Defending "Cavemen"

I'm going to echo my Variety colleague (and cubical neighbor) Jon Weisman on this one: I didn't hate the new sitcom "Cavemen" either.

As Jon writes at Variety's new "Season Pass" blog, the uproar over "Cavemen" has been so loud that you start to question your own taste if you dare admit you found some good things about the show.

Yet, like Jon, I was pleasantly surprised that the producers didn't simply go for cartoonish, larger-than-life characters a la "3rd Rock from the Sun." The cavemen in "Cavemen" are complex, and aren't encountering just sitcom-y storylines.

Jon writes:

I admired that a half-hour comedy sought to pursue issues of race in its storyline. That the cavemen of "Cavemen" were an allegory for real-world minorities in the U.S. emerged this summer as a sin in and of itself, and I never was quite clear why. When exactly did racial allegory become off-limits? A critique of the effectiveness of the allegory is certainly welcome, but some people seemed offended by the allegory's mere presence. (It certainly wasn't the producers' intention to claim that any minorities are in fact cavemen.) Me, I was pleased to see a show attempt to combine humor and substance, even if it didn't entirely succeed.

Of course, the show isn't perfect. But how many comedies are great, right off the bat, particularly in this day and age? I'd at least give "Cavemen" a try before writing it off.