Television: A Movie Hit, Restyled

One of the biggest laughs Chris Rock got at last year’s Oscars came from a riff about movies for African-American audiences. “Black movies don’t have real names,” he said. “They have names like Barbershop. That’s not a name. That’s just a location.”

It wasn’t an insult exactly. Barbershop didn’t pretend to be more than a funny movie about barbers. Moviegoers–black plus a substantial white crossover–didn’t much mind, giving the Ice Cube hit a $75 million gross and inspiring a sequel–two, if you count Beauty Shop. But it was hardly ambitious, so it was surprising that Showtime would ask screenwriter John Ridley (Three Kings) to adapt it for TV. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do,'” Ridley says sarcastically. “Remaking somebody else’s movie–that’s what I want to be remembered for.”

But Showtime president Robert Greenblatt told Ridley he wanted Barbershop to be a kind of urban-comedy M*A*S*H–a sitcom that would take a hit movie in a new direction. Before Greenblatt took over at Showtime, his production company made Ridley’s UPN drama Platinum, a savvy look at the hip-hop business. Ridley also wrote Undercover Brother, a 2002 send-up of blaxploitation movies. “He’s a really funny writer but also very intelligent,” says Greenblatt. “I thought he would bring the right combination of humor and analysis to the series.”

Truth be told, the movie Barbershop was sitcom-like to begin with, and not in a bad way. Most of the funniest gags came not from the wispy plot but from people standing around talking. And along with the broader humor were flashes of commentary, notably a controversial rant from a character played by Cedric the Entertainer, who said Rosa Parks was an overrated civil rights hero and “ain’t do nothing but sit her black ass down” on a bus.

Ridley’s version (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.) retains many of the characters, like shop owner Calvin, who is played by Omar Gooding rather than Ice Cube, a producer of the series. But the stories rely much more on the social-button-pushing aspects of the movie. In the second episode, the shop’s gentrifying Chicago neighborhood gets a franchise of a black rap star’s clothing chain called Niggaz. (The chain, the narration explains, is “the value-priced version of his high-end store, Uppity Niggaz, in Beverly Hills.”) One character argues that the store empowers black people by taking back a word from white racists. Eddie (Barry Shabaka Henley, reprising Cedric’s character) scoffs that young people know the term from rap videos, while he knows it from Klan rallies, at which, incidentally, “there wasn’t no hot young things shakin’ it like a Polaroid.” When it turns out the Niggaz franchise is owned by a salt-of-the-earth Asian American, no one is quite sure where he fits into the racial equation.

Barbershop will probably offend people–really, it goes out of its way to do so–but it’s not alone in pushing the boundaries of African-American TV comedy. Chappelle’s Show, though on hiatus, is still throwing elbows on DVD, while the most anticipated show of the fall is the Rock-produced Everybody Hates Chris on UPN, in which a white kid uses the N word during a fight scene. October brings an animated version of Aaron McGruder’s militantly funny comic strip The Boondocks to Cartoon Network. Ridley, once a writer on Martin Lawrence’s sitcom Martin, says that means there is more pressure to stand out. “When I started out,” he says, “black TV was very limited–Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, Homeboys in Outer Space. Now they’re raising the bar. We can’t just give people more of the movie. They can get that on DVD.”

Like the movie, however, the show is ultimately a tribute to the barbershop as a nexus of African-American life where professionals and hustlers, up-and-comers and down-and-outers, cross paths. “It’s an urban comedy,” says Ridley. “But it’s also an urbane comedy. We do jokes about selling CDs out of the trunk of your car, but we’ve also got jokes about Tucker Carlson.” Even more so, this appealingly motormouthed show is a celebration of language–boasting, blathering, put-down and pontification–and the new cast has an easy rapport and naturalness. It doesn’t always work: a subplot in which Calvin teaches a Nigerian employee to talk dirty thuds badly. But if the show can build on its verve and verbiage, this Barbershop could become not just a location but a destination.