Word: dads
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...Seth MacFarlane, the writer - producer - voice actor who calls the toons on three of the four shows. It's a turnaround for MacFarlane; Fox canceled his Family Guy in 2002, then brought it back after it proved hugely popular on DVD. In 2005, Fox added MacFarlane's American Dad, a war-on-terrorism-era CIA spoof. This fall came The Cleveland Show, TV's unlikeliest spin-off since The Ropers, focused on Family Guy bit character Cleveland Brown. For 90 minutes a week, MacFarlane has the loudest megaphone on TV. Is he saying anything with...
...series is often hilarious; there are so many jokes, it is statistically impossible for it not to be. It has a fantastic sense of showmanship (MacFarlane, who voices dad Peter and others, loves writing musical numbers to show off his Broadway side) but suffers from comic ADHD. A send-up of Family Guy on South Park revealed it to be written by manatees picking colored balls with random joke topics inscribed on them...
MacFarlane's best show, American Dad, is also his lowest rated - maybe because it isn't simply a remake of Family Guy. Yes, its protagonist, CIA agent Stan Smith, is a nuclear-family patriarch. And where Family Guy has a talking dog and Cleveland a talking bear, Dad has both a talking alien (a show-tune-obsessed card with a voice like Paul Lynde's) and a talking goldfish. (See the worst TV spin-offs of all time...
...next to the frenzied Family Guy and Cleveland, Dad is practically Mad Men. What makes Dad good isn't its political point of view. (MacFarlane, whose liberalism sometimes surfaces on Family Guy, uses Stan to send up post-9/11 jingoism.) It's that the show has a point of view at all. It's about something - satirizing the war on terrorism - and it invests time in its characters without ping-ponging between gags. It's still outrageous: the season premiere had Stan take nerdy son Steve to a Vietnam War re-enactment to toughen him up. (Sending up Vietnam...
...residency" programs that put budding teachers in classrooms for longer periods of time under the watchful eye of a veteran teacher, in much the same way that medical residents are supervised by seasoned staff for their first few years out of med school. (Read "Parent Academies Help Mom and Dad Face School...