Cleveland Brown and son Cleveland Jr. (left) relocate to Virginia and acquire a new family in “The Cleveland Show,” premiering tomorrow night.
CLEVELAND Brown would be a prime candidate for flop-sweat, if such a show-biz condition existed for animated TV characters.
Cleveland, who was Peter Griffin’s put-upon neighbor in Fox’s popular “Family Guy,” has been spun off into his eponymous series, “The Cleveland Show.” He’s saddled with more clunky jokes than a bad Friar’s Club roast — and that’s just in tomorrow night’s series premiere. It doesn’t get much better in next week’s second episode.
Some “Family Guy” fans wondered why it was Cleveland — and not one of that show’s more lively characters, like horny-jerk neighbor Quagmire — who got the spinoff treatment.
The slow-talking Cleveland was never more than pleasant background noise on “Family Guy,” and “The Cleveland Show” doesn’t do much to transform him into a leading man (or as much as one can be a “leading man” in a cartoon series).
The setup here is that the divorced, 40-ish Cleveland (Mike Henry) decides to leave Quahog, Rhode Island along with his obese, dimwitted son Cleveland Jr. (Kevin Michael Richardson) to chase his dream of beating the bushes as a minor league baseball scout in California.
On the way, he decides to make a sentimental sidetrip through his Virginia hometown of Stoolbend — where he encounters his unrequited high school love, Donna (Sanaa Lathan), who’s now divorced and living with her rebellious teenage daughter, Roberta (Reagan Gomez-Preston) and Rallo (played by Henry), her sullen, wiseguy grade-schooler.
You know what happens next: Cleveland, sensing his chance to finally win Donna’s heart, chucks his California dreamin’ and decides to remain in Stoolbend. He marries Donna, bonds with his new stepkids (after the requisite rough start) and meets his new oddball neighbors.
They include a rifle-toting redneck and, in a nod to “Family Guy’s” talking dog, Brian, a talking bear who sports a black tie. The bear sounds like polka-playing Yosh Shmenge (John Candy) from those old “SCTV” sketches, though he’s supposed to be Russian (Russian bear, get it?).
I found myself smiling once or twice, but mostly thinking that all this is way-too-similar to “Family Guy” to carve out its own niche (“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane is one of this show’s co-creators, so maybe it’s unavoidable).
That copycat quality extends to the neon sign over Stoolbend’s local water hole, The Broken Stool — way-too-similar to the neon sign adorning Peter Griffin’s bar, The Drunken Clam. They couldn’t think of something else?
Next week’s episode features a kinda creepy subplot between Cleveland and his stepdaughter, more misguided jokes (about testicular cancer and, for some reason, Chloe Sevigny) and a flashback vignette punctuated by a frozzled Courtney Love passing wind.
“Family Guy” might have pulled it off; here it’s just boring.