Losing (it) Isaiah

Normally I know how I feel about a situation very clearly.  Not in this case. 

He reacted slowly and arrogantly when first confronted.  Then after the incident at the Golden Globes where he said the word again (with enthusiasm) the media and moral leaders pressed him to reconcile with gay people.  He has since done a great job of reaching out. 

I understand ABC's need to fire him.  I don't watch the show but I've heard from others that do and they say it feels weird with him around.  TR Knight's character is very popular so letting him go would have been a hit for the show.  With that factored in Isaiah had to go from a business standpoint.

Personally I would have kept him on for one more season so it wouldn't look bad after all the stuff he's done to reconcile his remarks.  Just slowly make his role smaller and smaller until his contract is up.  I think he's done as much as he could and this would be the easiest solution to let him go.

So he apologized and went to rehab just to get his job back? Did ABC tell him to make that  bigoted remark in the first place?

I saw the writing on the wall with the "cliffhanger."  His character cleaned out his belongings from the apartment he shared with his fiance which I thought symbolized him cleaning out his dressing room.  It will be interesting to see how this is played out in the media.

Well we can sure tell that he's changed when you look at how he describes his "rehab", eh?

...Not.

He's making it out to be a chore. That he worked his way down a list that ABC handed him just so he could keep his job. He was never truly sorry, he learned nothing from his "rehab" and he was probably gritting his teeth trough all of the pro-gay meetings and PSAs he had to go through.

He's right. He should've been fired eight months ago. But better late than never.

This whole thing has been one classic blunder from the day the incident happened. The producer did her best to sweep it under the rug. ABC/Disney for all their claims of diversity and inclusiveness really dropped the ball. One wonders where the hell the H.R. departments were... did they go into hiding too?

If they were going to do something, it should have been done immediately. Surely the writers could have come up with some creative work-around to explain the absence of one or more characters.

For a workplace policy to be deemed effective, it must be seen being enforced. If there is a policy against homophobic remarks, then action should have been taken immediately, instead of all the hand-wringing and golly-gee statements.

I imagine Mr. Washington is a bit perturbed, but, if things had been handled properly at the time of the initial incident, there would be no room for the bitching and moaning going on now. He must have figured he was going to skate on this one. And this would have long been dropped by the media as they moved onto other celebrity obsessions (like the wall to wall coverage of your latest famous jailbird). I found it interesting in seeing the coverage the nightly news broadcasts gave to the story. Up here in the frozen north, the F word used is considered at the same level of obscenity as the other F word, so it was bleeped when the various clips were shown. Not so on other channels, some were using it like a nightclub song (that thing they do when they run a record backward and forward... I have no idea what the term is).

If the various companies involved in this whole mess had done something about it back when it happened, it would no longer be a story.

....the producers were probably unconvinced of the sincerity of his apologies/so-called rehab, etc. It's one thing to fire someone on the spot for bad behaviour in some sort of mainstream job, but quite another when there are millions of dollars at stake, as well of the jobs of hundreds for each of these tv shows. If a show gets suddenly canceled, a lot of people go home. The producer's mandate is to protect the show. They gave him a chance to clean up his mess and he did a pathetic job, so write him out of the next season. I think giving the time that this has had to slowly build up steam has been good for the gay community. There is overwhelming support now, for this decision. If he had been fired on the spot, I think it could have backfired.

 

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

As speculated on some boards, many point to Shonda Rimes as the culprit who put more fuel into the fire.  Any other person would have been fired if he had attacked one castmember and then verbaly slurred another but she was friends with Isaiah and it seems that she tried to keep mum about it, hoping it would go away.  I think that this was the catalyst that made TR Knight come out because many of the media was just taking the rumor of the GA fight as just some random temper tantrum between co-stars but a cast member outing himself without even a blind item out there suddenly fired up the reporters.  That's when ChokeGate-cum-SlurGate lit a fire under the media which hounded every GA cast and crew until everything came out at the Golden Globes months later.  And even then, Shonda Rimes was still trying to cover it up.  I think ABC made a mistake by following Shonda's lead on this matter, since it's her defense of Isaiah (and her neglect of TR) led to everyone being dissatisfied with the situation.

