For Jamie Foxx, the road to an Academy Award and Hollywood A-list status was paved by Wanda Wayne. Billed as the ugliest woman in the world, Foxx puckered his lips to an offensive degree to bring the “In Living Color” character to life, in addition to wearing a series of inappropriate dresses and a trashy wig. Wanda helped win Foxx his own sitcom. Then came movies and superstardom but first, he had to play the buffoon.
Foxx’s story inspires Showtime’s “White Famous,” his collaboration with “Californication” creator Tom Kapinos, and the actor appears in pilot as a kinky, inappropriate and out-of-touch cartoon version of himself. When rising stand-up comedian Floyd Mooney (Jay Pharoah) meets him for the first time, Fox has a naked woman writhing on top of him and sees nothing inappropriate about the encounter.
Floyd, on the other hand, is appalled. But he also wants to impress and possibly work with one of his idols. So Floyd remains in the same room as Foxx keeps on chatting and grinding away, doing his best to downplay the obscenity of the situation.
Hollywood is a vault of unseemly peccadilloes and sick secrets, a side celebrated in HBO's bro-culture comedy "Entourage" and witnessed in the real world with the speedy plummet of Harvey Weinstein. Everybody who works in the town or even adjacent to the industry knows a few stories they’d never take on the record for fear of ruin. The sexual harassment accusations current dragging down Weinstein and Amazon’s Roy Price — and Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly before them — are just the tip of the iceberg. The industry will make examples of them, and other predators will quiet down . . . for a time.
Performers of color have long known that the place is far more libertine than truly liberal, and we see Floyd live that truth as he break through layer upon layer craziness in his quest for fame.
Floyd is a successful comic with a devoted black fanbase, and the series opens in the midst of his stand-up performance, As he cues the audience to sing along with him as the rolls into a lyric from Tupac Shakur’s “Hail Mary.” Pointing out the lone white woman in the audience, he gets laughs by calling her to the stage and announcing she’s been adopted by the community. The room breaks into convivial laughter.
I can envision this scene playing out again later very differently, after Floyd’s brand has exploded and his audience’s racial makeup has shifted.
For the time being “White Famous,” premiering Sunday at 10 p.m., answers the frequently posed question as to how black people, especially rich black people, can claim to be oppressed at a time when a number of performers, athletes, entrepreneurs and politicians have reached the upper echelons of wealth and success.
“White Famous” has its flaws, particularly with regard to the pilot's denigrating view of gender; in a key scene elements of femininity are used, literally, as a tools of emasculation. (Kapinos' humor palette is overwhelmingly male-centric, as he proved in "Californication," so this isn't particularly shocking.) Even so, it's a legitimately pointed examination of the perils of attaining mainstream fame, exposing the apprehensive churn people like Floyd are subjected on their way up the ladder. For Floyd, there’s the matter of being true to his brand while expanding his profile. His fans adore his down-to-Earth nature, but his idol wants to offer him a shot — contingent on a condition Floyd finds to be embarrassing.
At just about every step Floyd is objectified and taken advantage of in ways he rarely seeing coming. Entitlement, cluelessness, bravura and simply craziness rule the world around him, and he’d be more than happy to opt out of the madness entirely.
But the series also suggests that our new age of rampant capitalism and branding the cautionary concept of “selling out,” while not entirely obsolete, may be antiquated. Floyd doesn’t believe that to be the case in his heart of hearts, and his best friend Ron Balls (Jacob Ming-Trent) co-signs that idea when he warns Malcolm to help Floyd stay true to the fans that brought him up. But Floyd also has a son to raise, Trevor (the adorable Lonnie Chavis) and a girlfriend to win back, Sadie (Cleopatra Coleman).
As his aggressive agent Malcolm (Utkarsh Ambudkar) relentlessly reminds him, the opportunities he’s getting are only available to a select few — and if he wants to secure a solid financial future for his family, he has to roll with the ridiculousness to some degree. But at what cost?
During the third episode a network executive manhandles Floyd moments after meeting him for the first time, raving about his physique. The exchange falls just shy of a modern version of examining a slave on an auction block and in response, a shocked Floyd asks the guy if he wants to check his teeth. The man laughs, because we’re all friends here, we’re all just kidding, right?
The writing of “White Famous” is light and scathingly funny, a remarkable trait in what may be the most comfortable uncomfortable portrayal of fame and racism on television this season.
Pharaoh, who famously departed “Saturday Night Live” to take this role, exercises a dramatic flexibility that shines through in Floyd. He makes him brash and unfiltered without making him excessively jaded, and when he’s teamed with Ambudkar’s ambitious but determined Malcolm his delivery is exceptional.
Kapinos, the comedy’s showrunner and executive producer Tim Story, who directs the pilot, present Floyd as a stubborn but genuinely enjoyable guy to whom viewers can easily connect — who can afford to drive a nice car and dine in expensive places but nevertheless is mistaken for the valet.
When that happens, and he calls out the offending party, who happened to be powerful producer (wonderfully played by Stephen Tobolowsky), the man responds with, “This is so not a thing . . . I am the farthest thing in the world from a racist! I am working with Jamie f--king Foxx right now . . . and he’s black as the ace of spades!”
Ours is becoming a culture of outrage, Tobolowsky’s character observes later, giving voice to the comedy’s reason for being in the process. We’re stuck in a swarm of discord, and the loudest, angriest buzz hums concerns racial injustice and a stubborn denial of its existence. The racism on display in “White Famous” is brazen enough to be served with booming laughs and smiles, but presented as an unpleasant appetizer to be swallowed in order to gain entry to prosperity's banquet.
Therein lies the answer to the previously posed question — regardless of what level of fame Floyd reaches, he’ll never shake off the way white people see him.
“A man could live a very comfortable life in a world that doesn’t want him in the first place,” a chauffeur assures Floyd on his way to a very big break, one of the most honest warnings he’s given in a land of false smiles and success by way of degradation. It’s enough to make you weep if it weren’t absurd enough to laugh about.
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