I guess you’re right. There’s no similarity. McFarland wasn’t influenced by the Simpsons. None of the set-ups are borrowed. No simliarty in any episode premises. I am clearly set out to take down Family Guy with no good reason.
and you forgot drunk. Try harder to keep your witty retorts acurate. 
Nonsense.
You claimed that Family Guy ripped off Simpsons.
When the bulk of the casts bear no resemblance to eachother whatsoever, and what few resemblances there are are entirely derivative examples of what’ve been sitcom clichees since the Honeymooners, then your claims of ripoff become more and more ridiculous.
Fallacy of the Excluded Middle, my friend.
I said ripped off characters and premises, not cloned (i.e. there are instances of “heavy borrowing”). Vanilla Ice ripped off Queen and Bowie, but the songs Ice Ice Baby and Presure aren’t identical and it would take an hour to rattle off the big differences.
How is it you can’t see the irrelevance of dissimilarity where the argument concerns instances of similarity? Once again, ripped off does not necessarilry equal clone. Green pants!! Green Pants!!!
Knowing when I’ve been beaten and making a lame joke, my friend.
Granted, Family Guy’s creators used The Simpsons as a basis for the style of humor they use in their cartoon, but calling it ripoff is like saying every scifi movie made since 1977 is a ripoff of Star Wars, or every heavy metal band is a ripoff of Black Sabbath, etc.
I am begining to agree with you.
Bzzzt. That trope is as old as the sitcom.
Didn’t Vanilla Ice explain it himself? Under Pressure goes “dun dun dun duh-duh dun dun” and Ice Ice Baby goes “duh-dun dun dun duh-dun dun chkk.” 
To me, though, it is a big difference, because I truly cannot remember any Simpsons flashbacks/cutaways off the top of my head. Flashbacks are not a novel device in any sense, of course. However, Family Guy flashbacks draw attention to themselves. I don’t think there’s a single Family Guy episode that doesn’t have a line that starts “remember the time when” or “like that time” and cuts into a flashback. I don’t believe the Simpsons ever did anything of the sort.
A lot of Family Guy comedy is non-sequitor parody segued through the use of flashback (and, in my opinion, lazy writing. And I do enjoy the show). The Simpsons (almost) never forces a joke like Family Guy does through the use of a flashback.
This is why I objected to cutaways in Family Guy and Simpsons being regarded as similar. I don’t think they are, and others have explained a little better than I have about why they are different.
As noted, they stopped doing it years ago precisely because Family Guy did it so much.
I think you’ve exaggerated that, but it’s probably true in general.
By the way, I was thinking about it earlier and decided that the plots of A Streetcar Named Marge and The King is Dead seemed kind of similar.
Which part? Because I honestly (no exaggeration) don’t think there is a single Family Guy episode that doesn’t have a “remember the time when…” type-line in it somewhere.
Gilligan’s Island used newscasts for exposition all the time. Granted they used a coconut radio instead of a television.
I see a few superficial similarities between Simpsons and Family Guy (the lead characters, the device of the cutaway which lends itself well to animation…um that’s about it, really), but the tones, situations and humor are quite distinct from each other.
The classic British comody series The Goodies frequently used TV news broadcasts as exposition, 20 years before The Simpsons- which must mean that The Simpsons are… A WITCH! 
Seriously though, The Goodies, Married… With Children, Dinosaurs, ALF, and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose are all TV comedies which either predate (or aired just as The Simpsons came to air) which use the “TV/Radio News As Exposition” device- and that’s without including the innumerable forgettable sitcoms which tend to air at 1:30pm in the afternoon when most people are at work or out shopping/running errands. The list would be even longer if we included TV shows that debuted more recently after The Simpsons began airing.
Honestly though, trying to make a serious comparison of Family Guy and The Simpsons is like trying to make a serious comparison of Star Trek and Red Dwarf.
There are more similarities between Family Guy and American Dad (“They’re the same show”, Seth MacFarlane is on record as saying) than there are between Family Guy and The Simpsons, IMO.
I agree. Not that I’ve seen all of FG but it is so common that they even reference it in an episode.
Stewie says “Like that time [blah blah blah]” and then it doesn’t cut away and Stewie looks around “What? No clip there? I thought we had a clip.”
Like that time on The Simpsons:
Or then there’s Bart reincarnated as a butterfly who burns down the school, the gigantic radioactive Curies, Bart destroying the school with giant ants, Homer the buffoonish blackjack player, Homer introducing Barney to Duff, “I am evil Homer,” etc.
The Simpsons were more creative with it, but they pioneered it.
As for a straight Simpsons take-off FG has indulged in, did anyone not groan when Lois developed a gambling problem?
Except the Simsons doesn’t introduce the flashback as blatantly as The Family Guy, which was part of the point of my sentence. (Hence the “remember the time when” or “like that time when” line that precedes my sentence about the Simpsons.) Also, the flashback is pretty much the primary conduit for jokes in The Family Guy. It is not on the Simpsons.
It would be hard for a live action sitcom to have a recurring secondary character like Tom Tucker or Kent Brockman. They’d have to build an expensive news set for one thing, and it would also be harder to work the character into the show on a regular basis, as live action sitcoms don’t have that many sets. If you notice, when the news is on on a live action sitcom you generally hear the audio but the camera is on the main characters as they watch the show.
Wikipedia tells me that Family Guy started in 1999 whereas the thing it is alleged to have copied wasn’t published until 2000. Surely this answers any allegations immediately.