Crappy Marriage Leads To Crappy Story

The Cleveland Show, S04E09

Cleveland and Donna went to marriage counseling after Cleveland messed up his personal vows to Donna.  On top of paying the counselor extra to make it seem like Cleveland was always right, the man blackmailed Cleveland into having sex with his wife.  Rallo retrieved Junior's old fridge from its grave and filled it with snacks that Junior couldn't help but eat, and Junior ended up owing Rallo a hefty sum for it.

I didn't expect much for a story about Cleveland and Donna's marriage.  They don't have the best one, and Cleveland is chronically saying bad things about being married in the first place.  You knew he was going to say something terrible at their ceremony, and then take the whole episode to make up for being unappreciative of his wife (pretty much how all of these shows go).  Luckily, it wasn't completely boring.  There were a few things that I found relatively funny.

The first was when Cleveland was questioning paying $80 for the marriage counseling.  Thanks to Junior he was able to illustrate how many sandwiches he could get with that money, and asked Donna:

[Cleveland] What would you rather have, a happy marriage or lots of sandwich?[Junior] Lots of sandwich![Cleveland] That'll be all, buddy!

I like the idea that Cleveland would rather have more sandwiches in his life than a more successful marriage.  Can't blame him--him and Donna are a mess.  He might as well enjoy some good food than someone being paid to tell him he's doing everything wrong.

The second thing that I liked was when Cleveland was in the marriage counseling and thought for a second that the counselor was agreeing with him.  When he showed that he was just agreeing Donna for the millionth time, Cleveland had a good line:

You've got a slappable face, you know that?

Cleveland may be an ass, but no one wants to sit there and listen to someone take the side of their spouse constantly over theirs.  He'd be an idiot to refuse to pay the guy more to turn the table in his favor (or he could have just told Donna he wanted a more impartial counselor, but hey).  I liked that instead of Dona figuring out what he had done, it turned into a blackmail situation.  That was different.  However, before Cleveland even went to sleep with the woman, I suspected that it was just a ploy to get Cleveland to prove that he loved Donna.  So the ending wasn't much of surprise to me.

In the side story with Junior and Rallo, I was disappointed that it wasn't funnier.  The two of them usually are a hit for comedy, no matter what they're doing.  I don't know.  I guess Rallo extorting Junior to buy food out of convenience seemed too easy.  The only part I sorta liked was when Junior "roughed it" by walking out of the room and into the hallway, which was super windy all of a sudden.  When he was blown away, he yelled, "Cartoon!" and that made me smile.  I like when they acknowledge that in cartoons you can get away with situations that defy the laws of nature.

Didn't care for this episode, but it wasn't too bad on a scale specific for this show.  It wasn't like watching that one about different countries, so in that sense it was all right.  I can't think of one episode dealing with Donna and Cleveland's marriage that was humorously depicting the negatives of marriage (because it's not all good, of course).  Instead, these stories just leave a bad taste in my mouth.  I wouldn't mind this as much if the side story could throw in a few laughs my way to make up for the main story.  It's a shame when even Rallo and Junior can't pull that off.