ABC Cancels "Welcome to the Neighborhood"

The ABC Network cancelled the “Welcome To The Neighborhood” series, the latest entrant in Reality TV. Good thing. The pogrom program should have been titled, “Meet the Caricatures.”

Your Audacious (yet so Reasonable) blogger had a conversation with the AP reporter, David Bauder, about controversy surrounding this program last week.

Caricatures on Parade

Now they’ve cancelled the show!

The show featured seven families competing for a rather nice house in a cul-de-sac of $350K shacks in Austin. The Texas capital motto is “Keep Austin Weird,” but even this city had limits. To win the candidate family had to be accepted by the current families living in the neigborhood. Losers would be brutally voted off the premises each week.

Will the violence never cease?

The show had something to offend everyone . . . featuring a homosexual couple; a black couple; a Hispanic couple (with lots of kids); an Asian couple (who owned a restaurant); a white couple (country-comes-to-town); a devil-worshiping witch (kid you not); and a couple with tattoos. ABC already has all their pictures scrubbed off their website.

Conveniently, the Bible-thumping Jesus freaks were there to pass judgement on everyone. Can anyone say “set up for failure?” I suggested to the AP that this was a lose-lose for everyone.

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Comments on Reality TV Magazine — yes, there’s a blog for this genre — were surprisingly perceptive and generally supportive for the series.

Shakespeare’s Sister didn’t care for the Neighborhood either.

Our friends at Pam’s House Blend illustrate how the show’s premise managed to offend everyone. Pam (tagline: “American. Female. Lesbian. Opinionated.”) thought that “watching the bigotry [would be] almost too painful to take” and predicted the Korean’s or the Tattoo’s would “win.”

See more analysis at Daily Pepper contrasting ABC with PBS

And a thank you to Open Post at Mudville Gazette for preserving, protecting and defending our way of life(!).