Roberta Coretta Tubbs is a main character on the animated sitcom The Cleveland Show. She’s the biological daughter of Donna and her ex-husband, Robert. She was named after her father. Despite the fact that she comes from a broken home and having a neglectful father, Roberta appears to be rather well-adjusted, despite not having an active male presence in her life.
Her relationship with her father is clearly strained in “A Cleveland Brown Christmas”, rolling her eyes when he appears on Christmas. She instead looks up to Tyra Banks in the same episode, hoping to one day become her co-hostess. A relatively popular girl in school, Roberta is often tying up the phone lines, both the house and cellular as well as the internet social websites such as Twitter and Facebook, with calls from her many friends. She dates a less than respectable boy by the name of Federline Jones, who Donna does not much approve of, but who Cleveland has managed to bully into submission in the “Pilot”. Despite her claim of still being a virgin in “Da Doggone Daddy-Daughter Dinner Dance”, Roberta often engages in heavy petting and making out with Federline, notably in “Cleveland Jr. Cherry Bomb” and in “A Brown Thanksgiving”, which she considers part of a normal relationship. Despite this, she is reticent to engage in other sexual behavior such as showing her breasts in “From Bed to Worse.” However, one hint that she may no longer be a virgin came in “Hot Cocoa Bang Bang,” when, after hearing Donna warn her and Rallo that anything sexual they put on camera can come back to bite them in the future, she subsequently runs off to call Federline about something they put on camera. Neither Roberta nor her brother Rallo is initially pleased with the arrival of Cleveland and Cleveland Brown Jr., though both appear to accept their mother marrying Cleveland without much issue. In fact, Roberta and Cleveland seem to fall into a rather stereotypical father/daughter relationship, with Roberta being embarrassed by her stepfather’s behavior and attending the father/daughter dance at her school in “Da Doggone Daddy-Daughter Dinner Dance”, although she warms up to him and even comes to his aid in “B.M.O.C.”. Roberta seems to have a normal love/hate relationship with her brother, Rallo. In the first episode, Roberta neglects her brother, so as to go out with her friends. Upon returning home, she attempts to cover for herself with an elaborate story that, of course, her mother does not buy for a instant. However, she seems able to share plenty of witty dialogue with her brother, apparently seeing him as something of an intellectual equal, despite his young age. in “Squirt’s Honor”, in which she opened up to Rallo in a very philosophical way. Roberta’s relationship with Cleveland Jr., meanwhile, has shown promise of being a decently caring one, despite a shaky beginning. Initially, both Roberta and Rallo are disturbed by how clean and attentive Cleveland Jr. is in regards to Donna’s parental requests in “Birth of a Salesman”. Initially annoyed at him making them look bad, they become sympathetic when they realize that he never accepted his parents’ divorce, and has been doing all he can to avoid giving into his sorrow. Together, Rallo and Roberta do all they can to help Cleveland Jr. let his feelings out and at the same time, they accept him as their stepbrother. She can also talk like Robert to fool Rallo in “A Cleveland Brown Christmas”, with whom she seems to have a fairly strained relationship.
