Recently, GQ posted a little one-question Q&A that I conducted with the co-creators of Fox's new "The Cleveland Show," premiering September 27. Below, is a piece about attending a table-read at the show's offices last spring, followed by a longer transcript of our conversation.
Grab a folding chair in the front row; avoid clumsy boom-mic gaffers; sit close to the guest stars; caffeinate. These are but a few actions you will enjoy if you’re one of the animators, production staff, agents, TV execs, writers, and miscellaneous VIPs invited to a table-read for The Cleveland Show, Fox’s "Family Guy" spinoff (premiering September 27) centered around Peter Griffin’s lovable African American neighbor. On the day that I drop by, last spring, in the Wilshire Boulevard offices, the scene is business as usual. Nearly. Superagent Ari Emanuel, the brother of the new White House Chief of Staff, is observing (he represents the show’s co-creator, Simpsons writing-staff alum Rich Appel). Actress Taraji P. Henson has a guest spot, fresh off her Oscar nomination for “Benjamin Button.” In the house, wearing a sharp white shirt, as well is spiky haired executive producer and "Family Guy" mastermind Seth MacFarlane, the highest paid and most identifiable comedy writer in the world--see a new slew of Hulu TV ads in which aliens unfurl from his stomach. Then there’s the day's most notable guest-star: Kanye West—quiet and composed, decked out in black, neon-yellow hightops, and his trademark oversized Wayfarers. (Sadly, Arianna Huffington, who plays a talking bear, is absent.) “The Cleveland Show,” if this is the first you're hearing of it because you don't live and breathe in America, is an attempt to recast the "Family Guy's" gentle deli owner as the patriarch of a new family in Rhode Island, where he lives with his gullible son, Cleveland, Jr., his new wife Roberta, and her ghettoriffic son, Rallo. But did you know America’s most heavily anticipated new African American sitcom’s really the brainchild of Mike Henry, a pale, 44-year-old white guy with easy smile from Richmond, V.A.? As the source of Cleveland’s laconic whine and the gritty growls of Rallo, Henry seems as if he could just be some soccer dad from the burbs—and it’s a pretty surreal thing to watch, as he vacillates with epic smoothness between urban voice-archetypes as if somewhere inside him is a class clown from the South Side of Chicago. From the confines of his office, he says no one’s really ripped into him for doing black-voice—but that's just got to be a testament to how well he pulls it off. “Here Cleveland’s not just the Black Friend, but a much fuller, well-rounded character than he ever was," Henry adds. Appel, a former Harvard-educated lawyer who literally runs the read by announcing the script’s action as fast and naturally as a New York City auctioneer, sharpens the point: “There's a tradition in animated shows, and it’s a virtue that people often aspire to: colorblind casting. You have grown women playing Bart Simpson and Bobby Hill, and Hank Azaria as Apu. We have Kevin Michael Richardson, who is African American,and while he plays Cleveland, Jr., he also plays one of our most redneck, potentially racist [white] characters.” An admitted “Family Guy” fan, Kanye is—surprise!—playing a character based on himself: a freestylin’ ladies man who competes for a chick with roley-poley Cleveland Jr. through a rap battle at a Jewish neighbor’s house. Picking up a Menorah, he spits: “This voodoo shit’s got nine candles/Your fat ass got nine loooove handles.” Kanye reads OK, if a little slowly, on the fly, but it's not half as magnetic as hearing him perform his own stuff—or, for that matter, posturing for attention on the VMAs. Voiced smoothly with spot-on syncopation by actor Kevin Michael Richardson, Cleveland, Jr.'s retort wins: “Your flow is fated ‘n’ dated, deflated ‘n’ constipated. If I had to rate it? Hate it. Translated—you ate it… Hey cheeseball, you been grated. Chewed up, swallowed, defecated…On the DVD this won’t be pixilated.” Yep, this thing's written by the Family Guy crew. And, expectedly, the in-crowd eats it up with cheers and measured guffahs. By the end, everyone’s congratulating each other, posing for snaps, and milling out to the hallway where a giant Cleveland cut-out stands in front of a large table of craft-service goodies. What I can’t forget, however, as Ari Emanuel offers Our Rap Icon a high-five handshake—power connection!—is how Hollywood rarely contrasts with its meta-depictions on shows like “Entourage.” To wit, the way Appel introduced the day’s Rhymin' Guest Star star an hour earlier: “The man who will appear two weeks from Saturday at my son’s Bar Mitzvah, I hope… Kanye West!” * * * As with any reported piece, there's often at least one Q&A behind it. For the true Cleveland fan, here's a three-way phoner I did with the show's co-creators after attending the Kanye Table Read...
