My Opinion of Family Guy

A while ago I wrote a journal entry where I expressed my thoughts on contemporary comedy cartoons. bahmo.deviantart.com/journal/2… you don't want to read something long, the first word in the title should give you a fairly good idea of them.  Let me start by saying we may be getting better.  I love Batman: The Brave and The Bold, for example.  However, one cartoon that was innevitably mentioned by my commentators in that thread was Family Guy.  I wasn't really thinking of it when I wrote that, but so many people apparently were when they read it that I felt it might be a good idea to post my feelings about the show.  Here it is:

First, where to begin about Family Guy?  Back when it was still on Fox and apparently attacked and eventually cancelled as a ripoff of The Simpsons, I didn't even know that it existed.  My first experience with it was when reruns debuted on Adult Swim, along with those of Futurama.  My sheer hatred of most of Williamsstreet's original shows ensured that it became one of my favorite TV comedies, but another thing that made it refreshing is by that time, The Simpsons had jumped the shark, at least in my and many other people's opinions.  I can't really put my finger on why it got bad--a more thorough Simpsons fan than myself might be able to--but it lost my interest, perhaps because it became stale.  

Family Guy, for all that it got attacked as a ripoff of The Simpsons, appealed to me mostly because it provided me with something that felt fresh.  Sure, the family has the same structure, but how many sitcoms do you think there are that have that structure?  The show felt, as befitting its new home, a great deal more adult than The Simpsons, with a more sexual nature to much of the humor, along with favoring spoofs of obscure, older subjects instead of cameos by modern celebrities.  I'm not ashamed to say that I laughed my ass off at the show back then--hell; I'm not ashamed to admit I still do, occasionally.  Between its penchants for older subjects and cutaway scenes, it had found a way to provide humor in a new, interesting way.

But as fresh as the show felt initially, it didn't last.  Fan activism saved it, but it seems to have gone to MacFarlane's head, because now he or whoever runs the show these days seems to think that it can just rehash and repackage itself as much as possible.  The cutaway scenes, once the thing that, perhaps more than anything else, made it unique among sitcoms, began to be spammed until less and less plot was left, resulting in the show seeming like a cheap imitation of itself.  Stewie, who seems to have become the most popular character, got similar increased exposure--and it ruined him.

New paragraph here, because Stewie deserves a whole sub-rant: I think he may be turning into my most hated cartoon character ever, or at least, in recent memory.  My problem with him lies that, in many ways, he isn't even a character any more.  Stewie's original charm, at least to me, is that he was a rather cynical, darkly comical parody of the "baby-with-speech-and-some-adult-traits" trope that got rolling thanks to Look Who's Talking, and got furthered in Rugrats.  I never much liked the idea in those places, but Family Guy managed to become an admirable subversion, at least for a while.  I think much of the effect came from the fact that Stewie mostly acted as though he was enraged to be trapped as a baby, and more obsessed with getting even with his percieved jailers than making people laugh at the idea of an adult-like baby.  Somewhere along the line, though, the creators seemed to have lost site of the old Stewie.  I would have been fine if he developed more sympathetic traits.  I wouldn't have tolerated a brutally evil character in the main cast forever.  Unfortunately Stewie instead had every trait stripped off of him and new ones cycled through rapidly.  Instead of being a mad scientist trapped in a baby's body, as he used to be, he's now whatever-the-fuck-type-of-personality-the-writers-want-at-the-moment trapped in a baby's body.  Near as I can tell, the writers seem to think that emulating Michael Jordan, Hugh Hefner, Leslie Nielsen, or myriad other celebrities, except with a baby, is inherrently funny, even devoid of actual jokes thrown in.  It's not.  Some people might disagree with my opinion there, but none of them can legitimitely deny that Stewie's original purpose was most emphatically not to be a baby channeling random adult personalities.  It was to have a specific personality, and now he doesn't have it.  When that happens, as far as I'm concerned, someone is no longer a character--he or she becomes a vehicle.

This sort of trend happens elsewhere in the show, too.  They obviously think reenacting scenes from musicals, or other media, and often playing them completely straight, is going to be funny just because it's done by Family Guy characters.  Again, I really don't think it is.  It's worse because musical numbers take up time that could be used for actual jokes.  It often seems to me like the main point of modern Family Guy episodes is buying time; pulling any and all crap it can in order to pad out the episode to the end, with minimal thought.

In retrospect, Family Guy began as a show that felt like a fresh alternative to The Simpsons after that show outstayed its welcome, but while The Simpsons wore itself out after many seasons of excellent episodes, Family Guy devolved into a mess that was part rehash of; part gross departure from its original product in a small fraction of that time.  Once original for its distinction from other sitcoms, it now is repetitive and unremarkable thanks to an artistic ego that denies it has to age gracefully.  Perhaps we should've left those letters unsent.

Want to Help Bahmo pay the debt for his new computer?  Go here!

bahmo.deviantart.com/journal/2…

The Watchers



Clubs I’m in, or at least like




Clubs with Wide Icons



My Club


Cool Folks:



Beautiful People: