Flavor Flav’s ‘Under One Roof’ is a deceptively smart sitcom

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Let’s review, shall we, the distinction between stupid and stoopid. Stoopid is dumb with intent, with a purpose. It uses idiocy to make larger points in a way that belies its intelligence. Stupid, on the other hand, is just plain dumb.

With that in mind, allow me to say that the seemingly abysmal MyNetworkTV sitcom “Under One Roof,” the star vehicle for Public Enemy rapper Flavor Flav, does indeed succeed in transcending its own idiocy to attain the stoopid. In fact, I’d go further than that to say “Under One Roof” is the best show to address race and class in America since “The Wire” ran its last episode earlier this year.

It’s just that “Under One Roof” addresses race and class the way “The Beverly Hillbillies” addressed class and regionalism and “Green Acres” addressed the Vietnam War, that is, behind a façade of idiotic humor.

    On the surface, “Under One Roof,” airing at 7 p.m. Wednesday on WPWR Channel 50, is a very stupid sitcom. For one thing, it’s an unabashed attempt to garner publicity by MyNetworkTV, the Fox subsidiary meant to fill the programming vacuum when many local Fox-owned stations were left high and dry after the United Paramount Network merged with Warner Bros. Since then, MyNetworkTV has specialized in lousy reality series and tawdry specials focusing on Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, but “Under One Roof” is one of its first forays into scripted series. If a borderline media celebrity like Flavor Flav is desperate enough to star in it, so much the better. Yet that doesn’t make it any good.

Flavor Flav is best known to TV viewers as the star of the awful VH1 reality series “Flavor of Love,” in which the once-proud Public Enemy rapper debases himself in a dating competition that is sort of “The Bachelor” for skanks. He ain’t no sitcom star.  

In “Under One Roof,” Flav’s Cali Cal is an ex-con who took the rap for his brother in a car crash and went to jail, allowing the brother to live a privileged life with his (white) wife and kids. Cali Cal is a playful idiot imp who frequently speaks the truth others can’t now that he has moved in with the clan in Beverly Hills.

Get past the jokes about prison sex and masturbation and look at the way the show, stupid as it is, has been designed to set him apart. As the brother, Kelly Perine’s Winston is a status-obsessed, ascot-sporting phony. Carrie Genzel is his rail-thin trophy wife, Ashley. Marie Michel’s Heather and Jesse Reid’s Winston Jr. (or J.R.) are their mixed-race kids, obsessed with wealth but also with their notion of blackness.

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