Cleveland Show - WTF?

Ok, I was a huge fan of Family Guy, and I still am a fan, though not as hardcore due to the dropping quality.  But just like The Simpsons there are still some funny gags and even some entire episodes I really dig.  I tried watching Amercian Dad out of respect for Seth MacFarlane and the quality he put out but I found it really dificult to watch except for the Patrick Stewart parts.  And then when I heard that Cleveland, one of the characters from Family Guy was getting his own show I thought the same thing most of you thought: somehow MacFarlane is making a fuckload of cash from this deal.  I can appreciate that and I bear him no ill-will.  And I know this probably sounds sarcastic (but for once it's not) but if I was in the same position to whore out my intellectual property with no regards to quality or artistic integrity.  And really "artisitic integrity" is just a bullshit term coined by the popular media to try and keep the working class oppressed by giving them the illusion of some kind of moral superiority.  But all of that still doesn't mean I have to like Seth MacFarlane's shitfest of a show.

I mean what a horribly unfunny show.  Cleveland was pretty much a one-note joke, a sort of straight man to Peter Griffin's shenanigans, but it was a one-note joke that worked.  I watched the pilot of The Cleveland Show but it was so fucking terrible I could barely make it through without putting my remote control in a sack weighed down with rocks and throwing it into the nearby lake and smashing the front of the TV so I couldn't change the channel.  Even then I had to keep from gouging my own eyes out and bursting my eardrums with a nearby pencil.  But, in the interest of fairness and open-minded dialogue (Hurray internet!) I decided to watch another episode this past Sunday.  Boy was I not surprised and a little disappointed when it turned out to still be shit.  Not only did they take one of the least interesting characters from Family Guy, but they seemed to have completely changed him.  Now Cleveland is a lot more similar to Peter Griffin, pulling the same old shit of big-fat-guy-with-a-much-hotter-wife-does-something-stupid-then-has-to-make-up-for-it routine which has already been perfected/done to death by both The Simpsons and Family Guy. 

The big problem is that with The Cleveland Show they seem to want to recreate the success of Family Guy by trying to directly immitate and plagiarise it.  This would be OK if it actually worked, but unfortunately you can't just take the same formula, apply it to another situation, grab your balls and hope it all turns out OK.  Sometimes it's not just having all the right elements (which The Cleveland Show definitley does NOT have) but also a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  The Simpsons and Futurama and Family Guy are put together by talented teams of writers and artists, but there was some other unquantifiable element that made them more than the sum of their parts.  I'm not sure what that element is (let's call it Zaz!) but I know for a fact that The Cleveland Show doesn't have it.

So to sum it all up, The Cleveland Show is a pile of dog shit and Mila Kunis is still hot as hell.  I know that's a pretty loose tie-in, but her smoking body helps in part to wash the taste of shit from my eyes.  My verdict: The Cleveland Show is a crime against humanity and should be banned except in times of war when it should be shown to captured soldiers to torture them for information for information.  I guarantee that if the US government just set up a bunch of giant screens in Afghanistan and Iraq and blared The Cleveland Show at full volume day and night the "war on terror" (AKA "war for more oil") would be over within the week.

There, that should help ease the pain...