Banned episodes of ‘The Boondocks’ to be aired on Teletoon

Mar 13, 2008

“The Boondocks” is about to take a detour into Canada.

Two episodes of the edgy, animated series, which is based on Aaron McGruder’s explosive comic strip, are airing on Teletoon’s adult-themed “Detour” programming block after being pulled from their originating U.S. broadcaster, the Cartoon Network. The episodes in question, “The Huey Freeman Hunger Strike” and “The Ruckus Reality Show,” air this Sunday night and next Sunday at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT.

Make no mistake – “The Boondocks” is not a children’s cartoon show. In fact, it may be one of the most adult shows on television. The series offers a bracing black perspective on American society from the point of view of two angry children, Huey and Riley (both voiced by Regina King), who move from the sketchy south side of Chicago to the manicured suburbs with their crotchety granddad, Robert Freeman (comedian John Witherspoon).

Most episodes are peppered with the N-word, which would normally get it banned just about anywhere else on television. McGruder, however, is uncompromising on this point, suggesting to critics a few years ago when the series was launched in the States that the phrase “the N-word” was more offensive to him than the word itself.

Champions of McGruder’s work say he provides a rare window on issues such as race relations and juvenile delinquency in America. “As hilariously scalding on-screen as it is in the comic pages,” raved the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Melanie McFarland.

The episodes in question, however, are not banned in America due to concerns over taboo language or sexual content. Rather, the Turner Cable-owned Cartoon Network yanked the two half-hours because they savage another cable network, BET.

BET’s CEO, Debra Lee, is depicted in Sunday’s episode as “Debra Lee-vil,” a sinister Dr. Evil clone who kills underlings and rants about creating a network “that would accomplish what hundreds of years of slavery, Jim Crow and malt liquor couldn’t – the destruction of black people.”

BET entertainment president Reggie Hudlin – once a “Boondocks” executive producer – is depicted as Dr. Lee-vil’s Harvard-educated lieutenant whose bright idea is to steal five-year-old reality show ideas from MTV and graft them onto the BET brand.

Clearly, McGruder hates BET, and it is hard not to see the depictions in this episode as personal attacks. It’s like sitting in on the first giddy draft of a satiric sketch in the writers’ room, only to realize that it was painstakingly inked and animated. (A request was made through Teletoon to interview McGruder but he was unavailable in time for this article.)

McGruder pushes parody to the limits in a relentless attack which continues in the next episode, where Uncle Ruckus, a self-hating black man (voiced by Gary Anthony Williams), gets his own offensive BET reality show.

The Cartoon Network has not acknowledged that the BET attacks were the reason for pulling the “Boondocks” episodes. All a spokesperson there would say is that Turner Cable was not contacted by BET, Lee or Hudlin.

It’s not the first time that a TV show banned in the U.S. has aired in Canada.

Way back in the late ’60s, CTV stood by “The Smothers Brothers,” airing an episode of the edgy variety show that CBS pulled from its schedule. (At the time, CBS used the excuse that the brothers failed to provide an advance tape for the censors; really, the network was looking for a way to ditch the show after feeling heat over the brothers’ opposition to the war in Vietnam.)

Teletoon’s decision to air the episodes is already being hailed in the comment sections of animation blogs and websites south of the border. Others are praising it for different reasons. The Canadian airings are sure to lead to the episodes being posted on video file-sharing sites such as YouTube – meaning Americans can finally see them, too, without having to spring for the upcoming, uncensored “Boondocks” season 2 DVD.

Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.