Planet Family Guy

Mike Henry has revealed a big spoiler to Sunday night’s episode of The Cleveland Show, A Brown Thanksgiving, over on the Hollywood Outbreak website. We’re not going to spoil it here, but if you want to know what it is, go over to the Hollywood Outbreak site and listen to the audio clip of Mike Henry discussing the episode in which Donna’s Auntie Momma and Cleveland’s father come to town.

Fox have a released a video of Mike Henry discussing the origins of a number of the names in The Cleveland Show to promote the series.

Mike Henry has been talking to Forbes.com about his new series The Cleveland Show discussing why he’s aiming for a more family friendly audience and how it differs from sister-show Family Guy. There’s also some discussion on the potential controversy over three white guys writing a black comedy.

On the humor of The Cleveland Show Henry said, “we’ll take shots at celebrities that seem to warrant them and we’ll have tons of potty and sex jokes, but my money is on people caring about Cleveland.” Both Mike Henry and fellow producer Rich Appel have children which Henry has cited as the reason behind making the show more family friendly than Family Guy.

The New York Times has interviewed Mike Henry, co-creator, producer, and voice artist on the new Family Guy spin-off The Cleveland Show on which he voices Cleveland Brown. In the article Mike describes Cleveland as being “just me, but black. With a mustache.” He went on to say that: “He’s different from Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin in that he’s not necessarily a buffoon… He’s a well-meaning man who gets himself into situations through good intentions and, sometimes, not the best judgement.”

In the in-depth interview Mike Henry discusses his new show and the controversy of a white man voicing a black guy on prime time TV, Family Guy, his childhood, and much more.

Seth MacFarlane and Mike Henry have been talking to Fanbolt.com about new series The Cleveland Show and the choice of Cleveland for their own spin-off.

In the interview Seth talks about his level of involvement in The Cleveland Show commenting that “producing one animated show on a weekly basis is next to impossible. Producing any more than that, two or three, you just can’t do it.” He goes on to say, “My method has been to co-create with other writers and then they go off and run the shows themselves. That’s what Mike and Rich do. Mike and Rich run The Cleveland Show on a daily basis. I think it also helps to make the shows all feel a little bit different. I don’t think it would be a good thing if everything felt like Family Guy.”

Also in the interview the guys discuss the increased popularity of animated sitcoms compared with live-action shows.

Zap2it have given their first impressions of The Cleveland Show based on the pilot episode. “Henry and Co. have made Cleveland a fully realized character,” reports Zap2it. “Rallo is the Stewie stand-in here and, like his counterpart, gets the most outrageous lines.” However, they point out that The Cleveland Show‘s Family Guy style rapid fire jokes have “a definite hit-and-miss quality to some of them.”

TMZ briefly caught up with Mike Henry and Kevin Michael Richardson in New York the other day and got a sneak preview of how Kevin Michael Richardson’s Cleveland Jr. is going to sound in The Cleveland Show along with Mike Henry doing the voice of father Cleveland.

Those at Carnegie Hall earlier in the week will have had the privilege of seeing and hearing Mike Henry, voice of Cleveland Brown, sing the new theme tune for The Cleveland Show live on stage:

I found a place
Where everyone will know
My happy black guy face
This is The Cleveland Show

Speaking behind the scenes Seth MacFarlane spoke of Fox executives getting nervous when he puts new ideas on the table: “they tend to worry that it’s going to take focus away from Family Guy“. However, he went on to explain that The Cleveland Show has “worked out great, because it can run pretty well on its own.” The new show is under the executive production of Mike Henry and Rich Appel, a former executive producer of The Simpsons and King of the Hill, with limited involvement from MacFarlane.

The basic premise of The Cleveland Show is that newly divorced Cleveland has moved back to his home town in Virginia along with his teenage son. There he gets back together with his high-school sweetheart and her two kids and gets mixed up in zany mishaps (“like inadvertently coaching the high school baseball team to become a ruthless drug-dealing operation”).

Source: New York Times