“What’s the sex like? Is it true what everyone says? Is it wild? I bet it’s wild. I want to do one,” the hot-to-trot best friend of Joel’s girlfriend enthuses to the accompaniment of Tone-Loc’s “Wild Thing,” presumably because the show couldn’t secure the rights to The Time’s “Jungle Love” in time.

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Judging by the tastelessness and terrible judgment of the pilot, it’s remarkable that the show-runners got a second chance to make a first impression. But after the pilot was banished to the land of wind and ghosts, the cast was tweaked (Dash Mihok was out as Andy, and Sam Huntington was in), the setting switched from the racially charged South (namely Atlanta) to the colorblind utopia of San Diego, and the racial components were toned down.

So instead of debuting with a racially problematic exercise in bad taste, Cavemen debuted with “Her Embarrassed Of Caveman,” an episode where Joel begins to suspect that his hot girlfriend Kate (Kaitlin Doubleday) is ashamed to admit to her friends that she’s dating a caveman. Joel finally musters up the courage to confront Kate, at which point he learns that she’s only ashamed to introduce Joel to her friends because they think she only dates cavemen. She’s got a bit of a history with them. A sexy, sexy history. It’s a lose-lose proposition: If Kate won’t admit to her friends she’s with a caveman, she’s embarrassed; if she dates too many cavemen, she must have a fetish, meaning she can’t appreciate him as an individual instead of part of an eroticized, exoticized minority.

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“Her Embarrassed Of Caveman” isn’t anywhere near as offensive or tone-deaf as the abandoned pilot, but it doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, either, beyond the drolly condescending, haughty Kroll as the caveman equivalent of an angry black nationalist, and a funny supporting turn by Nick Swardson as a neurotic little man who works alongside Joel at a store modeled on Ikea.

The next few episodes similarly riff on race and race relations in ways that aren’t offensive, but aren’t terribly amusing, either: The second episode, “Nick Get Job,” finds Nick working alongside Joel at the Ikea-like emporium, then filing a discrimination lawsuit against the company when he’s fired for gross incompetence. In the third, “The Cavewoman,” Nick finally gets an opportunity to live out his creed that cavemen should stick to their own kind by falling into a sordid sexual fling with sexy cavewoman Heather, who turns out to be insanely aggressive and bullying.

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Cavemen begins to realize its potential with its fourth episode, “The Mascot.” At the risk of damning it with very faint praise, Kroll, who went on to do fantastic work on Comedy Bang Bang and his Comedy Central special, is easily the best thing about Cavemen. The show’s best episodes explore the buried idealism behind the character’s smug, self-righteous exterior. In “The Mascot,” for example, Nick begins teaching just to make money, and is shocked to discover that he actually likes molding young minds. His elation quickly gives way to dismay, however, when he discovers that the school’s mascot is a crude caricature of a primitive caveman.

The first laugh-out-loud moment in the show comes when a distraught Nick tries to reason with the person inside the crude caveman-mascot costume, who mockingly hits him in the head with a club. Nick grows increasingly indignant and apoplectic until he can’t contain himself and knocks the mascot over, at which point it’s revealed that the person in the costume is a skinny little blonde girl. Kroll’s slow burn and deadpan attempts to reason with a crude caricature sell the scene, but there really isn’t too much difference between the ugly and offensive caveman mascot and, say, the mascot for the Cleveland Indians.

Cavemen’s next big laugh comes in the final episode to air on ABC, “Rock Vote.” The episode pits Nick’s fierce Caveman Nationalist politics against his common sense when he throws his support behind a caveman politician whose platform, alas, begins and ends with a strong, batshit-crazy desire to rid the world of gluten for reasons known only to him.

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The show’s ratings declined dramatically over the course of its six-episode run on ABC. Between “Her Embarrassed Of Caveman” and “Rock Vote,” roughly half the show’s audience disappeared. The show was cancelled, and six episodes went unaired. Since the show has never been released on DVD (and probably never will be), the final six episodes are available only through the largesse of some kind soul who put the entire series (including the unaired pilot) on YouTube out of some misplaced sense of devotion and dedication.

Here’s the strange thing: The widely disparaged show started to find its voice after being cancelled. The final four episodes—“Caveman Holiday,” “Andy The Stand-Up,” “Cave Kid,” and “Hunters & Gatherers”—represent a big step up quality-wise from the dire-to-mediocre episodes that actually aired.

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“Caveman Holiday” focuses on the trio’s preparations for “Long Night,” a holiday commemorating an evening when cavemen were able to stave off freezing to death by huddling together for warmth. The episode has a lot of fun with the stomach-churning particulars of Long Night, but it also benefits from a warmth unimaginable in the show’s creepy, mean-spirited pilot. The episode highlights how being part of an oppressed minority can bring its own life-affirming set of rituals and traditions. “Long Night” is amusing, but it’s also sweet and promising in the way it fleshes out the caveman culture and mythology.

“Andy The Stand-Up” is even better, though I suspect part of my affection for it is rooted in my love of bad stand-up comedy. The episode has Andy attending an open-mic night Nick hosts, and trotting out a stand-up routine that consists almost exclusively of catchphrases from Austin Powers, Napoleon Dynamite, Ace Ventura, and the like. His act dies a richly merited death until Andy figures out he can win over the crowd with a crudely stereotyped impersonation of a cartoon caveman. Andy is consequently faced with a tough choice: Chase success by selling out his people and indulging prejudices and preconceptions, or go the noble route and risk performing for an audience of none? Andy ultimately decides to go the honorable route, though in his case, that means trading in his self-hating “ooga-booga caveman” routine for equally awful but less self-hating prop comedy.

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The first season of Cavemen ends strongly enough to suggest that the show might have become something consistently watchable if it had made it to a second season. A show that began as an offensive, tasteless monstrosity evolved into something at the very least moderately watchable.

People should not be judged by how they behave at their worst or at their best. Hell, for that matter, people probably shouldn’t be judged at all. Nobody is as good as they are in their defining moment of triumph, nor are they as bad as they are at their nadir. The same is true of television shows.

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Though the public came to know Cavemen as one of the most colorful, flamboyant, ridiculed disasters of the last 20 years, it did not see the show at its agonizing worst (the unaired pilot) nor at its eventual unaired best. Instead, it saw a show with mercenary origins that married a questionable premise with lackluster execution.

The first season of Cavemen is better than its reputation in part because its reputation is so dire, though it’s not exactly an unearthed gem. Toward the end of its aborted first season, it began to transcend its origins, but by then, it was too late: The show was off the air, doomed to live on only as a punchline and an example of how degraded sitcoms can be. As a sitcom based on advertising, Cavemen is unique, and not necessarily in a good way. So I’m going to honor that singularity with My World Of Flops’ first mixed rating. If someone can turn goddamned insurance commercials into a TV show, I think I’m justified in giving Cavemen a distinctive grade—one that’s as ugly and unseemly as the strange commercialcom that prompted it.

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Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Secret Failuress