PASADENA, Calif. — Damon Wayans keeps saying he's not bitter that ABC axed his sitcom "My Wife and Kids" a year ago. He says it again and again and again.
The more he says it, the less believable he is.
"Honestly, I forgot about 'Wife and Kids,"' Wayans said. "And I'm so focused on 'The Underground,' all that anger, resentment that I had toward them is gone, and I've put it into this."
"The Underground" (11 and 11:30 p.m., Showtime) is the total opposite of a family sitcom. It's a tasteless, vulgar — some would say obscene — sketch comedy show. And that's no coincidence.
"I think I'm a little (ticked) off that they canceled 'Wife and Kids,' and that's a good motivation," Wayans said. "The fire that burns inside of me, I don't know where that comes from. My need to continue to push the envelope."
Wayans and his bother, Keenen, pushed the envelope 16 years ago with "In Living Color." And, while Damon Wayans said it still isn't "really clear" why Fox canceled that show, he has his own ideas.
"The climate has changed so much," he said. "They've shut down people. It's because we're trying to maintain an image of squeaky clean. We still live in the '40s in terms of censorship, but the reality of our world has drastically changed."
So, he believes, "The Underground" really isn't that shocking.
"The stuff that kids see, they are not shocked by it," Wayans said.
Wayans blamed the cancellation of his show and the decline of sitcoms overall on the corporate culture that currently rules the network-television industry. "I think it starts on the top, and the corporate agenda is not a creative one," Wayans said. "That's the last thing they think about — putting on something that's fresh and different. They say they want something fresh and different, but what they really want is something that worked before. That's all they know."
There are fewer shows featuring minority casts than there were a few years ago, but Wayans stopped short of calling it racial discrimination, attributing it to a "corporate agenda." "It's not a black thing — it's a green thing," he said, pointing to the proliferation of reality shows, which are less costly to produce. "I think (network executives) are getting lazier. And, unfortunately, the black shows go first."
Wayans somewhat sarcastically thanked ABC and Disney for canceling his sitcom. But not entirely sarcastically. "You get lazy. Money will make you very comfortable," he said. "I kind of lost my passion.
"But the fact that they had said the show was picked up, and then they said, 'Uh, we changed our minds,' it provoked me. So I had something to prove — not to them, but to myself. So I thanked them for that. I thanked them for the motivation."