They're gonna mercilessly rip Barack Obama, Bryant Gumbel, Tyra Banks, Al Sharpton and Gayle King. But Orlando Jones and Ali Leroi, the producers of BET's new animated comedy BUFU, recoil in terror from the idea of lampooning Oprah Winfrey.
''We do not have a bit on Oprah because we are afraid of Oprah,'' confesses Leroi. ``She has lots of money and lots of power and can --''
''Say notttthhhhhing,'' hisses Jones.
That's pretty much how it's going to go on BUFU, in which a fictional TV station is a platform for cartoon sketches shredding everything and everybody, except you-know-who. And the show, scheduled to start Nov. 13, is guaranteed 100 percent political-correctness-free.
''We have the ability to go into some avenues and deal with some subject matter that I think a lot of the comedians just, A) don't know what to do with it; and, B) if they tried to do anything with it -- if you even want to go down that street, you know how [Don] Imus was lambasted -- they just don't have the cachet to do so,'' says Leroi, an executive producer of The CW sitcom Everybody Hates Chris. ``We just have a whole field of stuff that's just going untouched.''
So, expect to see segments on Is Bryant Gumbel Street Enough?, Barack Obama playing unwilling straight man to a foul-mouthed, priapic hand puppet, and lots of jokes about Tyra Banks' giant, humongous . . . forehead.
If you were expecting -- or hoping -- for that sentence to end differently, don't be disappointed; cable's got a little something for everybody this season, from crotchety Christmas-hating grandpas to total Nimrods to extreme mammophiles.
The last are represented by Secret History Of The Bra, a National Geographic special that airs Sept. 28. Short of a seminar at the Playboy Mansion, where else are you going to find such priceless knowledge as the fact that caterpillar saliva is a key ingredient in the manufacture of brassieres? Or that the average American bust size has gone from 34B to 34C in the past 15 years? (Actually, anybody who watches NBC's Las Vegas probably knew that one.)
And no, a Nimrod is not a person who goes around collecting factlets like that one. In the biblical book of Genesis, Nimrod was a mighty hunter, and in the Sundance Channel's documentary series Nimrod Nation, he's a mighty basketball player. The Nimrods are the pride of tiny Watersmeet, Mich., where just about everybody lives and dies with the team, and Nimrod Nation -- which kicks off Nov. 26 -- follows them around for a season.
As the local folks admit, it's not always easy being a Nimrod. Believe it or not, the cast of the sitcom Cheers, which used ''nimrod'' as its stock-in-trade insult during the 1980s, doesn't even occupy the lowest level of Watersmeet Hell. That's reserved for those malign Looney Tunes.
'Bugs Bunny, when he was getting shot at by Elmer Fudd, he would say, `Here come that doggone Nimrod again,' '' remembers Jeffrey Zelinksi, a Watersmeet booster who appears in Nimrod Nation. ``At one point in time they talked about changing the name, but we all stuck to it. We're not nerds. We're just Nimrods.''
References to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd may seem counterintuitive in a television universe in which Shannen Doherty and Heather Locklear are regarded as nursing-home candidates. But the Hallmark Channel movie A Grandpa For Christmas, scheduled for Dec. 1, goes even further into antiquity, resurrecting Ernest Borgnine in the title role as a retired showman who inherits custody of a little granddaughter (played by Julietta Goglia) he didn't even know he had.
Even more counterintuitive was casting Borgnine in a Christmas special. He regards the whole holiday as a plague. ''I don't do Christmas anymore,'' he grumbles. ``You put up a Christmas tree, right, and you work like the devil.
'First comes the tree, and then you put all those ornaments and everything else, and in comes the people, `Oh, isn't that pretty. All right, what else do you got?' That's it. That's Christmas.
'And you say `Wait a minute, I've just tortured myself putting up this thing. Is that what your answer was?' I mean, is that what you want to hear?'' Wow, what a nimrod.
