Spin off shows have a richly deserved reputation for not being particularly watchable or good or worth making and rightly so as they usually smack of trying to squeeze a few more pounds or dollars out of a franchise that's already been bled drier than a virgin at a vampire orgy. As you may have guessed from the rating, The Cleveland Show is another show to add to this list.
For those who are unaware, The Cleveland Show follows the adventures of Cleveland Brown, Peter Griffin's erstwhile neighbour from Family Guy and his new family in the town of Stoolbend, Virginia including his new wife Donna, his son from the first series, pudgy Cleveland Jnr, and his two step kids, an uber-intelligent infant and a forgettable teenage girl, which sounds vaguely familiar. This is now the second series of the show, the first series kind of passing me by after watching the first two episodes, that was that. But now, it's the second series and is it anymore rememberable? Well, no.
Back in the days of yore, moustachioed Cleveland with his laugh like Sky Sports' Soccer Saturday's stooge Paul Merson was a loveable enough character but it's been quite comprehensively now, not enough of a character to base a series around. All that he is left with now is an insanely catchy theme tune that you couldn't get out of your head with an ice cream scoop.
Largely, the storylines are strange and with no real overarching progression of the story or sufficient enough interaction between the two story arcs per episode whilst, as can be expected from a Family Guy type show, there are jokes that hit here and there with flyers such as the David Carradine funeral gag but largely there is a severe dearth of laugh out loud moments.
Every so often references are made to the show's stablemates (Family Guy and American Dad) merely serve to remind you of the golden days of the mid-2000s when Family Guy was the edgiest and funny show on TV. Not any longer. The Cleveland Show suffers from the same problem as the later series of Family Guy and American Dad, in that it just seems very strained and forced with only the occasional high watermarks such as the third episode of this season's 'Cleveland Live!' which is a wonderfully offbeat 20 minutes of television where the show is broadcast 'live'.
Perhaps if the show wasn't so associated with Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane is the executive producer and voice actor for both shows and the animation is the same) then it might be able to stand on it's own as a show but the impact Family Guy made on the animated adult cartoon was so huge that the goalposts have shifted hugely in this genre of television that everything else just isn't quite good enough anymore. Sadly, even this review has to be concluded with a reference to Family Guy such is the shadow it casts over The Cleveland Show.
All in all, much like the more recent series of Family Guy, watching The Cleveland Show has become something of a chore, just hoping that maybe the heights will be hit again but ultimately being disappointed and the urge to watch it the next week and the next week and the next week gets duller and duller.
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