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Living In Captivity aired from September until October 1998 on FOX.
Set in the exclusive gated suburban community of Woodland Heights, California, this comedy focused on the relationships of 3 couples. Will ( Matt Letscher), was a neurotic Christian novelist, and Becca ( Melinda McGraw), a ball-busting Jewish attorney; Carmine ( Lenny Venito), a boorish Auto-parts mogul ( the " King of Mufflers") and Lisa ( Mia Cottet), his ditzy trophy wife; Curtis ( Dondre T. Whitfield), a successful black disc jockey, and Tamara( Kira Arne) his very pregnant spouse. Ethnic jokes abounded, cued by the arrival of the Cookes in the previously all-white enclave. Shortly after the premiere a baby Louis was born to the Cookes, and Carmine's horny young nephew , Vito ( Michael Bacall), moved in with the Santucci's. Carmine got Vito a job as a bagboy at the local supermarket where everybody , including fellow residents Les and Charlie ( Fred Stoller, George Wyner), seemed to hang out and gossip. Gordon ( Terry Rhoades), was the gay security guard-look out more stereotype jokes.
A Review from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; Mingling With Unlikely Neighbors
By ANITA GATES
Published: September 10, 1998
Three couples walk into a gated community. One is black and affluent; one is white and liberal; one is white and possibly mob-affiliated. Can they find happiness and true friendship in a Fox sitcom?
The answer is up for grabs. ''Living in Captivity,'' which has its premiere tomorrow night at 8, comes from Diane English and Joel Shukovsky, who gave the world both ''Murphy Brown'' and ''The Louie Show.'' And the first three episodes teeter between daringly honest ethnic humor and bad taste.
First of all, the black couple, Curtis and Tamara Cooke, are a little puzzled by the all-whiteness of their new neighborhood. Curtis (Dondre T. Whitfield) remembers looking at the brochure. ''There were happy black people on the cover,'' he reminds Tamara (Kira Arne), who is close to nine months pregnant. But the white-bread whites, Will and Becca Marek (Matthew Letscher and Melinda McGraw), point out that they were the models for the cover. Oops, it turns out there was just a little too much toner in the fax machine.
But the Cookes are here, they've bought the house, and they're going to make the best of it. As Will says when he first glimpses them next door, ''A little ethnicity will do everyone some good.'' Before Carmine Santucci (Lenny Venito) spies the Cookes, he takes a look at the contents of the moving van and says: ''They've got a lot of books. It's going to be trouble.'' Before the premiere episode is over, Carmine, who actually has a black lawn jockey outside his house, will have accused the Cookes of stealing his Char-Wizard barbecue. And Will will have realized that doing a morning run with Curtis reminds him of the time he was chased by a black man who robbed him.
But it cuts both ways, folks. ''That's the sound of our property values dropping 20 percent,'' says Carmine when he gets a good look at the Cookes. ''Great, there go our property values,'' says Tamara, when she and Curtis get a good look at Carmine's mammoth recreational vehicle parked outside the house.
The second episode of ''Living in Captivity'' focuses on each couple's curiosity about how often the other couples have sex. In a subplot, Carmine's young blond size-4 wife, Lisa (Mia Cottet), who seems to spend most of her time on exercise machines, decides to take a class, forcing Carmine -- whose manhood would apparently be compromised by pushing a button on a microwave -- to have dinner at the other couples' houses. ''So,'' he says to the Cookes, ''this is okra.''
The third episode is about a robbery, which results in the nervous breakdown of Gordon the security guard and security-alarm jokes. The subplot is about the Cookes' new baby, who ''hasn't stopped crying since he was born.'' And while everyone is trying to make the neighborhood safer, two dogs -- one (named Gambino) small, white and fluffy; one of the seeing-eye variety -- meet untimely (off camera) ends. Can they do that in prime time?
LIVING IN CAPTIVITY
Fox, Friday night at 8 (Channel 5 in New York)
Diane English, Joel Shukovsky and Tom Palmer, executive producers. Produced by Shukovsky English Entertainment and Dog Soup Inc., in association with 20th Century Fox Television.
WITH: Dondre T. Whitfield (Curtis Cooke), Kira Arne (Tamara Cooke), Lenny Venito (Carmine Santucci), Mia Cottet (Lisa Santucci), Matthew Letscher (Will Marek) and Melinda McGraw (Becca Marek).
