Prometheus 6

Interestingly enough, I never considered the commercials symbolic until I read a comment at a site Cobb linked . 

Maybe the producers should read the description of their show on the network’s Web site: “They have been around since the dawn of time ... making them one of the world’s oldest minorities. ... Joel, Nick and Andy have to overcome prejudice from most of the Homo sapien world.”

Of course it’s a show about minorities and racism, despite the writer Joe Lawson’s demurrer that it’s really about people struggling to acclimate, “something everybody deals with ...whether you’re a minority or not.” 

[TS] A Fictional Minority
By STANLEY FISH

The buzz about the new ABC show “Cavemen” is not good. The negative vibes take two forms. Some who have seen the pilot episode find it slapdash, poorly written and unfunny. Others worry that the show will reinforce racial stereotypes by encouraging viewers to identify the maligned Cro-Magnons with African-Americans.

If those who voice the first kind of criticism turn out be right, there will be nothing more to say; after the first week, no one will be watching. The moral objection is a trickier matter, too tricky it seems for the show’s producers, who are backpedaling as fast as they can.

Asked about the charge that plotlines like the perils of interspecies dating seem racially insensitive, one of the producers, Josh Gordon, disclaimed any intention to have the cavemen “stand in for” any racial group. The show, he insisted, is about “the fish-out-of-water experience.” (As a fish out of water myself, I’m tired of people who think that they can deflect criticism by hiding behind a fish metaphor.)

Another producer, Mike Schiff, added that he and his colleagues just want people to “care about these three guys under a lot of makeup.”