John McWhorter at the New Republic thinks The Cleveland Show sucks– which I agree with– and that it is therefore racist– which I don’t:

The show is basically Family Guy in blackface – and what isn’t black in it is so shamelessly ripped off from Family Guy that it’s hard to believe it’s the product of creators who are usually so studiously “post-” obvious stunts of the sort. …

The question is: would the Family Guy people create a show where a white supporting character – say, paraplegic Joe voiced superbly by Patrick Warburton —  moves to another town and settles in with retreads of the Family Guy characters? No – it’d be seen as folly to let that get beyond a conversation over beers. The reason it felt right to pull this with The Cleveland Show is because of a sense that blackness is so much a “thing,” so diverting in itself, that painting the Family Guy people brown makes artistic and commercial sense. …

Popular culture is long past black characters held up as a genuflective novelty in their brown skin alone, à la Franklin in the Peanuts comic strip or even Homer Simpson’s drinking buddy “Carl,” with a dopey white working-class voice, and “black” only in tint, as a gesture of diversity 1989-style.

First of all, let me just say that network television is so devoid of quality black programming right now that we’ll pretty much take what we can get.  And I’m only half joking about that.  But I think McWhorter makes some valid points.  Society is pretty much past seeing blackness as a novelty in and of itself.  There’s a reason why Barack Obama is president while Michael Steele continues to be a running national joke.  If just being black is all you’ve got, people are going to figure it out pretty quick.

Thing is, I don’t think this entirely applies to The Cleveland Show.  I don’t think race has much to do with the fact that it sucks.  I think it just doesn’t work because it doesn’t work.  Cleveland isn’t funny, none of the supporting characters are funny, and the smart-mouth baby who’s obviously meant to be the show’s scene-stealing star would only be funny if Stewie Griffin or the Boondocks comic strip never existed.  McWhorter, in between his points about racism, admits as much:

[T]he show itself is dishwater, and part of the reason is Cleveland. A Type B Droopy-Doggish fellow, he’s no lead. …

It feels like something Family Guy itself would venture in one of their ironic cutaways, in which case it would have been a choice one. But this is intended as a franchise that will run for years, stacking up something like 200 episodes and running endlessly in syndication. In which case the joke will wear off, and in fact, by my lights, become irritating.

It’s actually funny that McWhorter mentioned the Family Guy cutaways, because there’s one The Cleveland Show reminds me a lot of.  It’s the one where Julia Louis-Dreyfus is pitching a new sitcom called Now It’s Just Getting Sad where she throws a bunch of comedic elements against the wall, hoping desperately that people will find a few of them funny: “Okay, okay, hear me out.  My character is a therapist who’s living in the city, but I’m married… to an elephant.”  (You can listen to the hilarious audio of the scene here.)

I think Seth MacFarlane’s pitch for The Cleveland Show probably went along those same lines.  “Okay, okay, hear me out.  Cleveland is living next door to… a family of bears.”  Yeah.  I don’t think this says nearly as much about race as it does about how badly out of fresh ideas MacFarlane is, and his unwillingness to let that stop him from cashing FOX’s checks.

Simply put, MacFarlane threw a bunch of stuff against the wall (many of it the same stuff he threw against the wall for Family Guy) and virtually none of it worked.  The fact that one of the things he threw up there was that the show centered around a black family doesn’t make the atrociousness of the show rise to the level of racism.

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