Some Spoilers Below

There’s a pretty pivotal scene in the movie Braveheart where Mel Gibson (as William Wallace) is in the process of being hanged, drawn, and quartered. Midway through the scene Gibson is asked to bow to the British king, but instead he screams out ‘Freedom’ then gets subsequently hanged. Right now, I would say the future of Cleveland is him being asked to bow to the king (FOX) and we the fans are awaiting an answer. Yes, as it looks now the season’s future is pretty grim, but this season The Cleveland Show did give a good, funny fight.

The show, for the most part, is rather formulaic but it falls from the same formulas as The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad. Cleveland typically does something wrong and gets Donna all pissed off, then at the end he apologizes and she forgives him. Then the B plot typically included Junior and Rallo going off doing the whole ‘Boys will be boys’ bit to which they get in trouble, but somehow everything smooths out in the end. This season we did get more of an incorporation of ancillary stars like Cleveland’s parents, his friends, and Bryan Cranston’s ‘Dr. Fist’ the latter of which was a welcome addition and helped pick up the slack of a clearly Seth-less Tim the Bear. Craig Robinson as Freight Train was also all over the place this season usually badgering poor Cleveland like there was no tomorrow.

The biggest downfall of the series this season was how the guest stars were typically not very funny save for maybe Nick Offerman. Its ironic too, because NASCAR did its best to kill The Cleveland Show twice this year, the first time with its terribly acted guest stars in Kasey Kahne, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Tony Stewart, the second when we had the overrun of a race that had a majority of the country unable to watch the episode unless if they had went on Amazon.com the next morning and watched it there. Kanye West, will.i.am, ?uestlove, Nicki Minaj and Bruno Mars teamed up for a so-so episode and not one of the guest stars really promoted the fact that they were on the show so how the hell would their fans care??

The writers, producers, and crew of The Cleveland Show should have done more to work with their pretty solid voice talent. Like in Family Guy there have been a ton of Quagmire and Joe episodes, but how many Colt episodes can you count??  The show had some decent arcs that should have been further exploited, like I would have seen more of the Juanitas from last season or wouldn’tve been swell to see Rallo and Kwang-Kwang go at it a little while longer while we dealt with the fallout of Robert and DeeDee hooking up in the finale?? All good stuff here, but none of it used or if it was it was too late.

7.5 out of 10

 

Highlight Episodes

“A Rodent Like This”

“When a Man (or a Freight Train) Loves His Cookie”