¡Rob!

“What is America?” Rob Schneider muses toward the end of this extended trailer and behind-the-magic look at ¡Rob!, his upcoming, loosely autobiographical CBS sitcom about the American stew and all its spicy immigration issue-frijoles. “It’s a mishmash,” Schneider concludes. “This show will help represent that.” And indeed, ¡Rob! offers a big, sloppy pile of American sitcom tropes about disappointed in-laws, henpecked husbands, and classic, occasionally boner-related misunderstandings, then slathers it in the chunky queso of jokes about how Latinos all have huge families that are here illegally and refuse to leave, like Everybody Loves Raymond as written by Lou Dobbs. Indeed, for too long our ñatioñ has found itself segregated into sitcoms that play on bumbling white-man archetypes, and sitcoms that play on obvious Latino stereotypes. With ¡Rob¡, we are at last symbolically joined in a scene of Rob Schneider humping his Mexican wife’s grandmother in front of her home altar. That is America.