Either Mike Henry or Rich Appel: Can you hear us O.K.?
Adam Baer (AB): I can. I just don't know who is who.
Rich Appel (R): This is Rich.
Mike Henry (M): And this is Mike.
Rich: Mike is Cleveland so he can always do accents and impress you that way.
AB: Of course. Rich, have you ever done voices on these shows?
Rich: No, not really, I've done like...
Mike: He was "Husband."
R: I was Husband, and I'm sure I've been lawyer and accountant. I think I did a voice on the Simpsons (when I was there), and I think I did one similar voice on Family Guy. No, I play to type. I don't do many characters.
AB: Well, you certainly run a very fast and efficient table-read.
R: Oh, Thank you.
AB: You guys have been working on this show for a while, even though it hasn't obviously aired yet. Does it feel like a new show?
R: Y'know... No. Mike and I and Seth [McFarlane] first started talking about this show in August of 2007. And we had the writer's strike and then we returned to it after that and then worked on the pilot. And then the season 1 stuff started, let's say, June of 2008. And after doing 22 episodes, and living not only with the writers and the animators, and seeing the whole operation work, but just living with these characters especially, I think both Mike and I kinda feel like we are really getting to know this community and this world in a way that doesn't just feel like its been a week or two. It feels like we've lived with them for a while, and they are very real to us.
AB: Are there normally so many people at a read, or was the one that I attended sort of special?
M: They're usually pretty packed out.
R: We've been lucky. We can always stack it if we want, because there are more animators on the floor than there are chairs in the room. But, you know, people's agents will want to come because they're [meaning, the reads] often fun, and then people have friends. It always seems that it's full before you turn your back, which is nice. Maybe, knock wood, Season Four people will be so bored, we'll be going down to senior citizen homes and giving out passes to come sit there.
AB: What kinds of people were there other than me, that People mag writer, and your writers, animators, etc.?
M: You were there for Black History Month?
AB: I was there for the Kanye read.
R: Well the Kanye one, that was the one where we had Black History as the theme. The Kanye one, I don't think it was any more crowded, but it had a little different flavor just because Kanye West was at the table. That added a little extra something; I spent five years at the Simpsons, and there is nobody that had not done a guest voice at the Simpsons, in my five years there. Mike hasn't, but in my five years there, I think one person -- I think Rodney Dangerfield -- in my experience was the only one that came to the table. Usually, one of the reasons you can get celebrities is that they like the show. But they can record from any city from on any day when it's convenient. But the thing about Kanye West was kind of like expanding ripples of good news. 'He's interested in doing it, he likes the idea for the episode, yes he'll do it, he'd like to come to the table.' At every turn he showed up 20, 30 minutes early to run through the script with Mike. But you usually don't have a celebrity guest star who comes to the table. We've been lucky. Fergie came to another one we had earlier in the season, and she played Jason Sudeikis's character, Holt, the short kinda-Maxim-reading wannabee; his first girlfriend basically is this cat loving shut-in who has a little deep dark secret, and Fergie came to the table, and it was hilarious.
M: Kenny Smith came to a table, the family guy writer and voice actor. That's just a joke for me and Rich.
R: If you include in your article that we had guest stars including Kanye West, Fergie and Kenny Smith I will kiss you. He's one of the executive producer/writers on Family Guy who does a lot of the voices, and he's a nice guy, but he just always wants to be in that sentence.
