REVIEW: THE CLEVELAND SHOW “JESUS WALKS”

A devout choir girl (voice of Fergie) catches Cleveland Jr.’s eye, so he volunteers for a church trip to be in her good graces. But another choir member questions his religious fervor. Meanwhile, Donna’s former boyfriend returns from Iraq and discovers that she’s married.

Spoilers Below

Donna’s acting really weird as she is shooing her kids off to the movies, and romancing the hell out of Cleveland, even letting him go on a “four day mancation”. Really though, the ‘mancation’ is really just a cover so Cleveland can pull off some CIA shiz and catch Donna pretty much in the act. Turns out, Donna’s ex-boyfriend Maurice, who also happens to be a wounded Iraq war veteran, is in town and he’s trying to rekindle a romance with  Cleveland’s lady. And all Cleveland can do about it is pretend to be Donna’s brother ‘Clezeland’ and go along with the whole ordeal. Eventually, Maurice tries to propose to Donna which causes her and Cleveland to come clean, and a guy with two broken legs to crawl out the front door crying. To help try and coax over any hard feelings, Cleveland and Donna opt to throw a big ol’ parade for Maurice in honor of his service in the military.Maurice is clearly not amused, and even tries to start a fight with Cleveland in which Stoolbend’s own retaliates with a right hook to the jaw of the wheelchair-bound pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, Junior kinda has the hots for a girl named Vanessa of whom is part of the church choir. To try and win her heart, Junior joins the choir but another choir boy named Hunter is pretty much able to see through Junior’s ulterior motives. However, as it turns out Hunter is Jewish and has also been lying to Vanessa about his intentions! Soon they both spill the beans to Vanessa about what the real deal is, and you would think she’d be pissed but as it turns out she has a dark side to her and swears they will both see God before the end of  their trip to North Carolina.While there, Junior and Hunter end up building a house that ends up being ground zero for Vanessa’s attempted sexual exploits on Junior, that is until Hunter finds a gasoline canister and burns the thing down!

It looks as though the writers were taking a few more pages out of the Family Guy play book. For one, the ‘A plot’ introduced a wheel-chair bound fella of whom is at the wrong end of a bunch of ill-timed handicap jokes(Joe from Family Guy anyone?) in a story line that is becoming all too formulaic in the Cleveland Show world that being ‘Donna/Cleveland has an old/new flame in town which causes a conflict’. Its starting to get a tad old. Meanwhile, even the ‘B-plot’ was getting to be all to familiar with ‘Junior wants a girl that another dude likes’ story albeit in musical form. Surprisingly enough however, Darren Criss was pretty good as Hunter and I actually think he worked well with Junior. However, Fergie’s take on Vanessa was ehhh. Almost like you could tell she was reading from cue cards or something, and you could even tell that the voice of a near-40 year old woman was in there so it was almost off-putting when coupled with the much younger takes on vocals provided by Junior and Hunter. The songs themselves were nothing to write home about, although I thought Junior(Kevin Michael Richardson) did a pretty good job of keeping up with the season vocals of Criss. Obviously, Fergie’s singing was good but again overall her performance just couldn’t mesh well enough with the rest of the cast.

Score

7/10

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