A Review of Living in Captivity and The Hughleys from Entertainment Weekly
TV Review
The Race Cards
ABC's The Hughleys and Fox's Living in Captivity trump up black-and-white issues for laughs, but Ken Tucker isn't wild about these jokers
By Ken Tucker
Watching the comedian D.L. Hughley making the talk-show rounds to promote his new sitcom, The Hughleys, it's easy to see why ABC and a group of executive producers including Chris Rock were eager to go into business with him. The guy is funny as hell: fast and loose, able to riff ad-libs and fold what is obviously well-honed stand-up material into the conversational exchanges on even so rigidly formatted a show as Live With Regis & Kathie Lee. (It was most amusing to notice, in fact, that the studio audience was getting more of Hughley's speedy jokes than Gifford was.)
Hughley's brash, winning personality makes him a TV natural, but so far, The Hughleys isn't the proper showcase for it. The show is a trite fish-out-of-water variation: Upwardly mobile black family moves into white neighborhood, and the show has already acknowledged its debt to The Jeffersons, but the self-awareness doesn't necessarily make for better comedy. D.L. stars as family man and vending-machine entrepreneur Darryl Hughley, and like George Jefferson, he's more prickly and suspicious when it comes to his affluent new white neighbors than is his calm, sensible wife, Yvonne (Scream 2's Elise Neal).
D.L. Hughley tells any interviewer who'll listen that this premise is based on his own experiences as an up-and-coming comic who moved into a white area of his native Los Angeles, but that still doesn't make the standard-issue yuk lines (''I'm as hungry as a hostage!'') any funnier. For one thing, Hughley the actor doesn't seem comfortable portraying the grumpiness of Hughley the character. What comes across most naturally when you see Hughley do his stand-up is just the opposite quality -- his sunny, if devilish, demeanor.
Then, too, Neal's Yvonne is, so far, little more than long-suffering, and the couple's kids (Ashley Monique Clark and Dee Jay Daniels) are squeaky-voiced ciphers. Darryl's buddy Milsap (Living Single's John Henton) serves primarily as the best friend from the 'hood who's ''keepin' it real,'' a stance that is rapidly hardening into a sitcom cliche. But the real sign that The Hughleys hasn't found -- and may never find -- its voice is that the most vividly drawn characters are Darryl's white neighbors, bluff and hearty Dave and Sally Rogers (Eric Allan Kramer and Marietta DePrima). It's as if the writers said, ''D.L. knows what he wants his persona to be and he'll improvise half his lines anyhow; let's concentrate on the funny neighbors.'' (And I'm taking bets as to what percentage of that writing staff is white, too.)
Last season, two promising sitcoms with black stars, CBS' The Gregory Hines Show and NBC's Built to Last, flopped with good intentions, bad time periods, and poor early ratings that got them labeled as losers too quickly. ABC should look at the example of UPN's warm yet hip Moesha, a show that found its distinctive comic rhythm only after one full season. ABC will probably stick with The Hughleys anyway; its initial post-Home Improvement ratings have been decent, and in addition to the classiness of Rock, another of its exec producers, David Janollari, helped develop the network's hit The Drew Carey Show, which was also a slow starter that eventually took off.
Some early reviewers of The Hughleys found offense in a joke in the pilot when Darryl is teased about ''becoming white'' because he pays his bills on time. But rather than discourage Hughley from invoking racial stereotypes, these criticisms should enjoin him to dig deeper into them; as Chris Rock has proven in his stand-up act, black comedians joking publicly about things that some blacks joke about privately can be tremendously liberating -- and, not at all by the way, very funny and provocative. If D.L. Hughley will start insisting that Darryl Hughley be less crossly defensive and more agreeably aggressive, The Hughleys might have hope.
