Fall TV Report Card: (Returning Favorites pt. 4)

The Simpsons: Jack Bauer saves the day once again. Well, Kiefer Sutherland does at least thanks his voice work in the Simpsons' 23rd (!!) season premiere. He voices a new security guard at the Springfield Power Plant who Homer tries to befriend. But this guy has a mysterious past that gets revealed causing Homer to get caught up in some international espionage. This is by no means a classic, but after all this time, this show still finds ways of producing laughs. Credit to the show for throwing in some really absurd comedy here including a bizarre training montage involving Keifer's character and several fictional movie villains, plus a spoof on those animated Taiwanese news report videos. I realize this show will never be what it once was, but like SNL it has become an iconic comedy tradition that can still find ways to make us laugh. Grade: B+ The Cleveland Show: Most people seem to bash this show, but I often find it to be the best of the Seth McFarland trio. Perhaps its because a lot of the jokes on here feel fresher than they do on the other two shows. Their premiere was reflective of that again as Cleveland struggled to figure out who is best friends really are. This includes a guy's camping trip led by of all people Ric Flair (Woooo!). Of course, this naturally turns into a Deliverance parody, but they manage to avoid the cliches and still have a fresh take on that story. The subplot involving Rollo wasn't the best, but he's generally a very funny character so I was happy to see him get the screen time. Grade: B Family Guy: How the mighty have fallen. I have no idea what's going on with this show anymore. Like other recent episodes, this was more morose than funny. You would think a story involving the Griffin's winning the lottery would produce a high number of funny moments, but the writers opted to take a very dark turn involving Peter turning Quagmire and Joe into his servants after lending them some money. I felt unconfortable watching the story unfold. I guess they should have taken a note from Roseanne that winning the lottery on a sitcom is comedy death. Let's hope this show can recover from this lackluster opener. Grade: C American Dad: To show you how odd and complicated the animated process is, this year's opener was a story that was previewed in last year's Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue. I know this show didn't produce a full 22 episodes last year, so why this was held off until this year is unclear to me. Anyway it involves Stan buying a hot tub and quickly turns into a Little Shop of Horrors parody. The hot tub is voiced by Cee-Lo Green who also sings a few songs as the hot tub throughout the episode. From a narrative perspective this was a really strong episode, but it was somewhat light on laughs. I'm not sure if I would have aired this as the opener. It probably would have worked better on Halloween weekend. Grade: B