FXX Cancels 'Totally Biased,' Why It Didn't Succeed

by Julian Spivey
After barely two months as a television network FXX has canceled one of its three original programs, “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell,” which came over from his parent-network FX (along with the network’s other two original programs) when the new network debuted in September.
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The show was the network’s foray into late night talk show land and was met with mixed results and mediocre ratings. It was a show that I watched frequently, but honestly won’t cry for its cancellation and likely won’t even miss it all that much, despite believing the network should not have canned it this early. Two months into a new network is not an appropriate time to cancel a show, especially one that people have a hard time finding because they can’t find your network or even know that it exists.

“Totally Biased” was certainly a mixed bag of a show, but what it did well it did very well. Host and creator W. Kamau Bell is genuinely likable and a comic genius when it comes to political humor. His opening monologues almost always seemed to contain numerous laughs and the show’s hard-biting political satire was right up my alley as a comedy fan. However, after a while these opening monologues would become the only segment of the show that I would watch.

The middle segment was usually given to another one of the shows contributors or writers, which featured the often annoying likes of Janine Brito, Hari Kondabolu and Guy Branum ranting and raving about something that typically offended them and was generally not that funny. Dwayne Kennedy was the only contributor that was almost always hilarious, but he walked a fine line of being funny and just being offensive. The final segment of the show was dedicated to an interview, conducted by Bell, with a guest. These interviews could be good depending on the guest, but I’ve always believed that interviews don’t fit well in a half hour late night talk show. Hence only about the first third of each episode was really worth watching. Maybe with the show still being in its early stages FXX could’ve given Bell time to retool his show and it likely could have worked.

The biggest con for the show was that it really pigeonholed itself. The show was really only geared for liberal viewers and not even just liberal viewers, but mostly African-American viewers. Sometimes the show’s humor could even be outright hateful and walk the thin line of actually being racist, which came off as highly hypocritical as much of its humor (even though I appreciated it) trashed others for being racist. Sometimes it seemed like Bell and his staff only felt like racism was something perpetrated by white people. It’s hard to find an audience, when you’re frequently insulting much of the available television audience.

“Totally Biased” and Bell had a lot of worthwhile things to say and did so in an often funny way, but the show’s cons just proved to be too much for the show to handle despite the hilarity it was capable of providing.