Utterly without hope is the similarly themed but far more obnoxious Fox sitcom Living in Captivity. Here too, a black couple, the Cooks (Dondre T. Whitfield and Kira Arne), move into a white neighborhood. But, as presented by Murphy Brown exec producers Diane English and Joel Shukovsky, they are mere bland wimps, surrounded by neighbors such as a racist creep called Carmine (Lenny Venito) and a liberal creep named Will (Matthew Letscher). Fox just pulled Captivity, but it may return later in the season. So the show's creators have some time to try investing its characters with both humor and humanity. The Hughleys: C+ Living in Captivity: D
[BOX]
ABC The Hughleys 8:30-9 PM TUESDAYS
FOX Living in Captivity 8-8:30 PM FRIDAYS
An Article about Censorship from The New York Times
Censorship in the Age of Anything Goes; Where Have You Gone, Standards and Practices?
By WARREN BERGER
Published: September 20, 1998
LAST week, Fox ran an on-air promotion for a pair of sitcoms, ''Living in Captivity'' and ''Getting Personal.'' To make the point that the shows were sassy and sexy compared with tamer Friday night programming on other channels, the commercial depicted a man being chased as a voice-over announced, ''We ran the censors off, and boy, does it show!''
It's easy to see the appeal of such a sales pitch to the much-coveted youth audience, which has long felt a healthy antipathy toward anyone trying to tone down the latest records, music videos or sitcoms. But for more mature viewers who've been battered by Jerry Springer's cat fights, Howard Stern's genitalia gags, ''South Park's'' scatological cartoon children and ''Dawson Creek's'' libidinous teen-agers, the idea of one more television guardian who has turned tail and run for cover may not be particularly comforting.
Certainly, there has been no shortage of public and media outcry as raunchy programming has begun to pervade television in recent months, spanning the dial and the daily schedule from Springer in the morning to scantily clad porn stars on the E! channel in the afternoon, from ''Ally McBeal'' salivating over a well-endowed nude male model during prime time to late-night sex-obsessed gabfests on CBS's ''Howard Stern Radio Show'' and MTV's ''Loveline.'' Even veteran media watchers are expressing dismay.
''When it comes to violating traditional canons of taste, it seems that anything goes on television right now,'' observes Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University. ''In fact, tastelessness is the new orthodoxy.''
Interestingly, though, amid castigations of reckless hosts (there's an idea: let's make Jerry Springer feel really guilty) and calls for stricter ratings accompanied by prayers for the arrival of the vaunted V-chip, rarely has anyone asked what happened to the censors. As Mr. Stern and Mr. Springer parade all of those naked, only slightly pixelated strippers before the camera, where are the eagle eyes who, just a few years ago, fretted about glimpses of David Caruso's rear end on ''N.Y.P.D. Blue''? Or who, further back, worried about relatively innocuous wisecracks by Tommy Smothers?
Actually, many censors skipped town more than a decade ago, as the broadcast networks drastically reduced the size of their internal standards and practices departments. Previously, these in-house watchdogs held sway at the big three networks and weren't particularly well loved by anyone, from producers to viewers. Seen as inflexible, schoolmarmish and beholden to advertisers, television censors often lived up to their image. Adhering to a strict ''television code'' set down in 1952 by the National Association of Broadcasters (which forbade not only profanity and most sexual content but also anything involving fortunetelling or mind reading), censors seemed particularly onerous to the public whenever they tried to stifle candid discussion of topical issues on shows like ''The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.''
Given that history, few tears were shed when the old code was abandoned and standards departments were cut in half in the 1980's -- partly for budgetary reasons but also in response to a changing television landscape. Series like ''All in the Family'' had begun to push the boundaries of explicit content a decade earlier, but the real pressure came from the new cable channels, which faced less Government regulation than broadcasters and took the position that their programming could be more risque because viewers had signed up for the service and knew what to expect.
As network standards departments weakened, several producers, led by Steven Bochco, stepped up the assault on what was left of censorship rules. Pressure groups aside, most viewers didn't object much, because the rules were being broken ''by classy, well-written, intelligent shows like 'Hill Street Blues' and 'St. Elsewhere,' '' says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television. (The challenge of getting around the censors may have actually pushed those shows to be more creative and subtle when exploring adult themes.) However, says Mr. Thompson, once these shows claimed new territory in terms of what could be shown and said on the networks, ''that opened everything up for the sleazier shows to move in and take over.''
Which brings us to today's landscape and raises the question: were the censors all bad?
