Season Analysis: Has there ever been a show more satisfied with being slightly better than mediocre than The Cleveland Show?

“There Goes El Neighborhood”

There weren’t really any episodes of The Cleveland Show this season that would really qualify as particularly great examples of the television medium.  Thus, my criterion for picking “El Neighborhood” as this year’s best was more or less that I remembered laughing at it more than any other episode this year.  It did show some ambition, in that it continued the storyline from the previous episode (Cleveland, Jr. marrying a Latina girl to get her a green card) on a show that otherwise lacks serialization.  But if forced to pinpoint what really made this episode work, I would have to say, “I doñ’t know,” i.e., when Cleveland is confronted by his new Latina neighbor Choni (voiced by the intensely Latina Rosie Perez) regarding his insensitivity to Latino culture, he starts pronouncing all his n’s as if they had tildes over them, and overcorrection regarding pronunciation is always funny.