It's nice to get a second chance. For those of you that don't know, "The Goode Family" has moved to Comedy Central Mondays at 10:00 p.m. On our first time out on ABC we did not get nearly enough ratings (who would have thought that a show dealing with current social and political issues would have trouble holding the audience of a lead-in show whose tag line is "Big Balls!"). It was also sad that we lost some right-wing fans because our portrayal of the Goodes was too sympathetic. We can't help it, we like the whole family, including their involuntary vegan dog. And as much as we enjoy and respect South Park, our style leans more towards observational humor than satire.
What saddened us about going off the air the first go-round was losing a show that dealt honestly with the world around us, maybe too honestly for some. For example, we were censored for having a German character say "The Negro is right" in response to the Goode's African-American neighbor's comment about putting on a block party. We were told that was completely unacceptable, even coming from the mouth of a German Freegan (Freegans are people that insist on living off of other people's garbage -- The Freegan made even the Goode Family question their commitment because they could not get themselves to eat trash.) We felt that there were plenty of goofy, somewhat confused people in the world that still refer to people as "Negro" but we were told it was offensive and racist. Then along came Harry... Reid that is, who proved our point. The Senator, in our opinion, is no racist, and the NAACP has come to his defense, but we bet he identifies with Helen Goode's frustration in the pilot when she pleads, "I just want to buy organic apples and know what to call minorities! Is there like a big convention where all the minorities get together to hash this stuff out - hair styles, what to wear, what they want to be called?"
One of the core conceits of our show is that people are so twisted up in knots that they often don't know how to talk or relate to each other. This is why we were so surprised by the scathing review from Gina Bellafante of The New York Times that centered on her opinion that our show was so dated and so "1990s." Here is one of our favorite quotes from her review: "The show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early 90's, when it was possible to find global warming skeptics among even the reasonable and the informed. Who really thinks of wind power - an allusion which is a running visual gag in the show - as mindless, left wing nonsense anymore?" She sounds like Pauline Kael who said it was impossible that Nixon won because nobody she knew voted for him. Now, we at the Goode Family actually don't know if Global Warming is real or not, or if it is real if it is caused by man or not, but we do know that it is darn funny to watch people flip out if there is anything but lock-step unity of thought on the subject. And by the way, if you think there aren't critics of wind power, talk to the Kennedys about why they don't want wind mills anywhere near their compound in Nantucket. Ask why environmentalists protested putting them in the California desert. I mean if we like them so much it should not be that hard to agree on a place to put them. Hypocrisy is funny, and we like making fun of it.
We were asked what The Goode Family would think about "Climate-Gate" (the leaked e-mails that looked suspiciously like some major climatologists were cooking the books on global warming); we said that the Goodes wouldn't know about it, because they get their news from NPR and The New York Times. As you may know, they and other news outlets seem to feel it would be better if this story just went away. Lots of things seem to be inconvenient these days. When asked "How would the Goodes feel if they found out they did not have to worry about Global Warming," we realized the answer was they would be very depressed.
We hope you all get the word out and watch the show so we can keep dealing with all the fun stuff the world throws at us. I mean, now we not only don't know what to call minorities, we don't know what to call terrorists -- or as our head of Homeland Security might call them, "man caused disaster...makers." We are in a golden age of confused political correctness and we don't want to let all that material go to waste.
Catch 'The Goode Family' Mondays @ 10pm ET/PT on Comedy Central (for Satellite/Dish subscribers it's at 10pm ET/7pm PT)