Andrew Wallenstein of The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that at least two advertisers are pulling out of the a new BET series, “Hot Ghetto Mess,” set to premiere July 25.

The logo of BET’s “Hot Ghetto Mess“

Inspired by the Hot Ghetto Mess website and hosted by “Chappelle Show” veteran Charlie Murphy, the show plans to walk a very loaded line between viewer-driven reality TV and over-the-top satire.

BET has not released a copy of the pilot for review, but the description on the BET website is certainly provocative:

“Hot Ghetto Mess” is an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek examination of the good, the bad and the ugly of Black popular culture.

Utilizing comedy, man-on-the-street interviews, video clips, pictures and music, “Hot Ghetto Mess” aims to shine a spotlight on prevalent images in pop culture and examine what role they play in American lifestyle. “Hot Ghetto Mess” goes where most shows fear to tread.

As host Charlie Murphy guides viewers through shaking booties, thug life, baby-mama drama and pimped-out high schoolers, “Hot Ghetto Mess” will explore what these images really mean to all of us.

Cutting edge, original, relevant and irreverent, “Hot Ghetto Mess” is like the traffic accident you can’t look away from. Viewers will laugh. They’ll cry. They’ll think. They’ll learn, and hopefully they’ll recognize they’ve GOT to do better.

If the text, images and video on the original website are any indication, be ready for a variety of classic stereotypes — of both African American men and women.

The show’s MySpace page, though, asserts that those stereotypical representations have a lofty purpose. The show is “a call-to-arms of sorts to all of us to re-examine how we are looking and acting but more importantly how we are living. Consider this show constructive criticism. We’re holding up a mirror, dont be mad if you dont like what you see.” For what it’s worth, Mos Def and Chuck D, among others, have signed up as “friends” of the show.

Of course, for the show to achieve this purported goal it will have to do more that simply say it’s a satire.

Read on for more about the show’s satirical dilemma, a funeral for the N-word and putting civil rights on the big screen …

For a satire to be effective, it must go beyond the laugh. By definition, satire is a method of social critique. Humor and ridicule are only tools to expose human and institutional folly and faults.

And, of course, there are many different levels of folly and faults. It’s one thing to get us thinking about how silly those hairstyles were back in the day. It’s another to get us to understand (and not simply perpetuate) the damage caused by the long history of the “mammy” stereotype of black women.

I’ve talked about the power of satire before in reference to everything from ObamaGirl to cartoons about Muhammed to Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. One of the most complex acts a creative artist can perform these days is to get across a serious political point. The ubiquity of irony has dulled the senses of both the artist and the audience.

Too often writers and performers use classic ironic techniques like hyperbole (exaggeration for effect) or parody to mock a behavior, but because they don’t present an alternative way to act, we are left with a joke and not much else. Similarly, artists spend most of their energy on purely individual shortcomings, rather than tackling the vices of institutions and public policies, which offer an equally fertile comedic ground.

That’s certainly the case with the “Hot Ghetto Mess” website, whose “we got to do better” tagline ends up as more of an insulting self-accusation than a legitimate satirical goal. Let’s hope the TV show does better, but I have my doubts.

Then again, maybe it’s up to you. BET is encouraging the audience to send in content via this submission page — which, as far as I could tell, was only linked through the MySpace page, not the BET website. Of course, you’re not choosing what’s on the air.

Sal and Willie in BET’s “Baldwin Hills”

To put the show in a broader context, it is, depending on your perspective, either part of or a glaring exception to what Felicia R. Lee of the New York Times identifies as a “face-lift” for a network that, according to critics of its traditionally video-heavy lineup, “fails to mirror the complexity of black life.”

Premiering this week is a new docudrama, “Baldwin Hills,” focusing on “a group of mostly hip, affluent black teenagers.” “Exalted!” is an upcoming biography series focusing on ministers. “Somebodies,” BET’s first original scripted series premiering early next year, will focus on recent college graduates in Athens, GA. And the list goes on, as BET is in the process of introducing 16 new shows.

Another one of those shows is “S.O.B. (Socially Offensive Behavior),” the half-hour lead-in to “Hot Ghetto Mess,” which sets up “un-politically correct” situations and uses a hidden camera to catch people’s reactions. Patrons to a restaurant are told, for example, that seating is by race. Wallenstein reports that “S.O.B.” is also making advertisers nervous.

In related news, the NAACP on Monday, as part of a campaign spurred by the Don Imus controvery, held a mock funeral for the N-word.

One of the presiders at the ceremony, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, put the act in perspective: “You can?t just bury the N-word. You have to bury all the nonsense that comes with it. Good riddance. Die N-word. We don’t want to see you around here no more.”

Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, put it this way: “While we are happy to have sent a certain radio cowboy back to his ranch, we ought to hold ourselves to the same standard. If he can?t refer to our women as ‘hos,’ then we shouldn’t either.”

While I certainly agree with the sentiment, I just wish more leaders of this movement would make the distinction between what I see as the three uses of the word: 1) as a racial slur that we can trace all the way back to the antebellum South; 2) as a (possibly humorous) term of camaraderie between friends; and 3) within a thoughtful literary context, as a realistic representation of the language of particular characters, in particular times and places.

The first use of the word obviously needs to be dead and buried. I’d even agree that the second use is too problematic to defend (although its ambiguity needs to be discussed). But I would wholeheartedly defend the third use — as I must do every year when I teach everything from “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” to “Huck Finn” — as long as the artist shows a consciousness toward the power and history of the term.

And that’s true even in the proper comedic context. Dave Chappelle, at his best (think Clayton Bigsby and the white family with the unfortunate name) was able to use the term to effectively undermine racial misconceptions. At other times … well, it’s been discussed plenty.

Ultimately, though, it’s unfortunate that it’s the comedies — or the glamour shows — that garner all of the cultural attention. Ann Hornady of the Washington Post, after watching “Talk to Me,” a new film starring Don Cheadle, asks a crucial question: Why hasn’t the civil rights movement ever been the focus of “a pivotal, defining feature film”?

Hollywood, she points out, has never even gotten around to making a Martin Luther King biopic.

She provides a insightful historical overview of films that touch upon (or focus on just a distinct segment of) the civil rights struggle — but she herself is left wondering why it is ultimately such an uncomfortable subject.

Her coup de gras, though, is when she imagines pitching several sure-fire hits:

Just think of it: Kerry Washington signs on to play Diane Nash, the former teen beauty queen who led one of the first sit-ins at a lunch counter in Nashville, and went on to lead the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala.

Or: Jamie Foxx stars in the biopic of Fred Shuttlesworth, the fiery mastermind behind some of the most famous clashes between the 1960s Freedom Riders and Birmingham’s Bull Connor, he of the notorious dogs and water hoses.

Or: Mos Def as Bob Moses, the Harvard philosophy student who in 1964 helped organize Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and remained there to found the Algebra Project, designed to teach African American youngsters math. Or Queen Latifah as Fannie Lou Hamer, who stood up to the all-white, all-male Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and in so doing sent no less than Lyndon B. Johnson into a swivet.

A Woolworth’s lunch counter. A bus in Montgomery. The Edmund Pettus Bridge. All evoke the kind of epic, good-vs.-evil showdown that movies are made for — when they’re John Wayne westerns.

So why, with such promising stories, such larger-than-life characters and such historic sweep and importance, hasn’t the civil rights era been captured in a feature film? Not surprisingly for the movie industry, the answer is portrayed as purely economic; and equally unsurprisingly, economics in Hollywood are inextricably interwoven with the still unresolved issue of race.

Unresolved, indeed.