I was excited to see the show. I like the occasional Bollywood film. I like the cute guy from Heroes who was the guest star. I loved the Bollywood style opening credits. Now, I've always preferred Gus to Shawn who I feel is too egotistical and too selfish for my tastes, but Shawn's character is usually pretty funny. This time I felt he just came off as an ignorant bigot. His boorish behavior alienated me from the character completely and even made me disappointed in Gus for not calling him on his behavior. 1. He refuses to call Raj by his real name and instead insists on Anglocizing it to "Roger". I know people who changed their names in the 50's because of discrimination based on "weird/foreign" names. I still know some Chinese people who use their "American" names because of racism. This has always made me sad and to see Shawn perpetuate that was inexcusable. How hard is RAJ to say anyway?
2. The most unforgivable moment, in fact the nadir of the entire show was when Shwan (uninvited of course) drops by and gets invited to dinner at Raj's house and proceeds to insult all Indian people and calls them stupid.
As a guest of this house, eating their food, he insults their entire culture by saying something like "it's STUPID for YOU PEOPLE to eat food this hot". First of all "you people"? Secondly, just because you don't agree with something it's stupid? Third, insulting all Indians? I can't eat most Indian food either do to the spiciness, but I don't insult the entire nation of India becaues my tastebuds haven't grown up eating their food.
3. Shawn displays his uttter ignorance again by slaughtering more names (this time converting one to Dipstick). If I wasn't so mad at his character, I would have just cringed at how ignorant this made him appear. 4. At the festival, Shawn yells out "Indian giver". Offensive enough. But then he compounds it by saying "I meant to insult a completely different race".
(oh yeah, haha. racism is funny... NOT!)
and just in case I wasn't bothered by the racism & cultural insensitivity of the show, they had to close with a sexist remark about getting 'hit by a girl".
This "girl" was a woman who had engineered some serious attacks & could have killed Juliet, but yeah, let's just dismiss that with a terribly trite & cliche stereotype..... (real original & real funny..... NOT!)
I am sad that they have ruined the chacter of Shawn for me, and that I may not be able to bring myself to watch the show again. It's bad enough when I hear 87 year olds who grew up in Nazi-occupied France say things like this in real life. I can try to forgive their racism as a product of their times/their homogenous upbringing. To see what's supposed to be a 20+ year old who grew up in a diverse big city in CA consider such behavior acceptable and to have this displayed to me as amusing & entertainment is disturbing.
Did the writers think these incidents were humorous? If so the writing staff at USA/NBC desparately needs some diversity and some sensitivity training. This episode was sad, disturbing and made me angry.
p.s. an earlier review was removed because I supposedly insulted other users.
This review is not meant to insult any users. I'm not insulting the actor. I am merely expressing my personal opinion. I am disgusted at the writers and NBC for perpetuating racism and thinking that would serve as enjoyment.moreless





