A Controversial ‘Diary’

Even with the flood of 36 new television series premiering over the next few weeks in the kickoff of the fall season, one UPN comedy, “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer,” has always stood apart from the pack.

Just the premise alone--a black English nobleman who becomes a butler and advisor to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War--was enough to grab the attention and raise the eyebrows of industry insiders and television critics, many of whom labeled the series the worst show of the season when they viewed the pilot.

In a unique twist of promotion, UPN is embracing the negative reviews, featuring them in commercials. “The critics hate it, you’ll love it!” trumpet the ads.

But weeks before its Oct. 5 debut, a coalition of black community leaders say they more than hate “Desmond Pfeiffer.” Claiming that the show’s historical setting in the era of slavery is inappropriate for a situation comedy, the Beverly Hills/Hollywood chapter of the NAACP, the Brotherhood Crusade and others say they are launching a determined grass-roots effort to torpedo it.

“This show desensitizes the pain and devastating suffering of slavery,” said Pastor Ron Wright of the Emmanuel AME church in Los Angeles. “It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Danny Bakewell, head of the Brotherhood Crusade, added: “There is no compromise on this. This show need not air. We want our children to understand what happened, and that it will never happen again. When it’s dramatized in a comedic way, it diminishes the value of our pain and our ancestors’ suffering.”

In addition to criticizing actor Chi McBride, who plays the title role and is the only black cast member, the advocates say they are particularly dismayed at UPN, which has targeted much of its programming toward a black audience and has a loyal African American viewership.

Bakewell and Wright say they are planning a “major protest” next week at an undetermined location, demanding that UPN take the comedy off the schedule. They say they will target advertisers if the program airs.

UPN President Dean Valentine said he is “deeply puzzled” by the opposition, saying that the network has been diligent in talking to those concerned about the series. But he added that he has no plans to yank it.

“We have nothing to feel bad about, and we’re not going to feel bad about it,” Valentine said. As for the protesters, “They can march up and down the street all they want to.”

Much of the furor is over an early version of the pilot, which had a comical scene in which the bodies of two men in England are shown after they have been hung. Their heads are covered, so it is impossible to tell if the victims are black or white.

That scene and another that showed Pfeiffer being transported by ship to the “southernmost part of America, the part where they grow cotton,” were cut from the final version of the pilot. Producers of the show said the scenes were excised because of time considerations, while UPN executives said they were deleted because of “bad taste.”

Still, rumors continued to fly for months--fueled by the Internet--that the show made light of slavery and the lynching of blacks. But even with the deleted scenes, Wright and Bakewell said they still want the series pulled.

Billie J. Green, president of the Beverly Hills/Hollywood chapter of the NAACP, contended that even if the series has little reference to slavery in the first episode, “it will be brought in later. That’s how the studios operate.”

Valentine said he finds nothing in “Desmond Pfeiffer” that would be offensive to African Americans: “We’ve gone out of our way. The last thing we want to do is offend an important part of our constituency. We don’t want to drive people away.”

He made note of the broad, farcical tone of “Desmond Pfeiffer,” which contains a great deal of sexually suggestive comedy and is largely designed as a satirical broadside at politics and the current sexual controversies in the Clinton administration.

“I can see where people might find it morally or sexually offensive, but not on the issue of race,” he said. Valentine added that tapes of the pilot had been shown to several African American groups that did not find the humor racially offensive: “People who have seen it have found it incredibly funny, and that includes black and white audiences.”

As for the show having an “inappropriate” historical setting, Valentine said: “Instead of Chi, what if we had cast a Caucasian in that role? Would it still be wrong to do a comedy set in the Lincoln White House? I’m totally baffled by that.”

McBride, who compared “Desmond Pfeiffer” to “Hogan’s Heroes,” the classic 1960s sitcom that depicted a group of American POWs in a Nazi war camp during World War II, said he was not surprised that “Desmond Pfeiffer” has sparked controversy.

“I anticipated it because of the setting and time,” said McBride. “But if this were a comedy about slavery, I would not be involved. I wanted to make sure when I took the project that if I had any objections, that it would be a climate where I would be able to address them and they would be dealt with.”

“Desmond Pfeiffer,” which is produced by Paramount Network Television, depicts the fictional title character as the most intelligent and articulate member of the Lincoln administration. He has his own personal assistant, Nibblet, who is as clumsy as he is dim-witted. Lincoln is portrayed as a sex-crazed bumbler, while his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, is mostly just sex-crazed.

In the first few episodes, there are some references to slavery. In one scene, as Pfeiffer is relaxing in the kitchen, Lincoln’s chief of staff comes in and says, “The slaves haven’t been emancipated yet, Pfeiffer. Get your feet off that table.” In another scene, when the brandy-swilling Gen. Ulysses S. Grant demonstrates a lack of battle savvy, Pfeiffer quips, “With you at the helm, I better get my cotton-picking skills ready.”

“There’s no way they can pull this off without offending people of color,” said the NAACP’s Green. “Nothing during this time was funny.”

Mort Nathan, a creator and executive producer of the comedy, said he was surprised by the outrage. “This is not about slavery or the struggle of slavery,” he said. “It’s about a fish out of water. I’m mystified that someone would say that a historic period is taboo for satire. There’s always a period of history that will be painful to somebody.”

Added supervising producer Bill Boulware: “It’s extreme censorship to say you can’t do a comedy about a particular period in time. We’re doing stories on telegram sex, security leaks in the White House, the internal conflicts of character.”

Boulware, who is African American, added: “This protest is personally frustrating. It’s like an indirect hit on me. It’s an attack against my own integrity, and I would not be on a show that made fun of slaves.”

Opponents of “Desmond Pfeiffer” said they were hoping for a multitude of people to show up at next week’s protest. But some community insiders have already weighed in to defend the series.

Lee Bailey of the Entertainment Urban Report, an online newsletter dealing with black entertainment, wrote in an edition this week that the furor over the comedy was “much ado about nothing.”

“Our critique?” wrote Bailey. “It’s silly, the comedy in the script is played out, the laugh track is working overtime and the acting is pretty pitiful, even for a sitcom.” He added, “This show is not where we should point our greatest energies of protest.”