The Cleveland Show
The LA Times calls The Cleveland Show a keeper, I respectfully disagree.
Now the LA Times doesn’t go into a lot of detail as to why they think so but from the tone of the overall article its analysis seems to be based on ratings.
Well let me point out a couple things.
First, The Cleveland Show is, diabolically, placed between new episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, both of which are producing some quality product right now.
Second, The Cleveland Show airs during an uncontested half hour on Sunday nights. Seriously, there’s nothing else on – God knows I’ve looked. Even if MSNBC was airing a repeat of Meet The Press or Friday night’s episodes of Countdown or Rachel Maddow I’d switch for the half hour.
And the simple fact is half an hour isn’t long enough to do much of anything else. Just get into a video game and then have to stop, wash a sink full of dishes without time to dry them. It’s just far easier to leave the TV on and check your e-mail, tidy up a bit, or heaven forbid actually talk to the people you live with. They could air a news program in that half hour and get similar ratings but those ratings don’t necessarily mean people are paying attention.
Which brings me to my third point, The Cleveland Show sucks. I know only two episodes have aired thus far so Jon would probably point out that I haven’t given it a serious chance but once Cleveland left Spooner Street it averages about 2 mild guffaws per half hour with me. And I’m a guy who loves his comedy. I’ll laugh at a lot. When it comes to comedy I like to think I’m easy to please but The Cleveland Show just doesn’t do it for me. The humour is, at best, dated.
And the most interesting character is also the most ludicrous. I mean, randomly having a bear for a neighbor is exactly the kind of absurd focus-group-driven plot device that Family Guy would mock mercilessly on other shows. It’s like Poochie on The Simpsons and yet he’s thus far the only hope for the show. His accent is hard to place and amusing, he says funny things, and his bear-ness provides a not-entirely-subtle counterfoil to the racial stereotypes that typify the rest of the characters. Oddly enough using the bear as a metaphor for racism is one of the few promising concepts the show has but it only seems to flirt with the idea.
Picking Cleveland for his own show was where everything started to go wrong. He’s a minor character on Family Guy that the writers seem to have run out of things to do with. I understand the practical reason of giving the spinoff to a character that Seth MacFarlane doesn’t do the voice for because the guy would be overworked into an early grave and we would have lost something special as a result but I think perhaps we’re going to his well a little too much now. Thankfully Family Guy hasn’t suffered – which also speaks to Cleveland’s lack of value as a character.
One of the other networks really needs to challenge Fox on Sunday nights, particularly during this half hour or else Fox can just keep churning out this crap and people like the LA Times will continue to think it’s gold just because no one else is stepping up to the microphone. Seriously, The Cleveland Show and American Dad are still around but Knight Rider got cancelled? Where’s the justice in that?
