Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall shared a list of “The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time” on Monday, hedging that appreciation for Chappelle’s Show is an “art-versus-artist mess.”
Sepinwall touted his list as a “ranking of the most game-changing, side-splitting, tear-jerking, mind-blowing, world-building, genre-busting programs in television history,” but also included some criticism.
‘Chappelle’s Show,’ a renowned series from Comedy Central in the 2000s was #69 on the list, but its eponymous creator was condemned for his recent comedy specials.
“Another art-versus-artist mess. Dave Chappelle’s legacy has unquestionably been tainted by his commitment in recent years to hardcore transphobia,” Sepinwall wrote. “Can we still enjoy the sketch-comedy series that he and Neal Brennan created, and the ways that the show bearing his name mixed hysterical parodies of Black celebrities like Rick James, Prince, and Lil Jon with more nuanced but still funny ideas like the fake game show ‘I Know Black People’?”
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The author suggested that it may be best to try to divorce a creator’s past work from their more recent political controversies.
“As with several series on this list (and ones that didn’t quite pass muster with our voters, like Louie and The Cosby Show), perhaps it’s best to fondly remember the experience of watching it back in the day, rather than attempting to revisit and having to think more directly about the now controversial guy at the center of it,” he wrote.
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Chappelle has been targeted by the left for jokes about the transgender community among his trademark irreverent comedy routines.
In August, comedians rallied around Chappelle and blasted cancel culture after Minneapolis’ First Avenue canceled Chappelle’s sold-out show mere hours before his set time.
The same Rolling Stone list also condemned the eponymous host of “The Joe Rogan Experience” in its entry for NBC’s ‘NewsRadio’ from the late-‘90s.
The #94 entry warned, “it can be difficult now to watch scenes with Joe Rogan as the station’s electrician without thinking about who and what Rogan has become.”
Rogan faced similar backlash to Chappelle for speaking on his Spotify podcast about controversial topics of modern politics.
