Today, we look at how The Boondocks got surprisingly heartwarming in Season 1’s “Riley Wuz Here.”
This is “All the Best Things,” a spotlight on the best TV episodes, movies, albums, etc.
This is a Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day this year, we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.
All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great Black-centric TV episodes.
The Boondocks was one of the rare adaptations of a comic strip where the comic strip creator was also the driving creative force behind the adaptation, as well, and Aaron McGruder did a wonderful job adapting his excellent comic strip into a TV series. Since he was in charge, the continuity between the show and the strip was amazingly tight for Season 1 of the series, and it really felt like the comic strip was just being brought to the screen, and since the comic strip was great, the show was great, as well.
However, for as good as The Boondocks comic strip was (and it was excellent), the cartoon seemed to almost elevate the material, giving the characters a bit more room to grow (as, well, obviously, you have more room to work with a TV show than you do with a daily comic strip). The work of the brilliant lead actors, Regina King and John Witherspoon, was outstanding, especially King’s ability to give the two brothers that the show is about, Huey Freeman and Riley Freeman, distinct personalities and speaking styles. Witherspoon was playing a bit of a familiar role for him as Granddad, the man who takes his grandsons from the West Side of Chicago to live in the predominantly White suburb of Woodcrest following the death of Huey and Riley’s parents (Granddad used the boys’ inheritance from his son’s passing to buy the house in the suburbs), but he was great in the role.
As noted, the two brothers had very different personalities, with the extremely intelligent Huey being very cynical and prone to conspiracy theories and tended to criticize modern Black culture, while Riley firmly embraced “gangsta” culture in a big way. Granddad, a World War II veteran who was a Civil Rights activist in the 1950s and 1960s, disagrees with the viewpoints of BOTH of his grandsons.
Typically, the series was a razor sharp satire that cut everyone to the quick, but on occasion, it could get surprisingly heartfelt, like the Season 1 episode in 2006, “Riley Wuz Here,” where Riley is doing graffiti on a neighbor’s house when he is approached by a strange White man with a giant afro (voiced by voice acting legend Rob Paulsen, the Emmy Award-winning portrayer of Yakko and Pinky on Animaniacs) who is obviously meant to be a strange parody of artist Bob Ross. The Art Teacher critiques Riley’s graffiti, and gets him to do a better job. Of course, when the neighbor discovers that Riley had tagged his entire house, he freaks out (Riley is angry, as he thought that the Art Teacher WAS the owner of the house). Riley is punished by Granddad by being forced to take art classes with The Art Teacher.
The Art Teacher cleverly breaks through Riley’s barriers, and gets the young boy to slowly but surely start to take art seriously. They begin to do graffiti together, without a signature. Riley’s murals become beloved in the neighborhood, but Riley is going nuts over no one giving him the credit. He finally comes clean to Granddad, who doesn’t believe him, as he doesn’t think Riley could do the sophisticated murals we’ve been seeing.
Riley proves to Granddad that IT him by doing a mural of Riley and Huey’s late parents…
Even Granddad is touched…of course, he then punishes Huey for painting the house, and forces him to wash it all off, but he definitely IS touched first. It’s a powerful moment (meanwhile, the Art Teacher has taken the heat from the cops, and gotten into a shootout in a hilarious parody of the various urban legends about Bob Ross and Mister Rogers’ backgrounds being Vietnam War snipers).
Huey’s plot is not as good, as he does a Super-Size Me parody by watching nothing but Black-centric TV for two weeks, and it rots his brain. But it really is a minor subplot in the episode, and the Riley stuff is so good that the episode is still excellent.
McGruder wrote the episode with Yamara Taylor, and Kalvin Lee directed it.
Okay, if I’m going to have 313 more of these (and 5 more this month), I could use suggestions, so feel free to email me at brian@poprefs.com!
