New, Multiracial Beginning in Story of ‘Madam & Eve’

The doorbell rings at the home of Madam Gwen, but Eve, the black maid, refuses to answer it. This act of defiance spells trouble for plump and proper Madam, who idles away her day while her domestic servants do all the chores.

Madam reluctantly pulls herself up from the sofa and opens the door.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you answer the door before,” says the startled visitor, a neighbor.

“I wouldn’t let Eve have time off to see her Uncle Joe, so now she’s getting back at me,” says Madam.

“By making you answer the door?”

“Forget about the door. She’s protesting by not doing her work. She’s on a go-slow.”

“A go-slow? How slow is she going to go?”

Eve enters from the kitchen, walking at an exaggeratedly slow pace as if her feet are stuck in glue. She delivers tea to a displeased Madam and her guest. The laugh track roars.

“Well, at least she made you tea,” says the visitor.

“I asked her last night,” Madam says wryly. More laugh track.

So goes the first episode of “Madam & Eve,” the newest South African sitcom to hit television screens. Based on a popular comic strip of the same name, “Madam & Eve” explores the awkward relationship between a wealthy white woman and her black maid as they try to make their way in post-apartheid South Africa.

Before the 30-minute episode is over, Eve cleverly turns the madam-maid relationship on its head. She takes over the house for a party, her friends get Madam drunk on African home-brewed beer and she and Madam dance together as if they are the best of friends.

Signs of political and social change are everywhere in the new South Africa, but there are few places like television to understand how South Africans see themselves--or would like to see themselves--in this uncertain period of transition.

Under apartheid, a show such as “Madam & Eve” would have had no chance of getting on the air. But since the democratic elections in 1994, television producers are turning to multiracial sitcoms as an entertaining way to wrestle with the country’s uncomfortable past and perhaps show a path to the future.

“South Africans are very loyal to local programs. They want to look at South African life comically,” says Deva Britow, the executive producer for “Madam & Eve,” which airs on South Africa’s only free independent station, e-TV. “South Africans like to laugh. They like to laugh at themselves.”

But behind the laughter, the show delivers its share of social commentary. The day the first episode of “Madam & Eve” aired last month, for instance, the Star, Johannesburg’s largest daily newspaper, ran a story on overworked, underpaid domestic workers along with a photo of the “Madam & Eve” characters. The newspaper also printed the country’s basic conditions of employment act, reminding all the nation’s Madams that their Eves are entitled to vacation, sick leave and severance packages.

“Madam & Eve” builds on other post-apartheid sitcoms that don’t blink at racial humor. “Suburban Bliss,” a wildly popular sitcom about a black family from Soweto moving into an affluent white Johannesburg suburb, was a breakthrough for television viewers. So was “Going Up,” a show about events occurring in a small established law firm in downtown Johannesburg and a “shebeen,” a black tavern, located atop the same office building.

Many of these comedies are cast in the mold of “All in the Family,” the 1970s American sitcom featuring Archie Bunker, a racist grouch whose attitudes are constantly made to look ridiculous as he confronts his family and the world.

“Instead of bigotry winning out, solutions are found,” says Keyan Tomaselli, a media studies professor at the University of Natal-Durban. In South Africa, sitcoms are “an easy way to deal with social and interracial issues,” he says.

Sitcoms are allowed to play with cultural stereotypes, such as the rich madam, the poor maid, the old racist Afrikaner and the Zulu grandmother, freeing the show’s writers and viewers to explore the contradictions and complexities of South Africa today, he says.

What sets South African television apart from its American and British counterparts is that by law, all shows must include as many of the country’s 11 official languages as possible.

To an outsider, it makes for awkward, often confusing, viewing. In “Madam & Eve,” for instance, Eve speaks Zulu with the family’s black gardener but will talk with the Madam in English. Sometimes viewers are provided subtitles; other times, viewers are expected to understand the conversation within context or repetition.

The final product, in most cases, is not as polished as the television shows from America. Critics complain that the scripts are tired retreads of slapstick comedies from 1970s American television, lacking the sharpness and wit of award-winning comedies such as “Seinfeld” or “Frasier.” One reviewer wrote that the “Madam & Eve” script was so bad that the makers of “Three’s Company” would have rejected it.

Some critics view the visual humor--the pratfalls, the funny faces, the objects falling on peoples’ heads and toes--as a way of reaching across a multilingual audience.

Others blame limited budgets and a general lack of experience in a country where television is just 25 years old. Fearing that it would be a dangerous, perhaps revolutionary technology, television was banned by apartheid leaders until 1976, when the first government-owned station, the South African Broadcasting Corp., went on the air with tightly controlled news, sports and entertainment programs.

Early on, a black person could not appear in the same frame as a white person. Half of the programs were in English and half were in Afrikaans. Native African languages were rarely heard. But over the years, the restrictions were relaxed somewhat as the government launched two more stations broadcasting in black tribal languages.

South Africans also started importing American shows such as “Dallas,” “Miami Vice” and “The Cosby Show”--programs that drew both black and white viewers and offered images of blacks in positions of power.

In 1994, South African television was liberated from its apartheid restrictions. Today, about 66%, or 6.3 million, of all South African households have televisions. Viewers now have their choice of the state-run South African Broadcasting Corp.’s three channels with programming in all 11 languages, independent e-TV and several pay channels with home-grown shows.

American, British and other foreign imports make up nearly half of all shows on television. One of the most popular shows is the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” It is so closely followed by the black population that the nation’s minibus taxis set their schedules around the daily 6 p.m. broadcast.

Audiences, however, still prefer anything made in South Africa, because the shows reflect their own experiences.

“With democracy comes a lot more freedom. You can see a lot of people from previously disadvantaged upbringings involved in television. There are black actors, black producers, black writers,” says Britow. “We can see stories about the Cape Flats and about the townships, made by people who have lived there.”