Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell

W Kamau Bell in Totally Biased is funny and thought provoking. Highly recommend this show to make you laugh and keep you thinking. The show includes an interview--one of them was with Rachel Maddow in which they talked about making jokes. Kamau also interviews people on the street about different issues. Kamau teaches while being funny. People who weren't gay were supposed to choose someone who was gay that they might want to marry and people who were gay were supposed to choose someone that wasn't gay they may want to be with. This helped bring attention to gender issues. Another excellent piece was aired after the shooting at the Sikh temple. It pointed out that some people were thinking that Sikhs were Muslims. There was a chart that showed Sikh, Sheik, Shaq and so on plus a map. Again one was learning but also laughing.

First of all, regardless of the weak personalities making awkward special interests group speeches, the low quality (and often incongruent) laugh track makes very difficult to consider this a credible production. If television reflects our culture then I can only hope the viewers of this show are a small and isolated group. The episode I viewed this evening included a man introduced as a comedian. He apparently read a TelePrompTer and paused seconds before each laugh track audio. His jokes were a litany of comparisons between 7 years of working at McDonalds with 7 years in the US military during the Vietnam war. The biggest surprise was a few incidents in which the audience in the studio groaned along with the laugh track.

A relatively new show. Give it some time! Great political commentary, excellent jokes. I saw a review calling it 'racist.' I'm of a lighter persuasion, and I don't see racism at all. W. Kamau Bell is explaining his views through the way he sees the world. You've got to give him the latitude he deserves as a black man in 21st Century America. I have never once been offended by anything he has said. As for the producer: Chris Rock, he is one of the funniest comedians alive. I have fallen out of my chair & got up with tears in my eyes watching his older HBO specials. The show is unique and would be sorely missed if it were to disappear. Comedy is a rare commodity these days, at least on the tube. If you naysayers hate it so bad, grab the remote, change the channel. It's that simple! Viva Totally Biased!

It's difficult to imagine anyone but know it all hipsters thinking there is anything worthwhile about this program. A recent episode spent almost the entire running time bashing the movies Lincoln and Django Unchained complete with a "hilarious" appearance Frederick Douglas in a silly wig. It gets two stars for the total number of times anything amusing or actually insightful was broadcast from this show. Of course that is based on personal experience. Maybe there are more occasional bits of worthwhile content, but it doesn't seem worth watching anymore of this show in hopes of discovering any. That's like looking through a pile of excrement hoping to find a nickel. But hey, if self congratulatory monologues laced with superficially short interviews conducted by a host surrounded by a room full sycophants is your thing, then by all means tune in. This makes a perfect companion piece to an episode of Maher's self love.

Totally Biased w/ W. Kamau Bell is amazingly refreshing. Where The Daily Show was once the most refreshing thing in the world to me, in being way more critical than the average news program, after a while it becomes rather painfully clear that TDS is very much part of white TV, so to speak. This is especially evident when compared side-to-side with Totally Biased, which has the politically critical attitude of TDS, but adds a "racially" critical dimension still very much needed in today's TV landscape. It holds a contentious position and I think its focus on "racial" issues makes it more prone to criticism than a show like TDS, which generally fits nicely into the white liberal paradigm, but it's difficult to overstate the importance of radical shows that truly question the status quo. What other show would have provided such scathing reviews of all-around praised white movies like Django and Lincoln,for instance? One point of criticism is that Totally Biased is still pretty much a dude show (if we talk about "white TV" we should also talk about how male-dominated TV is), but I don't think it is trying to be a feminist show, and I don't think it's fair to condemn a show that is already so radical in a different, equally important way for not going *all* the way. (NB: it spends a lot more attention on gender issues than TDS!) The 5.3 rating for Totally Biased is a travesty and only proves how hard it is for the (white) mainstream to deal with truly radical content. Totally Biased being canceled would be horrible, and I would go one step further and say it should be expanded. Let's have a "daily" counterbalance to TDS; let's have a regular news/cultural satire show that goes beyond white issues.