My Beef With “The Cleveland Show”

The Simpsons

          There are actually several problems I have with the now long-cancelled The Cleveland Show—the ungainly third child in the Seth MacFarlane stable of animated adult cartoons that all share one universe (confirmed by that episode where they all got hit by the same hurricane). There are some obvious issues I could point to—that this is a show about black characters created by three white dudes, or that like all MacFarlane Brand Programming The Cleveland Show has major issues with trans people but, somehow, to an even greater degree than Family Guy or American Dad!, which only manage to be all “ewww gross trans people” every so often instead of what seems like every other episode in the case of this show. I feel like those particular issues are pretty glaring, though, and my actual, real, deepest-seated problem with The Cleveland Show does not have anything to do with social justice.

            My beef with The Cleveland Show is that it squandered its potential.

            John McWhorter once described The Cleveland Show as “basically Family Guy in blackface,” and I think that is a pretty apt assessment of the creativity on display there.[1] This is not to say that I think The Cleveland Show has no redeeming qualities. It still manages to be the sort of bad funny/not-all-that-funny that I will watch consistently whenever I have nothing better to do and it is already on television. Low effort for the occasional laugh. The series does unabashedly follow the Seth MacFarlane Formula For Comedic Success (Maybe), however, with talking animals, a precocious child character, and oddly catchy musical numbers.[2] In fact, so closely following this mold is how The Cleveland Show fails to make good on its initial promise.

            When Cleveland leaves Quahog for California to pursue his dream job as a minor league baseball scout he gets sidetracked in his hometown of Stoolbend, Virginia when he runs into an old love, Donna Tubbs, who has two rambunctious children, a deadbeat ex-husband, and finds that she has strong feelings for Cleveland as he, over the course of the pilot, helps out with the kids and generally proves himself to be a nice sort of fellow. Donna and Cleveland fall in love and get married… and then the show really begins and what we actually end up with is the same family dynamic as Family Guy and American Dad!—namely a husband-wife duo who give us the same old “women do X but men do Y!” bits that we have seen trotted out over and over again in sitcoms. The pilot suggests that Cleveland is a handy father (good with kids and whatnot), but then we still get the same stories down the road where he plays the part of a goofy, incapable, irresponsible man-child. Donna is the love of his life, but then we get the same old man-is-tired-of-his-nagging-wife plots where, say, Cleveland fakes being deaf to avoid having to listen to Donna talk. This is a comedy, so nobody was expecting an idyll, but this shameless re-hashing of the same dynamic and jokes suggests that the writers had no idea how to deal with a husband-wife pairing other than to shoehorn in the same tired tropes for both the man and his spouse. We talk a lot about damaging tropes for women in pop culture, but one for men that I know I am thoroughly sick of is that of the negligent, goofy father who does not understand his kids (at best) or completely, accidentally, humorously(!) neglects them (at worst). In fact, the general atmosphere of “idiot, clueless man” that permeates a lot of shows or ads that also pull the old “women do X…” etc. trick bothers me.

            If the character of Cleveland was only this trope, that would be one thing, but the show also faithfully copies and pastes the same all-over-the-place characterization used in the fathers in the other two series. Just like Stan and Peter, Cleveland’s personality and character vary wildly from episode to episode. Sometimes he is the loving husband and capable father, and sometimes he is an utter child or irrationally, ridiculously dismissive of his wife, children, and responsibilities. Donna fares little better. She shares many similarities with Lois and Francine: All of them are cast as pleased domestics at points who occasionally try to jumpstart other careers with the grudging support of their husbands. They are all good in a fight and have some kind of sordid past that is casually alluded to for… humor. Look, the juxtaposition of housewife with “good in a fight” works. It is funny—just not when you reproduce the exact same thing three times over and call it a day.

