Netflix’s ‘Good Times’ is as offensive as the trailer said it would be

If Seth MacFarlane desired to make a tougher version of Family Guy, he could have just said so.

This would be more acceptable than the way he and everybody else attached to this disaster of an animated “comedy” series played in the faces of Black people.

Netflix’s “Good Times” is every bit as offensive as the two-minute trailer promised, and anyone who criticized people for reacting negatively to the trailer on social media acted like “a dog attacked will scream” because, honey ? This show is terrible.

To be honest, the trailer immediately turned me off. I could not understand why anyone would wish to reboot Good Times, and I could not understand why a “reboot” would include the stereotypes and caricatures I saw in the trailer.

However, I made a decision to try it because I desired to be honest in my criticism.

All 10 episodes of the series aired on Friday, and the motion begins immediately in the first episode. Reggie (voiced by JB Smoove) takes a shower and sings a part of the original theme song. He is accompanied by a cockroach that stands on the window sill while he bathes.

From there it only gets worse.

The fourth generation of the Evans family (Reggie is James Evans Sr.’s grandson) lives in the same apartment at 17C that the original Evans family lived in, and it appears their situation is still unchanged. They are poor, perform projects and struggle to survive each day.

Beverly (Yvette Nicole Brown) enters the lounge where her son is JJ Junior (Jay Pharoah) is sleeping on the sofa bed and is apparently having a wet dream.

“Not again! I just changed these sheets,” she wails, waking him up and asking about the Black Jesus mural he painted on the wall.

She’s attempting to win a constructing beautification contest, very like Florida in the original series, and while explaining it to her two oldest children, she hands her daughter a cracker and tells her, “Just rub some crumbs in your mouth so that when the judges come to our apartment and they’ll think I fed you .

The prize for winning the competition is a month of free rental and “two weeks without cockroaches”.

Terrible.

There are many references to the original series in the first episode, including the iconic Florida film “Damn! Cholera! Damn!” statement, but they’re sandwiched between all the offensive things that were added to make the show “funny”. I know these things are usually considered “Easter eggs,” but in my opinion they’re wet farts. And they stink.

I suspect it wasn’t meant to be, “Black people are funny.” It’s more like white people will think these things about black people are funny, but maybe that’s just my impression.

One gets the impression that this so-called sequel to the original series is little more than a parody of “Good Times” disguised as “Family Guy” – to put it mildly.

Junior and his fighting younger sister Gray (Marsai Martin) argue and insult each other in the same way Thelma and JJ did in the original series, and since the fighting siblings have already been included, the third sibling is Dalvin (Gerald’s Slink). ” Johnson), a drug dealer, still breastfeeding a baby who limits his food in a stroller and has already been kicked out of the house by his father Reggie for what he does.

Beverly’s breasts lactate each time Dalvin is around, and my 10-year-old nephew told my sister he thought it was “highly inappropriate.”

He was also rejected by a drug dealing kid.

It’s funny how in the show every swear word is allowed to fly freely, but the N-word is uttered repeatedly. You’ve come to date, why are you ashamed now?

Halfway through the third episode I spotted I could not do it anymore after which for some strange reason the power went out in my entire neighborhood and I’d wish to think it was Jesus from Power Company telling me to present up the ghost, so I did.

I probably won’t finish this series and I do not regret it. This piece was enough for me to come to a decision that I’m not the target market for this show, and that is okay.

I’m undecided what the creators of this series were hoping to realize, but perhaps the meta message they smuggled into the first episode indicates that they didn’t really intend for this to be a reboot or a nod to the original Regardless series.

Returning home to seek out out that Beverly won’t win the beauty pageant in any case, Reggie apologizes to her for the failure on his part.

“No,” Beverly says. “It’s me. I thought our family had to win this stupid competition to prove we were just as good as the old Evans, but the truth is, we are the new Evans.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Reggie replies. “We have to be ourselves and that’s all that matters.”

The creators of the show appear to be aware of what they’re doing.

Too bad they weren’t aware enough to not call it “the good times.”

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