From the LA Times blog:
George Lopez, the first Latino to lead a television series successfully, isn’t laughing. “TV just became really, really white again,” he said.
ABC, he said, has “unceremoniously” canceled his self-titled comedy, which over the years chronicled his personal life from his sad childhood growing up with an abusive grandmother, to his alcoholism and kidney transplant.
I never saw this show, although I watch very little television. But the show as described sounded like this white comedian’s failed sitcom from a few years back, which I remember because I found it so obnoxious (and was hardly the only one):
Three years on and Christopher Titus still can’t grasp why his Fox sitcom was canceled after just three seasons. … It was always Titus’ contention that viewers would identify with his TV family because it resembled his real life family. (On TV, they include Titus’s adopted brother Dave [Zack Ward], best friend, Tommy [David Shatraw], and his rarely seen manic-depressive, schizophrenic mother, Juanita [played by Christine Estabrook in the first season and Frances Fisher in the second].) … Titus experiences abuse and neglect as a child due to his mother’s illness and his father’s drinking and womanizing.
I could be wrong about this, of course, but it could be that sitcoms based on comedians’ own abusive childhoods might not be a winning formula.
