I'm not sure how much I should burden you with ABC's session for "Cavemen," given that most of the people reading this haven't seen the original pilot -- and won't, at least until about eight episodes in, by which point the show might be long gone.

Or such an enormous hit that it can afford to swallow the cost of an unaired disaster.

Sure, I've made "Cavemen," and my fear of it, a running joke in the column -- you do read the column, right? -- but there's so much unfunny about the show, which expands a pretty decent Geico commercial into a broad commentary about racial and ethnic stereotyping.

Actually, it's mostly racial stereotyping: Even the clip ABC showed to torture us -- some of which came from the commercials, some from the pilot that's being replaced -- focused on the following stereotypes of "Cavemen": athletic prowess, sexual prowess, dancing ability.

One of the characters even break-dances.

I know, I know. You're thinking Scottish people everywhere will be highly offended. Highlands-ly offended, even.

I really thought I'd lost my own ability to be offended, since it hadn't happened since this morning, when we learned ABC was holding back on us on some "Lost" announcements they wanted to hold for Comic-Con tomorrow in San Diego. (More on that in Thursday's column.) But facing a panel of eight white men who were attempting to justify jokes that seemed to be aimed pretty squarely at a group none of them belonged to, I found myself, well, sputtering.

With three actors and five executive producers on stage, there was a lot of talk about how this show wasn't going to be nearly as bad as many of us obviously think it's going to be. The word "acclimation" was tossed around -- again, by guys whose idea of acclimation may be, well, theoretical.

And then they were asked to describe some future episodes, and executive producer Mike Schiff stepped in it, outlining an upcoming storyline in which one of the characters would take a job and would be really, really lazy.

The heads of several people sitting behind me exploded just then, and I'm afraid I don't remember a thing after that.