            Donna, Cleveland, Peter, Lois, Stan, and Francine are not characters: They are comedy vehicles. I once read a very good A.V. Club article (that I can, unfortunately, not find at the moment) that examines the difference between King of the Hill and American Dad! in very similar terms. To paraphrase heavily: Where the characters of King of the Hill are just that (characters who are consistently drawn and have jokes built around their personalities) American Dad! offers no consistent characterization. Stan can be an idiot man-child, a caring father, a loving husband, or a complete misogynist as the joke dictates. This approach is not necessarily “wrong,” but I would argue that it makes the difference between a show with true cultural staying power that can summon genuine pathos for its major players (like, say, King of the Hill) and a show that is ultimately throwaway, forgettable. Like The Cleveland Show. Like using a pop culture reference in place of an actual joke. Shows like Community and Bob’s Burgers establish characters first and then build the jokes around the ways certain characters act and react. But, to be fair to The Cleveland Show for a moment, this was never MacFarlane’s MO. It is not like it had any real chance of not being what it was, but the fact that there was a chance—however slim—at the start to shake things up with a new location, new characters, and new relationships irks me. It speaks to the industrial quality of reality TV series and “reboots” that are cranked out to reproduce safe, old thrills—The implicit assumption is that the world of television is a world of trough feeding and that the viewing public will eat the same thing again and again without caring. Again, repetition is the bread and butter of the MacFarlane Trio, three very dumb series undoubtedly made by smart people.[3]

            How to end this discussion? Perhaps with proof that MacFarlane and company can do better. Here is one really great character moment (of all things) that I suspect may have been accidental:

            In the Family Guy episode “Thanksgiving,” Joe’s son Kevin surprises everyone by showing up alive when he was presumed dead while serving a tour of duty in Iraq. The characters eventually discover that Kevin, who initially claims to have been in a coma, actually went A.W.O.L. To defend Kevin’s actions, Brian, the liberal mouthpiece of the series, turns to Ida—a trans character. Idea’s transition story is the focus of an earlier episode of the show that has become notorious for its protracted, disgusting depiction of a straight man’s reaction to discovering he has had sex with a trans woman.[4] In “Thanksgiving,” however, Brian turns to Ida to support Kevin because first, as Brian explicitly states, Ida also served in the armed forces and should be able to commiserate with Kevin’s negative experience, and second, implicitly, the appeal singles Ida out because by virtue of being a trans person she ought to be more permissive in general, right? Wrong. Ida refuses to support Kevin’s going A.W.O.L. and instead reminds him that he owed his loyalty to the people serving with him.

            What I like about this moment in particular is how it breaks the mold for MacFarlane-verse characterization. Rather than use the appeal to Ida to set up some kind of joke about perceived stereotypes of transwomen, the episode instead allows a character to answer in something like a genuine voice. Ida’s pride in her military background is also completely unrelated to her trans status. It is rare to see a trans character anywhere characterized like this (in a way not somehow related to transition). It feels utterly alien watching this one scene and recalling it after the fact that the episode does not go for some easy jab by using the moment to remind viewers for the umpteenth time that Ida is trans (and that that is disgusting to the show). The way that this brief exchange subtly characterizes Ida and rebukes Brian’s assumptions is better than Family Guy deserves or even usually manages.[5] It is not a humorous moment at all, so as a standard for fixing what was wrong with The Cleveland Show it really does not apply. I suppose all I can really say about it is that, generally, The Cleveland Show was a chance to change the game even slightly or at least up the ante. The characters could have been more clearly drawn to try for a more King of the Hill-esque approach to humor instead of using both cut-aways and non sequiturs again. Cleveland could have had a different family life with Donna—Comedic troubles could arise but their genuine affection for one another could still be evident, rather than being so changeable and seemingly distant to the characters mere episodes after they were married. That the show could do no more than to leap from love to dissatisfaction so quickly demonstrates its lack of faith in its own ability to make audiences laugh without resorting to the same old shtick. And that is The Cleveland Show’s greatest sin: a lack of imagination and an apparent unwillingness to try to be anything other than “Family Guy in blackface.”

