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The show begins with Cleveland leaving behind his past life to go work for Joe Torre as a minor league baseball scout (wtf?) but that plan gets derailed quickly when he rekindles with a past love in Virginia.
The good? You get to see the whole Family Guy cast in the opening moments with some slightly amusing Quagmire lines. But the segment lasts for a whole two minutes, and is not as well-written as the actual show. From the get-go you realize that The Cleveland Show is going to be too fast-moving, the same problem Sit Down, Shut Up suffered from.
The characters all have distinct, notable personalities, but the family is just about the same as the ones in both American Dad! and Family Guy. There's the little boy Rallo (very similar to Stewie) who is a wise-cracking five year old, Cleveland Jr. (who is now fat like Chris) and Roberta (a brash teen like Meg or Hayley). Cleveland Jr. is now dumb and speaks very slowly like the senior, not the amusing high-pitched kid from the older Family Guy episodes.
The bad? Besides the stuff I mentioned, this is going to offend a lot of people. The show plays into a lot of black stereotypes. There's some harmless dialogue such as Donna's ex calling Rallo "Rerun" from What's Happening, but then it gets worse in scenes where Cleveland and Jr. freak out over running out of Nutter Butter, how much they enjoy large buttocks, and the neighbor Lester bringing a gun out because "black people are on the lawn". If this sounds like it might turn your stomach, this is not the show for you.
Final verdict: I probably will not give this show a second chance. I love Seth MacFarlane's other shows, but this is just so thrown together and feels more like it is full of jokes that were removed from Family Guy scripts than something that took months to complete. Sorry for the grim outlook but I see little potential for growth here, and the show has already been renewed for a second season by FOX (yikes!). 3.3/10
