‘The Cleveland Show’ falls flat of another ‘Family Guy’
October 23, 2009
Fox’s current Sunday-night lineup is more rehashed than reheated leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner. With “Family Guy” at 9 p.m. and “American Dad” 9:30 p.m., the recent airing of “The Cleveland Show” at 8:30 p.m. has only expanded Seth Macfarlane’s viewer domination. Not only that, but the show itself has simply become a third-rate clone to a familiarly dense comic strategy.
The people behind the new show use phrases like “sense of family” and “sweet and funny” when talking about it, but these descriptions don’t seem to match up with Macfarlane’s past show profiles: the ones filled with that risky, perverted, sometimes straight idiotic thing we call satire. The most controversial thing about the show is its portrayal of a black family. Satire will definitely not disguise the use of the race card if the show exploits this concept to dust.
The show follows Cleveland Brown and his son as they leave their “Family Guy” friends behind for life in the west. Cleveland gets sidetracked by his high school sweetheart on a pit stop to his hometown and ends up moving in with Donna, her teenage daughter, Roberta, and 5-year-old son, Rallo.
While trying to combine the outrageous trademark humor with a more family-oriented appeal, the show has only produced an undefined and distorted demographic that is neither for family nor for hardcore “Family Guy” fans. “It’s too soft, but still tries to be messed up and offensive,” said senior Errol Tongco. “It only ends up being stupid.”
The show does end up becoming this less intelligent version of “Family Guy”, without the wittiness, the edgy tone, the keen sense of comical timing and delivery. The show has many scenes like characters looking at their boogers under microscopes or snapping a chicken’s neck. Still, a lot of American viewers seem to want to see this kind of brainless vulgarity, making them easy targets for producers to profit simply by putting out the same thing in different forms. Forget innovation and quality, it’s all about the ratings in today’s world of television.
Loading ...
Comments
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!