• Brothers, 8-8:30 p.m. Friday, WSVN-Fox 7

The Cleveland Show, 8:30-9 p.m. Sunday, WSVN-Fox 7

When The CW last spring canceled Everybody Hates Chris and let The Game move over to BET, it created a startling gap: For the first time in nobody-can-remember-how-many years, there wasn't a single black family sitcom on broadcast television. A network staple since Diahann Carroll broke the color barrier in 1968 with Julia was, to borrow a perhaps infelicitous phrase, gone with the wind.

Extinction, however, didn't last long. Fox is debuting two black sitcoms over the next three days -- and at least one of them is likely to stick around, if for no other reason than it's a cartoon produced by Seth MacFarlane, who comes about as close to being cancel-proof as you can get without sleeping with a network president.

MacFarlane's other two Fox cartoon series, Family Guy and American Dad, have 14 years on the air between them and are both already renewed at least until 2012, so there's no reason to think his monomaniacal fans won't latch onto The Cleveland Show the way they have to the others.

All the more so because The Cleveland Show is a spinoff of Family Guy. Cleveland Brown, one of the lower-key characters from that show, now moves to center stage with his rambling, disjointed monologues. ``What the hell? He's getting his own show?'' shouts a disbelieving Stewie, the talking baby in the opening scene as Cleveland sets off to return to his little Virginia hometown and marry his high school sweetheart.

It's a complaint that echoes that of some Family Guy fans who considered the phlegmatic Cleveland an unlikely bandleader for the symphony of the inspired gross-outs, juvenile genitalia jokes and general assaults against human decency that make up a MacFarlane show. But actually the dimly befuddled Cleveland works pretty well as a foil to the collection of redneck psycho neighbors, oversexed stepchildren and Russian bears (don't ask) who make up the cast. The Cleveland Show is your typical MacFarlane production, right down to the unprovoked and hilarious cheapshots against show-biz icons like Kathleen Turner (for being too old) Gene Hackman (for being too gay), R. Kelly (for too much scatological sex) and Dolly Parton (for over-mammation).

`BROTHERS'

Brothers is more conventional (although almost anything, up to and including a Roman orgy conducted by the casts of Lassie and Mr. Ed, would be) in every way than The Cleveland Show, starting with the fact that it stars people instead of drawings. Former NFL defensive lineman Michael Strahan, showing a surprising natural flair for comedy, joins Daryl ``Chill'' Mitchell (Ed), Carl Weathers (the Rocky films) and CCH Pounder (The Shield) in this tale of a loudly dysfunctional family on the mend.

Thirtysomething brothers Strahan and Mitchell have long been bitterly estranged over the responsibility for an accident that left Mitchell in a wheelchair. But with the economy pounding the family finances and dad Weathers showing the first signs of Alzheimer's (including obsessive worry over the potential for cheetah attacks in their suburban Houston neighborhood), Strahan moves home for the first time in 10 years. After a long stretch of hilarious mutual heckling, the brothers start bonding again.

Everybody in Brothers is funny, but the unquestioned star of the show is Pounder, a rapturous mix of menace and guile in the struggle to keep her men in line. She even regularly sticks a fork in Mitchell's paralyzed legs to see if he's faking it. Though in one of Brothers' occasional poignant moments that leaven the brawling, she quietly explains why: ``Because I dream that one day, he's going to say ouch.''

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