Hey, I was excited to hear that Saturday Night Live's Chris Redd’s new Peacock sitcom “Bust Down” is set in my beloved hometown of Gary, the Steel City. However, I was jittery about the outcome as I recalled the disaster image native Fred Williamson created in “Original Gangtas.” Williams’ opened the 1996 movie showing worn buildings and not, for example, the new Hudson-Campbell Sports Center just a camera shot to the left.

The fellow mid-westerner’s 30-minute streaming fiasco is just as bad, if not worse. It was crass. It seems like using bad language in a show is still enough to earn costly laughs.

The first episode focuses on the misdeed of a stereotypical overweight White boss of an all-Black staff at the Diamondback Palace, a run-down casino with dirty employee bathrooms. In real life, all of the casinos that line the Lake Michigan shoreline in Northwest Indiana are relatively new. The one in the heart of Indiana’s great Northwest, the Hard Rock Casino in Gary, just opened in May 2021.

But, who deals with reality? Even reality TV is too often false, stereotypical, uncreative, and sensational.

The manager in the fictional debacle is charged with sexual assault of a male employee and what follows drives the story around the block to a dilapidated house.  At the house, Chris and friends are out just having a drink around a rusted car and uncut grass as Gary in reality is finally beginning to witness the renovation of houses.

Is this the way for “youngins” to show respect to what Parliament called “our piece of the rock,” in their 1975 hit “Chocolate City"? They produced the artistic hit 10 years before Redd was even birthed and had not learned to laugh.

To my surprise, Redd, an St. Louis native, did include Hispanics as secondary characters, a needed nod to the area’s significant Hispanic population. But, having the Hispanics just show up in one scene was like watching a Perry Mason re-run where a Black doorman becomes a very, very minor witness.

Not much of the show is Gary specific, they once mentioned “The Lake,” but they never went to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore or show the recently sold million-dollar house in the city’s lakefront community. Oh yes, and the boss didn’t even try to buy a house there, instead he bought one in Muskegon, Michigan, another lakefront community two and half hours away.

The first episode was free. I won’t be paying to see the other five episodes. Why pay a hefty sum to hear well-paid actors curse?  Aside from that, I would rather see a lot more creativity built on reality and that includes showing that my piece of the rock is “STEEL” strong.