      

Notes:

[1] McWhorter, John. “Just a Cartoon, But Still: Is Family Guy in Blackface Funny?” The New Republic, New Republic, 2016. Accessed 7 Sept. 2016.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmePGQ3Mu7I

[3] Of the three, American Dad! is easily my favorite. It starts out rough in seasons one and two but really finds its footing in three. Although it also borrows the same dynamics from Family Guy, it somehow manages to make them work. The most recent season that aired only on TBS felt weaker, but there are some great comedy moments in the mix. Furthermore, Roger is a brilliant character—one who perfectly embodies the spirit of the MacFarlane-verse since he is ever changing (through costume) and can meet whatever comedic or narrative demands a particular episode may have. Certain episodes of American Dad!, especially “Lost in Space,” actually manage to summon the same mixture of humor and genuine feeling that you could consistently find in the likes of Futurama.

[4] The guy is, of course, Brian. He vomits for a long time. The vomit is really the only thing that moves as Stewie looks on and Brian keeps vomiting. The vomit creeps across the floor. It goes on so long. It is… humor.

[5] I do not think anyone in Family Guy has really grown as a character over time, though I guess Brian has become less well-liked by other characters. On the other hand, I will admit that American Dad! and The Cleveland Show do attempt some small developments. Stan becomes somewhat less intolerant of gay people, and Cleveland becomes somewhat less intolerant of Hispanic people.

Do we live in a post-blog world?

“The age of the blog is forever over. The age of ‘tl;dr’ is upon us. Even tweets are deemed too wordy these days. We can dig our heels in and say ‘Not here! Not me!’ But that doesn’t change the idiot momentum of history.”

            --        Caitlín R. Kiernan, “I wouldn’t mind leaving, but I got so far to go” (13 Jul. 2015)[1]

            I have never had any doubts as far as the readership of my blog(s) is concerned. I got started blogging years ago in a Professional Writing class, so I had something like a captive audience for those first few posts. When I decided to expand the blog beyond the class assignment, I also started to link to posts through Facebook, Twitter, and eventually Tumblr to try to bring in more readers. Although the blog itself had a dedicated Facebook page, most of the views came from friends following the links. Twitter brought in a few readers, but Tumblr barely attracted any. I left my old blog behind to start again with what I conceived of as a more professional voice and an increased interest in producing quality posts with a greater emphasis on researched topics than personal stories, and at the time of my leaving I had been holding steady at seven official “followers” through Google and only a handful of actual comments on posts that mostly came from friends. Originally, this wasn’t even supposed to be another blog. It was going to be a professional portfolio or website with a little blog on the side, but when I couldn’t find a platform that provided what I was looking for, I came back to Blogger with the intention of continuing the same practices I had previously established with the old blog.

            For a little further perspective, consider that it took me nearly five years of posting semi-regularly to the old blog to hit roughly 10,373 views. This blog currently has around 200. Granted, I am not a well-known blogger. I’m not even remotely famous, and I could arguably have worked harder to draw in readers. I have recently heard at least one blogger whose posts I frequently read saying good things about Medium as a platform for potentially attracting an audience.[2] That’s beside the point as far as this post is concerned, however. I am far more interested in the relevance of blogging in general. Reading Kiernan’s post was the impetus for this interest.

            Admittedly, I felt a bit like a dinosaur having to Google “tl;dr” to find out that it meant “too long; didn’t read.” I had seen it used before, but I never took the time to figure it out. Obviously this sort of shorthand is a product of internet culture, generally, and texting and Twitter culture, specifically. Its brevity is functional but also tonal. Like other shortened words or phrases—“Totes,” “’Merica,” etc.—it suggests a flippancy or even petulance associated with adolescence or teen culture, which is often seen, reductively, as apathetic about or disinterested in complicated discourse or subjects requiring effort to understand. “Tl;dr” encapsulates not just an idea but an attitude generally associated with internet and youth cultures which are, arguably, cultures that currently dovetail in their interests and ideas. As someone who has studied education and done some teaching, I am familiar with “tl;dr” as an attitude if not as a concept with a name (so to speak). If it’s too long or not of interest, then why read it? More recently, I was working in a university library and saw that someone had written on the desk where I was sitting, “I love studying for finals not in my major. – No one ever.” Although not necessarily a matter of length in every case, the sentiment is the same. The effort required to do something makes the doing not worthwhile.