Not that the cast wasn't satisfied in other areas.  Have you seen the last half of Season 3?  That was an amalgam of dreck that I have ever watched -- and even Ellen Pompeo and Patrick Dempsey was complaining about the direction of their characters/ relationship since Season 2.  Anyway, anybody who was watching the movement wothin Shondaland would have had an inkling that something was going to happen.  First, Krista Vernoff was appointed showrunner of GA and if I'm not mistaken, Marti Noxon became the EP/showrunner for spinoff PP  (which is a mistake since MN uses her shows as therapy for abusive boyfriends and dead-end relationships, like what she did with Buffy -- but that's another story for another time). Then a producer (I forgot her name) from SFU was brought aboard to consult for the first half of the season 4.  Then Knight comes on board again for Season 4 and gets a salary bump and points (percentage of profits) which has been given to  Pompeo, Dempsey & Oh when they renogtiated their contracts.  ABC was cleaning house and I think it was really a choice between Knight and Washington and they now finally sided with the victim and sweeped out Washington.

Rhimes really did botch this. I was so annoyed when she came out as angry over the comments that Washington should be replaced with another black man (an offensive idea) but never said anything in defense of Knight. As I've said before, I find it hard to believe that there are too many businesses out there that wouldn't have fired Washington on the spot for assaulting another co-worker.

ABC and Disney have always been gay friendly, and when some unknown employee went to the press with lies about the nature of the conflict between Patrick Dempsey, and the use of the word faggot, I think ABC/Disney saw it as an Imus-like opportunity to advance the gay agenda - at Isaiah Washington's expense . . .

By encouraging the public to believed that a gay actor had been humiliated by a homophobic slur and "forced" to come out, they could engender sympathy for gay issues. All ABC had to do to pull it off was to, let the rumors fly and, keep Isaiah quiet.

It was working, Isaiah kept his mouth shut until he got an opportunity he couldn't resist, while the cameras were rolling, a reporter asked him if he called T.R. Knight a faggot . . . He seized the opportunity to clear his name, announcing that he had not.

The truth is there was no physical confrontation between Isaiah and Patrick, and T.R. Knight was nowhere around when the word faggot was used by Isaiah, against Patrick. T.R. Knight didn't come out because the word faggot was spoken, he didn't need to come out, everyone already knew he was gay. He was not in danger of being exposed because the f-word was spoken in his abscense since, at any time, any one of his co-workers could have spill the beans . . . He chose to "come out" at the time that he did because the time was ripe to harvest the sympathetic goodwill for himself and the homosexual community, at the cost of Isaiah Washington's reputation and career.

Isaiah Washington wasn’t just fired, he was set up! ABC let employees tell lies about him in the press and they would not let him respond. When he finally did speak, ABC acted like it was a function of homophobia, rather than a man trying to let the world know that he did not hit a co-worker and that he did not call a gay co-worker a faggot.

After ABC shut Isaiah up and sent him to rehab, to make it look like the rumors were true, they allowed employees to bad mouth him in the press, even giving T.R. Knight a pass to use the word faggot when he lied about Isaiah on national television.

Besides gagging Isaiah and allowing employees to slander him, ABC invented a whole new characterization of the word faggot to keep the fires raging around the lie that Isaiah is a homophobe. According to ABC, the word faggot cannot be used under any circumstances, unless your name is Glenn Beck, then they'll hire you after you use it on national television, or if your name is T.R. Knight, they'll give you a raise, for the same thing . . . Perhaps it doesn't matter what your name is, so long as you're white . . .

ABC fired Isaiah because he didn't sit still while they banded him as a homophobe and a brute, in furtherance of gay rights . . .

Notice how they’ve stopped talking now that they can no longer control Isaiah, and lawsuits are looming.