Friday, April 26, 2013

“Not” in Cleveland!


More bad news for prime-time animation fans, as our friend Joe Cab said in the comments to THIS POST, THE CLEVELAND SHOW has been cancelled, joining other prime-time animated favorite, FUTURAMA.  MSN is reporting the cancellation this morning.

I wish they were waving HELLO, instead of GOOD BYE!

 I had a feeling this might be the case because the series didn’t seem to have a regular “8 PM-or Later” timeslot on FOX Sunday.  It was shunted around, or was run at 7 or 7:30, a timeslot that always gave way during NFL Football season.  Ironically, this is exactly how FOX treated FUTURAMA at or near the end of its FOX run. 

Something feels familiar about this, Bender!
Perhaps just as telling, the Third Season DVD for THE CLEVELAND SHOW has been made available only on an MOD basis, just like Warner Archives.  As my previous POPEYE post indicates,  a MOD DVD collection is not the greatest vote of confidence in a property of any sort – much less one currently on the air. 

It was better to be "MOD" in the sixties, than now!

I ordered that MOD DVD this week, unaware that it may be one of the last times I get to see “...his happy, mustached face – on THE CLEVELAND SHOW!"

I may be mustached, but I'm really not happy, trust me!

On the bright side, THE SIMPSONS, FAMILY GUY, AMERICAN DAD, and BOB’S BURGERS are all being renewed by FOX, so that may be enough for a whole Sunday prime time (8-10 PM Eastern) for “Animation Domination” to continue. 


2014 UPDATE: Well, maybe not AMERICAN DAD... see HERE. 

 

Sure hope they finally find a spot for Seth MacFarlane’s proposed FLINTSTONES, though.

2 comments:

Comicbookrehab said...

I recall a popular theory that the only reason why Cleveland got a spinoff (and not Quagmire) was because Seth would have not been able to give enough time to oversee it without leaving "Family Guy" in other hands; "American Dad" is supervised by Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman, "Cleveland" by Mike Henry and Richard Appel. "Cleveland" was quite a gamble - there were some amusing moments in there, but a LOT of clunkers, too. It needed to find the right hook and didn't. I didn't like a lot of the supporting cast, and Cleveland himself had devolved a lot in order to try to make him "funnier". For a prime-time cartoon, it's done remarkably well for itself.

Joe Torcivia said...

‘Rehab:

You may be right about THE CLEVELAND SHOW filing to find “the right hook”.

When it started out, it seemed to be aiming to be raunchier than the average prime-time animated series. See, especially, the First Season “Thanksgiving” show for an example of what I mean. I don’t think a made-for-network-TV animated product has EVER gotten raunchier than THAT one! …And, for what it’s worth, I liked it. I might not have wanted to see something like that EVERY WEEK, but I DID like it!

But, this was probably an approach that could not be sustained week-to-week, year-to-year, so it began becoming something of a clone of FAMILY GUY. Particularly, as you note, in the de-evolution of Cleveland himself.

On FAMILY GUY, Peter was the annoying dumbass, Quagmire was the sex-maniac, and Joe was the disabled cop with severe anger-management issues – but Cleveland (though “low-key”) was the “normal guy”. He lent an air of “normalcy” to the over-the-top on-goings of FAMILY GUY.

But, more recently, he’s become as annoying and dumb-assed as Peter, to where you can almost substitute one for the other, plot-wise. Perhaps he did become “funnier”, but he also became much harder to take. And, maybe we don’t need a second FAMILY GUY, while we still have the original.

That’s my theory, anyway. Sad to see it go.