            It’s easy to see this attitude as a result of unmotivated youth, but arguing that today’s young people are less anything (less studious, less motivated, less moral) than previous generations feels remarkably shortsighted given that there has always been a cycle of older generations bemoaning the shortcomings of the next generation, which will in time be the older generation itself. If today’s youth are less likely than ever to put forth the effort to read a longer piece of writing (for example), the cause can be found not just in internet culture which promotes information glut and prioritizes easily digestible snippets over more developed texts but also in the current economic climate. The cyclical, generational argument about youth not caring is one way of explaining the problem, but I have recently begun to feel that the issue is too much caring or too much responsibility. I would argue, though I have no data to support the argument, that today’s young people are more aware than ever of what is expected of them by society. Perhaps they have less time for activities they do not find immediately enjoyable or applicable to their lives because they feel that they have such a short amount of time to work with.

            In that case, the abbreviated lingo and cries of “YOLO” take on a more desperate feel. “The end is nigh.” Youth is short, and the stakes are high. Although different people take on varying levels of responsibility at different points in their lives, the implications are the same. You have to have fun while you can, but you also need to figure out what to do with your life. You have to decide on your career path, find work, pay off any loans that you might accrue in the process. I’m generalizing heavily here, but this is the thrust of what I’m arguing: that a youthful unwillingness to read or otherwise “waste time” is a result of societal forces (cultural, economic, political) that conspire to impress upon them at increasingly young ages the utter lack of time that is afforded to them to figure out what to do and to get it done. Without going too far afield into the subjects of pedagogy and educational theory, I find it very interesting that while public schools become increasingly regimented and stress the importance of getting ready early for the future, certain collegiate subjects like Rhetoric and Composition are trying to move in more holistic directions that stress experimentation and exploration—things today’s youth seemingly have little time for.

            Again, this sense that time is short and anything that cannot be done in as short a time as possible isn’t worth doing could be a result of an increased sense of urgency amongst the younger generation, but the source is something of a mystery. In the case of internet culture, in particular, one can almost find a version of the old chicken and egg question. Did youth culture influence the creation of quickie social media culture like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr? Or did quickie social media culture influence its youthful users? The world may never know… Suffice it to say that it’s easy to see a bit of one in the other. Either way, internet culture is a fast culture, and the question of whether blogs still have a relevant place in that culture today is an important one—especially if you happen to have a blog like yours truly. When I was doing some research for this piece, in fact, one of the suggestions offered by Google to complete my “are blogs” search was “are blogs still popular.”

            According to Mary Pipher in her chapter on blogs (“Blogs—A Revolutionary New Tool”) in her book Writing to Change the World, “blogs surfaced in the 1990s as online journals for people who worked with computer technology, but they quickly morphed into a much bigger phenomenon. Computer users began posting personal blogs that included everything from daily activities to poetry, travel tips, movie reviews, political commentary, and thoughts about the universe.”[3] 9/11 served as the catalyst for a dramatic increase in the number of users with blogs, and by 2005 there were thirty-two million people in the United States (sixteen percent of the population) working blogs into their lives as part of their daily reading, while one in seventeen Americans maintained a blog of their own.[4] Of course, this data came from 2005, and Pipher’s book came out in 2006. Perhaps tellingly, Tom Watson wrote for Forbes in 2014 that when he tells social entrepreneurs to start a blog as a part of their digital media strategy, “[t]hey sometimes look at me like I teleported in from the mists of 2006.”[5] In the world of business, blogs were once integral parts of marketing; however, they have increasingly been relegated to the backburner in favor of maintaining a presence on more immediately accessible social media sites. Writing for Didit, Steve Baldwin reports that in a recent (as of May 15, 2014) study of “professional social media experts,” eighty-seven percent maintained blogs, but only thirty-four percent actually produced up-to-date content for those sites by posting at least once per week.[6]       

            Given their origins in the 90s and the fact that we now live in an increasingly streamlined, “mobile-dominated media world,” blogs have been outclassed by newer services that are definitely more efficient at allowing people to share their thoughts, though they have developed flashier and more intuitive interfaces in an effort to keep place. Although it’s certainly possible to have shorter blog posts or blogs that primarily deal in images or photographs—and these types of blogs and posts fair best on Tumblr where the most popular content is that which can be quickly digested while scrolling through updates on one’s dashboard—I find it hard to separate the notion of blogging from its root “log”: as in, a captain’s log or some other long-form, primarily text-based piece of writing.

