often drowned out by screaming from the crowd.

“I was caught off guard by the intensity of their feelings, but the criticism was not unexpected,” Weithorn said the following day. “We’ve known all along that it would anger people.

“Most of the people who came to the screening have devoted their lives to the furthering of a political agenda, and that is very commendable,” he said. “But we’re not furthering an agenda with this show. We’re telling a story about people with flaws and warts. That kind of thing is not going to be consistent with their agenda.”