The Cleveland Show

You may remember some months back I wrote about the demise of King of the Hill and lamented it's replacement with The Cleveland Show.

The Cleveland show came on TV a few weeks back and, as the faithful animation addict I am, I've been watching it; I figured, what the hell, I always watch cartoons on Sunday night so I may as well check it out. 4 episodes later I think I have a good feeling of the show.

I may have been a tad bit hasty on my prejudgement, it's actually not a bad show all in all. Of course, again all in all, it's basically the The Family Guy with a black family so it's not like they have anything new to create and perfect, just use a small child to set up a series of largely non-sequiter cut scenes and have a talking animal for the moral guidance. It delivers that, although, after so many years of The Family Guy I think we may be running a bit short on this style of humors lifespan. When I made my earlier judgement I was thinking of the Family Guy pre-cancellation, late 90's Cleveland who had all the personality of stale sliced bread, but I failed to notice that they had managed to breathe some life in him over the last couple of years, giving him at least some of the qualities needed to run his own show.

I guess it boils down to this, if you like the Family Guy you'll like this, and, to be perfectly honest, you may like this better. Let's face it, the Stewie-Brian stories were an interesting sideline on the Peter oriented stories, but they were never worth enough to dedicate so many episodes to them alone. I think the Family Guy has run it's course, and, if Fox is smart enough, which we know they're not, The Cleveland Show can act to gently segway into a retirement of Peter and his family.

Long story short, 3.5 stars out of 5; not a waste of time to watch, but if you don't already watch the Fox Animation Domination on Sunday nights, this isn't going to get you started.