            Interestingly, both Watson and Baldwin still encourage the use of blogs despite the trends in social media use. To a degree their sentiments echo those of Pipher from 2006. Blogs provide instant publication and the possibility for anyone with internet access and an email address to write about whatever they want and potentially join or create a discourse community. They are strictly democratic spaces, as they “offer us zero degrees of separation from people anywhere and everywhere.”[7] Whether it represents a business or an individual, a blog (even one hosted through Google) gives that group or person content control, the opportunity to connect directly with an audience, and the opportunity to establish a “brand,” which can include a space free of ads or other unrelated content which has increasingly invaded spaces like Facebook and Twitter to distract from the personable and personal aspects of those services. Baldwin specifically suggests that “social platforms” like these are transient, while “domains and blogs go on and on.” How many kids today know about MySpace or GeoCities? There is some merit to this argument given that having a domain name you own and through which you can host your content into perpetuity guarantees you web space where you can easily archive work that is difficult to find years, months, weeks, or even days after the initial posting on a site like Facebook or Twitter. Not to mention the fact that some creators are leery of using Facebook to promote original content like artwork because of potentially skeevy copyright issues.

            None of this actually answers the question of whether blogs are still a viable part of internet culture, however. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a definitive answer. There are a lot of people on the internet, and not everyone has a “tl;dr” attitude. Arguably, Medium is working to provide a platform from which internet texts of all lengths can find readers (and all readers can find the texts they will read) by offering an estimated reading time next to the link to an article. Readers can decide for themselves whether a five minute read or an eighteen-minute one better suits their needs. From an English teacher’s perspective, students read daily (all sorts of things), and there is plenty of content available for them to choose from. From a content creator’s perspective, I recognize that I live in a world influenced by youth and/or internet culture, where “tl;dr” is a likelihood, and where the sort of writing that I do is less likely to attract an audience. Although I like to hope that someone will read what I write, I also recognize the holistic value in writing for its own sake or at least for a smaller audience. I could post more often and in smaller snippets and probably draw more attention, but that’s not what I want from my own writing. It’s not what I want out of blogging. I have argued that recognizing early on what one’s ideal “endgame” in writing is is important to the writing process. An honest assessment of what one expects to get at the end of a particular writing venture is important for warding off disappointment and not expecting something from oneself superficially that one doesn’t truly want on a deeper level.

            More objectively, my final thought on the blogs issue is this: next to official news sites and platforms like Kindle that presuppose a certain amount of professionalism (though it certainly varies), a blog is the purest, widest-reaching way for individuals to self-publish in the internet age. Blogs provide access to an audience to people who would otherwise be denied access through traditional channels like publishing houses and the like. Marginalized voices can use blogs to great effect. Though the digital divide is still a very real issue (and therefore even access to blogs is gated based on economics), there is still great opportunity for self-expression to be found at minimal cost through blogging. Where one can easily be one truncated voice lost among many on Twitter or Facebook, a blog allows a voice to thrive and express itself as fully as it chooses. Relevancy is as much a matter of effective marketing one’s voice as it is a matter of being cutting edge. Blog content is your content, and what you do with it is determined by your personal endgame and limited only by your aspirations and your willingness to seek out your intended audience.

    

Notes:

[1] http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1131797.html (Author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s LiveJournal.)

[2] Lauren Modery of Hipstercrite (http://www.hipstercrite.com/). You can read her article “What I’ve Learned from Going Viral” on Medium (https://medium.com/@Hipstercrite/what-i-ve-learned-from-going-viral-b0f7c557672b).   

          

[3] Pipher, Mary. Writing to Change the World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006. 215. Print.

[4] Ibid.

[5] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomwatson/2014/02/28/why-blogs-still-matter-for-social-entrepreneurs/ (Tom Watson’s article “Why Blogs (Still) Matter For Social Entrepreneurs.”)

[6] http://www.didit.com/are-blogs-still-important-today/ (Steve Baldwin’s article “Are Blogs Still Important Today?”)

[7] Pipher, 216-217, 221.