AB: What what went right and what could have gone better the day I attended the table-read?
M: I gotta say that was a pretty good one. Because I think our story was pretty solid up through the first two acts. We were hitting a lot of marks, we were getting laughs, and then Kanye was our secret weapon coming in when we already had the game won. That was a particularly great event for us.
R: There's always a few things in the story that you can fix, but the worst thing in the world is when your story doesn't make sense, because no amount of jokes is gonna save you. It can cover you for the first 15 to 20 pages, but those things can run 50 pages and the last 20 pages, I've been in a few over the years where the sweat is thick, and it's painful. So as long as the story is clicking and people are invested in that, it's always easy to add extra jokes. And I think that story worked and people were invested. It's very easy to get invested, we find, with a story that involves Cleveland, Jr. because Kevin Michael Richardson, plays him with such an original sympathetic quality that literally had audible awwwws and sighs. There are lots of moments in the season where he's been given the short end of the stick, and people are so invested in his well being.
AB: Was it hard writing that rap?
M: It was cool because it was a room full of writers for a couple of days before that [the read] working on that rap. And Kanye showed up early, and he was reading over it for the first time. And we were like, Oh god, what is he going to think of this? And he just looks at it and goes, "It's pretty funny." He added one minor change to one line, which he suggested very humbly. He was down with it. He read it relatively cold at the table; it went well, and then we recorded it the next day. And that was a special moment, having Kanye West in our sound booth doing his thing. It was just a very cool experience.
R: He's a genuine fan of Family Guy and American Dad and loved being on the floor -- and wanted to walk around and see some of the little artists' cubicles. You saw them, they're literally, you know, five feet by four feet with curtains drawn across. And I had the fun experience of, you know, four or five times, just knocking on the side cubicle and saying, "Hey, can I show a friend [your workspace], there's someone here." And they'd say, sure and look up and Kanye West is there, and they're like, "What the hell is Kanye West doing in my tiny little space asking interesting questions?" So that was fun. But he hung out for three or four hours, went to the character design department and had some very specific good notes about how he wanted his character to be drawn and the colors used for his clothes. Our guest stars don't usually take that great of an interest in the episodes as a whole.
AB: Ariana Huffington doesn't usually walk around asking questions?
R: No.
M: She's very interested in everything.
R: She'll come into the booth on a moments notice just for one line. She came in one day, and I ran down, and I forgot what she was there for. I then see her and she says “And that's what happens when you put a Jew in charge of a Christmas Pageant.” That was her only line of the day, and out she went. She's very game. It lends a little glamor to our little cartoon.
M: I gotta say, I'm especially thrilled with our cast: Sanaa Lathan plays such a great Donna opposite Cleveland, Reagan Gomez-Preston as Roberta, Kevin Michael Richardson as Cleveland Junior, and then beyond that Jason Sudeikis as Holt, and we got Jaime Kennedy as Federline Jones, Roberta's wannabee boyfriend, rebel wannabe. David Lynch plays Gus, our bartender, a recurring character. Arianna Huffington of course. Of course we have Seth MacFarlane. Will Forte, another great guest, Glen Howerton is a recurring voice for us -- he's from "It's Always Aunny In Philadelphia." Will Sasso [is another]. There are all kinds of people coming through here, it's quite surreal to be able to work with all these people.
AB: Having to work so far ahead of time -- it takes over a year for a show to come to air -- are there any worries that any jokes won't play a year from now? There was a reference to Octomom in the script I saw, for instance.
R: That's true, and that's the one we, in fact, we talked about. I don't know the answer to that, but especially if it's embedded in a rap with a guest star you'll hear it on Late Night. We kind of avoid things like that for just that reason.
AB: Is there any way to get in at the last minute and change stuff?
M: I don't know if we can grab Kanye again at the last minute, but typically we will change stuff, like when we were working on Family Guy we could change stuff right up 'till the end, and I'm sure we'll be able to do that, and then grab the actor and change the mouth movement, color and animation.
