Caveman sitcom NOT a racial metaphor?

Sometimes I wonder if TV producers today have their brains on a diet patch regimen. That’s about the only way producers of ABC’s forthcoming sitcom, “Cavemen,” could be interpreted as not being a metaphor for racial integration.

Yet that’s the claim producers Mike Schiff, Will Speck, Josh Gordon, and Joe Lawson were making to the press this week as the media reacted to a first-blush take on the pilot episode; the episode has been ordered to be re-shot based on the network’s feeling that the series starts too late in the cultural integration process of the cavemen into modern society.

Based on the popular Geico commercials, the racial metaphor has been present ever since Speck, Gordon and Lawson came up with the campaign; yet they seem willfully unaware of the obvious.

The series of commercials have always featured militant, offended cavemen, put off by Geico’s Cro-Magnon-insensitive slogan, “Geico. So simple, even a caveman could do it.” If that’s not a stereotype of race relations over the past 40 years in the US, nothing is.

Of course, the tricky part would be admitting it. If the producers were caught admitting the forthcoming show is a metaphor for, say, the African-American experience, then every time they wanted to have one of their characters do something silly and caveman-like, like bop a spouse over the head with a club, the network would be flooded with calls from offended racial leaders like Jesse Jackson, claiming them show negatively portrays black men and the black American experience through the show.

Newsflash, guys: Jackson, Sharpton and company are probably already lining up to Imus you anyway. At least show you’re intelligent enough to recognize the metaphor potential of your show, since you’re bound to be under fire anyway.

Idiocy on parade…