On Saturday at the San Diego Comic-Con, fans of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy were shown footage of the show’s first spin-off, titled The Cleveland Show. The show follows Peter Griffin’s friend Cleveland Brown, as he and his son Cleveland Jr. move back to their home town. Once back, Cleveland rekindles his relationship with his high school sweetheart, who has two kids of her own.

The show will premiere on September 27th at 8:30pm EST. Judging from the footage shown, I’m still not sold on the series. I’m a pretty big fan of Family Guy, but I was surprised to see that they would be using Cleveland as a character on his own. The show had decent jokes at times, but on the whole it left me pretty cold. Who knows, maybe the good jokes were left out of the previews shown, and it could just be that the creators haven’t found the right tone for the show yet, but Fox had better hope viewers enjoy it more than I did, since they have already picked up the show for a second season, before even one episode has aired. So far, 22 episodes have already been made, and we’ll have to see if they all get shown on the air, or if they just have a lot of episodes to include on the eventual DVD.

Like the rest of the animation panels that were held on Saturday, it was fun to see the voice actors behind the show, but the actual panels were short of much real information. The creators did reveal a lot of celebrity voices that will be appearing on the show, including Arianna Huffington as the wife of Cleveland’s ursine neighbor, Tim the Bear (voiced by Seth MacFarlane). Other voices include Kanye West, Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, director David Lynch (who will play a bartender with odd hair named David Lynch) and the R&B group Earth, Wind, and Fire, who will appear on multiple episodes.

Series co-creators Rich Appell and Mike Henry said that while they would have certain Family Guy characters show up from time to time, they were trying to get the show to be able to stand on its own two feet. MacFarlane also said that if the show doesn’t do well, we could expect Cleveland to come back to Family Guy.

I’m sure I’ll watch a few episodes of the show, but having seen some of the clips, I’m going to have to hope that it gets better as it goes along. Here’s hoping the writers get their act together.