Mr. Miller of N.Y.U. and others cringe at the thought of returning to an old-fashioned censorship system that would probably be far too authoritarian for the 90's. But the search for alternative means of regulation, like the rating system implemented last year, doesn't seem to be going great guns, either. In fact, judging from current programming (almost all of the aforementioned sexually explicit shows came into being after the rating system was enacted), the ratings, including TV-MA (mature audiences), seem to have had a far different effect than intended.
''The people who wanted ratings to put the brakes on this new explosion of raunchy television saw just the opposite happen,'' says Mr. Thompson. ''Anybody should have seen this coming. If you give producers the opportunity to use a TV-MA rating, it's an invitation to make TV-MA programs.'' Indeed, by affixing an MA rating on ''South Park,'' a channel like Comedy Central, whose standards and practices department consists of exactly one person, can feel that it has acted responsibly.
''We've used the rating as a tool,'' says Comedy Central's president, Doug Herzog. ''It warns people that this show is not for everybody, and certainly not for kids.'' That seems reasonable enough -- except to parents whose children are clamoring, and perhaps sneaking off, to watch the show because it is topic A in the schoolyard.
To some extent, the rating system provides broadcasters and cable networks an opportunity to wash their hands of monitoring and occasionally censoring content, thereby freeing them from any esthetic responsibility for what they transmit into living rooms. And while some may tend to applaud this as a welcome end to unwanted censorship, the reality is that only certain kinds of censorship are going by the wayside. When it comes to muzzling uncomfortable points of view or avoiding difficult and divisive topics, censorship is apparently still alive and well.
While gobs of sleazy content have slithered under the gates in the past year, those hold-over network censors have stirred from their slumber whenever a show has veered into political hot-potato territory, as in the cases of ''Ellen'' and ''Nothing Sacred,'' which did battle with ABC over dealing candidly with subjects like homosexuality, abortion and religion. Just a few weeks ago, Fox scrapped a drama about the sexual harassment charges against Clarence Thomas, reportedly because of objections by Fox's owner, Rupert Murdoch, who is friendly with Justice Thomas. And earlier this year, NBC's ''Saturday Night Live'' deleted a portion of the show satirizing the ownership of networks by large conglomerates (the show's producers insist that the segment was cut from the finished show for artistic reasons; others aren't so sure).
Mr. Miller of N.Y.U. says these instances and others like them indicate that the more prevalent form of censorship in today's television landscape comes not from a schoolmarm type armed with a list of dirty words, but rather from ''a rocking-and-rolling C.E.O. worried about how his company may be affected by something said on TV.''
All of which suggests that the current age of anything-goes television may not be particularly brave or daring after all. With few censors to worry about, the only thing that programmers need fear is skittish advertisers. But as Mr. Miller points out, most advertisers have overcome their old fears of sex because such programming delivers the young-adult demographic and tends to stop channel surfers in their tracks. (How many can cruise past Mr. Stern's show without at least taking a peek to see what he's up to?) In some ways, raunch is the safest kind of programming right now.
Meanwhile, there has been an odd reversal. While it once required courage to defy the censors, now it takes backbone to uphold any kind of censoring standards. Out there alone on the last front lines of censorship are local station owners and network affiliates, who must decide when to redraw the line that has been all but erased by the networks, cable channels and syndicators. A Phoenix station programmer recently dropped Mr. Stern's show because she thought a segment in which mentally disabled people engaged in a ''Frankenstein beauty contest'' might be a tad over the line. Other stations must make similar judgments about the latest outrage from Mr. Springer, but if they reject his high-rated show, ''they run the risk that the station across the street will pick it up and then trounce them in the ratings,'' says Andy Grossman, an editor at the industry publication Multichannel News.
Given that the in-house censors are not apt to return to an active role any time soon -- and that we probably don't want them to, considering their proven susceptibility to corporate pressures and poor judgment -- it seems likely that the task of minding the gates of good taste will increasingly fall not just to the local station managers but also to series creators. With less outside censorship, they are forced into being censors of their own work. Philip Rosenthal, executive producer of ''Everybody Loves Raymond,'' says he imposes his own limitations on what characters can and can't say ''because it's too easy to just go for the raunchy line,'' he says. Not that the censors would stop him.
''I haven't even seen anyone from standards and practices the whole time I've been working on the show,'' he says. ''That gives you freedom, but it also makes you pause. Who is going to censor you if not yourself?''
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