Cleveland Brown

Cleveland is drawn as patient and gentle, losing his temper or turning to violence only rarely, though racist conduct visibly irritates him. When the others land on a bad plan he is usually the one urging caution. His speech is slow and drawn out, and the series gives conflicting accounts of why. A flashback in "Death Lives" has Peter meeting him in the 1970s already speaking that way, and the opening episode of the spin-off shows the same manner in his school years. An out-of-continuity flashback in the fourth-season episode "Blind Ambition" instead has him working as a fast-talking auctioneer until a totem pole lands on his head. He is said to have been conceived during the seventh-inning stretch at a Cleveland Indians game, the club now known as the Guardians.

A gag repeated across the series has Peter wrecking the front wall of Cleveland's house while he is bathing, leaving him exposed as the upper floor tips and the tub drops to the ground and smashes. The causes have included a giraffe, a car and a falling missile. The pilot of the spin-off treats it as the final reason for leaving Quahog, but wreckage from the missile in "Spies Reminiscent of Us" reaches his new house anyway. In "Brian's Got a Brand New Bag" his empty Quahog house is destroyed the same way. "Gone with the Wind", an episode of the spin-off, turns the gag on Loretta Brown, who breaks her neck in the fall and dies.

The writers may have named the character after the American football club of the same name, although his surname went unmentioned until after the series returned from cancellation in 2005. A commercial shown during Super Bowl XLV had the residents of Quahog in New England Patriots shirts, with Cleveland alone wearing a Cleveland Browns one. MacFarlane announced a spin-off built around the character during a live broadcast of Loveline, the first thing to come out of his hundred million dollar agreement with Fox. It was trailed in the closing moments of the seventh-season episode "Baby Not on Board" and reached the air on 27 September 2009, in the slot after The Simpsons.

Cleveland was written out during the eighth season, before the spin-off began, and his new household in Stoolbend included his second wife Donna, her daughter Roberta and her young son Rallo, alongside Cleveland Jr. He still turned up in Family Guy, in "Spies Reminiscent of Us", "The Splendid Source" and "Go Stewie Go", and for a full episode in the tenth season, "Cool Hand Peter". He closed the American Dad! episode "Hurricane!" as part of the Night of the Hurricane crossover, and he and his family were guests in The Simpsons episode "Homerland". The Cleveland Show finished on 13 May 2013 and was cancelled that July; MacFarlane said the same day that the character would rejoin Family Guy, which he did in "He's Bla-ack!".

Mike Henry originated the voice and also plays John Herbert, Bruce and the Greased-Up Deaf Guy. He and MacFarlane met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design, kept in touch afterwards, and he was later invited to join the series as writer and performer. He modelled the voice on a basketball partner in Virginia. Billed as a guest star for four seasons, he became main cast from "Prick Up Your Ears" in the fifth. On 26 June 2020 Henry, who is white, said on Twitter that he was giving up the part after twenty-one years, saying that characters of colour should be played by actors of colour. Wendell Pierce campaigned to succeed him. Arif Zahir, known online for his impressions of the character, was announced that September and started in the twentieth season.