“I’m sick of women singing about broke men, sick of men singing about loose women, sick of award shows, sick of name-brand clothes… From this moment forth I stand as the antithesis of black popular culture.”

These were some of the first words I read from my all-time favorite character Huey Freeman, from my all-time favorite comic strip, “The Boondocks.”

When the strip was translated into an animated television show, the strip’s creator, Aaron McGruder helmed the series creatively. I was unendingly thankful to Cartoon Network for reviving the series after its four-year hiatus before hearing the unimaginable had happened.

According to NPR, the series lost McGruder for the show’s final season.

“The Boondocks” used to be a revolutionary satire that both challenged popular African-American culture and broadcast the culture’s societal struggles. McGruder routinely tackled talking points such as urban no-snitch rules, the contradictory abasement of Tyler Perry films, and regular white privilege to name a few.

Now, judging by the final season’s premiere episode, titled “Pretty Boy Flizzy,” the rebellion and activist heart of The Boondocks left right along with its original visionary.

Essentially now fully in the hands of Cartoon Network, The Boondocks looks like just another medium for the perpetuation of black stereotypes rather than the satire of them.

The entire episode follows one of the show’s secondary characters, Tom the lawyer, as he agrees to represent Chris Brown-esque Pretty Boy Flizzy in return for relationship advice with his wife Sarah.

The relationship advice naturally consists of aggression and disrespect to reap love and affection.

The writers used the episode to skewer Chris Brown and his bad boy antics while violence against women was made light of and condoned without any social narrative aim.

I watched this episode and couldn’t help but feel personally betrayed by McGruder for allowing this slop to be televised as a result of his creative property. I mean, Chris Brown? How tired is the Chris Brown thing now? Is it even a thing anymore?

What made the show so uniquely powerful previously were its three main characters, who acted as a perfect foundation for social commentary: Granddad, the pop-culturally inept grandfather, and grandchildren Riley and Huey Freeman.

Riley is the 8-year-old thug life apologist who represents everything Huey, his slightly older but exceptionally wiser brother, stands firmly against.

In “Pretty Boy Flizzy,” Chris Brown is depicted using his low-level crime and woman-beating ways to stay relevant. All the while, women, both black and white, are rendered as submissive beings who only respond to displays of black male violence toward both women other black males.

That’s it. There is no overarching or underlying commentary here. It’s just a bunch of black men bolstering the same customs and tendencies that make Cliven Bundy think “the negro” is better off as a slave.

Add this to the fact that the series already told a very similar story in season two with “Tom, Sarah and Usher,” only in that installment, the social discourse and allegory was rampant throughout the episode.

Even when the episode began to fly a little off the cuff with its exaggerated models of black behavior, Huey Freeman was there to anchor it back down to earth.

For example, in the McGruder-run “Tom, Sarah and Usher,” Tom struggles with being pushed over by his wife who desires a stronger male presence.

 Street thug-archetype Riley proclaims he doesn’t know any other way to say it, but, “Tom got bitched.”

“Try humiliated, emasculated or castrated,” Huey responds.

These little gems permeated all early episodes in “The Boondocks” series but are entirely absent in the new season so far.

See, my biggest gripe with this new material is the near-absence of Huey Freeman in light of a new focus on celebrity caricatures and secondary characters for ratings and cheap laughs. Huey is the sort of moral backbone that kept the show, in all its offensiveness and stereotyping, from solely being an offensive stereotype.

Huey was, in the same way George Costanza on “Seinfeld” represented series creator Larry David, an animated embodiment of Aaron McGruder.

It seems the absence of McGruder translates to the absence of Huey Freeman, which in turn creates a void in the new material where commentary once thrived. No McGruder, less Huey, less societal relevance, more ratings?

Either fortunately or unfortunately, the show’s premiere garnered 50 percent more viewers than last season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

McGruder released a statement via Facebook late last month addressing his absence. “For three seasons I personally navigated this show through the minefields of controversy,” McGruder said. “It was always done with a keen sense of duty, history, culture, and love. Anything less would have been simply unacceptable.”

Oh, the irony. Thanks Cartoon Network, for turning Huey’s black antithesis into just another thesis on all things stereotypically African-American.

– Fletcher Bailey is a junior communication major from Seattle. He can be contacted at 335-2290 or by [email protected]. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the staff of The Daily Evergreen or those of Student Publications.