I’m not sure if it was a re-run or not, but I haven’t seen it before so I assume not.
Meg gets the mumps. She then gets religion and believe God loves her, and this causes her to become a callous fiend. She has Brian beaten up for being an atheist, and sudenyl everybody everywhere is a mindless lockstep thug hating the poor, persecuted freethinkers. There’s an insipid and interminable subplot with Stewie taking the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation around town, except they’re all annoying and childish. It’s really, really boring.
You can always tell a TV show is bad when it gets preachy. Even more when it grossly insults anyone on the other end by being grotesquely unfair or dishonest about them, particularly when it’s, y’know, not even funny. I mean, even remotely. Eventually, I was just shaking my head in disbelief. No episode they’ve ever done was this bad.
Other shows, including the Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park, have honestly and hilariously mocked religion. Fine; comedy often does expose things about us we prefer to look at, and good sense of humor about the matter makes it a lot more swallowable.
This was just awful, though. It’s such blatant obvious preaching, particularly Brian’s saccarine speach to Meg telling her that “answers are there for you to discover”. Seriously, does Seth MacFarlane want to bone Brian, or just become him? Cuz Brian’s Athor Avatarness is getting obscene.
There was no shark to jump. Family Guy debuted on the grimy port side of a fart-filled zeppelin performing a Hindenburg reenactment fifteen thousand feet above an empty shark tank.
How do I know? Well, I’ve seen most of them, of course. Every three episodes or so I laugh, and that’s evidently good enough.
But yes, it was disappointing to see *yet another * primetime television show acknowledge (in its own ham-handed, juvenile way) that you can be an atheist and still be a good person. When I think of the years of “Why Won’t Billy Pray?” After School Specials, the countless disclaimers preceding every Christmas special… we get it already. It’s not like we haven’t had an atheist president…
I think you’re just sort of over-worked up about the religion aspect, which honestly wasn’t any more or less preachy or lazy than anything they’ve done lately. It was as tongue in cheek as anything else, and honestly, I took the meta-punchline of Brian’s speech to be the incredibly banal bedroom scene. Which still wasn’t funny.
But it was lazy, like a lot of what they’ve done lately. Almost everything here felt like a retread of old jokes, from the whoowhhhip interchange to the aforementioned flash out into non-cartoon reality.
Which is not to say that they don’t still pull of some really funny bits from time to time. It’s just that it’s generally no fun when the Simpsons is actually better than Family Guy. American Dad has been the best of the bunch for a while now.
For me, it wasn’t just that, it was the fact that it was one of the most hamhanded things I’ve ever seen. Even aside from the Stewie subplot, McFarlane pulled out his dick and pissed all over every religious person on the planet by almost outright staying we were inhuman monsters blindly wreaking havoc in order to enjoy our cruelty and avoid thinking. And it was vastly less honest than previous depictions in the same show (Grandpa Griffon and the Pope, etc.)
I’ve actually had better treatment from this very board, which is saying something.
*Point: You can be a perfectly good human as an atheist. Where I disagree is whether you get beyond that, which in my religion (Catholicism) is basically the entire point of human existence. And, unfortunately, perfectly good humans aren’t really all that good.
Didn’t the episode specifically point out that Meg was getting her inane ideas from the likes of Kirk Cameron? Would you be surprised to see Kirk Cameron burning a copy of “On The Origins of Species”?
I wouldn’t.
As usual (at least in the episodes of Family Guy I’ve seen) the show is mocking extreme religious views. Not the moderate hum drum sky pixie hypothesis of the average theist.
No he didn’t. It was lazy, true, but it was also ostensibly focused at Kirk Cameron, who often really IS that stupid, amazingly. All of the other Griffin family members are religious and always have been, and nothing was really done to them in the way of making them seem foolish for believing or that the moral is that they need to stop. Heck, in the Family Guy universe, God and Jesus show up fairly regularly and display obvious Biblical powers demonstrating their existence… so in the end, Brian is sort of the fool.
So, phooey on your overreaction.
So why is this any better or worse than McFarlane’s poorly written rambling? I think many of the official positions of Catholicism not only don’t serve a high purpose, but hurt people. Somewhere between these two positions lies ample ground for parody and comedy. What I see here is just lousy comedy.
Except that suddenly, everyone (including Peter who now and then mocks Christians himself and Lois, who ignores it almost totally, and the rest, who’ve never given any sign of caring) is suddenly borderline violent, as well as out willing to burn books.
The B-plot was hilarious simply because it makes me laugh to hear the actual Star Trek actors being total goombas more than because there was anything really funny. I guess that makes me Family Guy’s demographic.
I only watched clips on Hulu, so I can’t comment on the A-plot.
The only reason Family Guy pulled me in last night was for the reunion of the Next Generation cast. I thought it was funny that Stewie killed Denise Crosby right off. I thought Stewart yelling “Shut up, Wil,” was humorous. A shout out to the Next Gen episode, what was it, Datalore (?) where Picard yells, “Shut up, Wesley.” And Brent Spiner having to take Michael Dorn, the big, bad Klingon, to the men’s room was pretty funny. In fact, the whole plot of the cast acting more childish than Stewie and not living up to a Trekkie’s expectations was quite good.
I only watched because this is likely to be the only time we will ever see the crew of the NCC-1701 E together on-screen again. And considering the quality of the last couple of movies in the franchise, probably it’s a good thing. Otherwise, I avoid Family Guy like the plague and cannot for the life of me see why it ever was renewed.
Ah, because they’re all so sane and measured and rational about EVERYTHING ELSE THAT’S EVER HAPPENED ON THIS SHOW… right? This is a show that seems to feature lynch mobs about every other week, often over some incredibly absurd things.
And, honestly, extremely over the top shock and horror at the possibility that there is an atheist in existence sort of IS the status quo for a heck of a lot of places in the US. It’s not a stretch in the least. I’d say that the book burning stuff was pretty lame, but isn’t what you really objected to in your OP was, well, the fact that a character got to actually say out loud his view on religion (however tritely worded you found it)? Isn’t that exactly the sort of hysteria that the show is parodying with that particular overreaction?