R: It's the same with the picture editor: It's kind of remarkable what we can do now. There are only sixteen mouth moments and as long as they animate a blink you can recycle that and...
M: And all the animation is done on "Computers." [intended as joke]
R: You can rewrite stuff very late now. That's the second time Mike has used that joke, it's such a dry joke, that I didn't get it the first time and you didn't get it now.
AB: Well, I didn't know because we're just chatting on the phone -- maybe if I'd seen him say it, seen his facial express?
R: Believe me, I've worked on four animated show and I didn't get it when he tried it with me.
AB: So, I'll ask you the annoying and obvious question that too many people probably ask you, and feel free to tell me I'm an idiot and magazine writers are morons. Is America ready for an animated show about a black guy?
M: I would assume America is always ready for a show about an African American.
R: I'm glad we're not premiering in 1959.
AB: Do you get any questions about being white and doing a black voice?
M: I get asked about it a lot more [than I get actual criticism for doing it]... Nobody has had anything really bad to say about it, knock on wood. I feel like I give Cleveland a lot of integrity especially with the new series. He's not just the black friend. He's a much fuller, well-rounded character then was ever set on Family Guy.
R: I think there's no reason people would know, but I think this is ok too. We didn't invent Cleveland and then decide who to cast in the roll. Mike created Cleveland in episode 3 of Family Guy Season 1 in the writer's room. He just started doing this voice and then the character kinda grew in large measure out of Mike's performance of that character. So he kinda was Cleveland long before the show existed. So to me that makes it a little different. There's a tradition in animated shows, where you really can have the virtue of what people often aspire to, which is colorblind casting. You can have a grown woman playing Bart Simpson and Bobby Hill, and you have Hank Azaria as Apu. We have Kevin Michael Richardson, who is African American, obviously, and plays Cleveland, Jr., and he also plays Lester, one of the most redneck potentially racist characters on our show.
AB: I love talking bears, I always loved that SNL skit "Bear City," and my last name is Baer. Why do animated bears speak in your show?
M: Well, on Family Guy, when Seth and Rich and I were developing this universe and the new place where they were going to live, we were coming up with these iseas... Could there be ghost living in the house? Could there be something that's not human? And we just lighted up about a family of bears. That just seemed funny to us. And then the idea of them being somewhat foreign -- they're a little bit foreign, not easily placed. Seth just started pitching this voice, and Rich had the idea of Ariana Huffington matching him with her own natural accent. It became funny to us that there would be a family of bears.
R: Seth is always there to be called on, but on a day to day basis he is kind of preoccupied with Family Guy, but writing the pilot with two first rate actors and voice performers is the extra bit that I never experienced. At the Simpsons, for instance, Hank Azaria and Dan Castellaneta are not writers in that room -- and to write this with Seth and Mike, where they start pitching a character in a voice, you get such a better three-dimensional sense of who these character are, even in our two-dimensional world. We got a sense of who that bear character was when we first started to play with that voice. And I'm sure that's what it was like when Mike first did Cleveland; you know, I wasn't there for it. There are other little recurring characters that Mike has just pulled out of his hat for our show. And we kind of feel like it's a little bit like you step up to the plate and you're immediately put on second base because you already know a little bit about who these characters are.
M: It's incredibly satisfying for me because I'm just about to fall about into a weird voice or some idea of a character and just start riffing, just trying to make the people in the room laugh, and as I'm doing it, if it does get a laugh, it gets written down, and I get to go record it.
R: And it's very funny, because I think, most people would probably say Mike plays a little more blue than I do sometimes. And thing with all the puns, in the room Mike will sometimes fall into these characters and get huge laughs, and a lot of times it's so blue that it's not even a close call whether this is going in any script. Sometimes it's just blue enough that I think it's hilarious and we'll put it in the script, and Mike will stop on the docks and say, “Wait, you're actually going to put that in?” Which is great because I'll call his bluff and say, “You know what, we're taking this to table.” And these are always the things that stop the table cold with laughter. It's fun once in a while being the parent that gets to say, “You know what, we are going to say fuck at the table tomorrow.”
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