To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is?
Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense. The premise, for example, is willfully as hokey as those of the old-time spinoffs (“Mary’s friend Phyliss moves to San Francisco to live with her ex-husband’s parents ...”).
