The show is crude and stupid.
But it makes me laugh my ass off, and that is why I watch.
Well, I guess I’ll throw in my 2 cents to keep this from being a dogpile on lachesis: I hate the show. Not because it’s vulgar and stupid and offensive, but because it’s just not funny enough.
That alone wouldn’t be so bad, because there are hours and hours of unfunny comedy broadcast on TV all the time. But most of those shows don’t have such a big chip on their shoulder about being “edgy” and “subversive.” “Family Guy” isn’t LCD humor; it’s next-to-the-lowest-common-denominator. It’s for the people who are intelligent enough to recognize really dumb stuff when they see it, but aren’t intelligent enough to do more than say, “Hey, that’s dumb.” It’s the same mentality as the movie Shrek: all you have to do is counter what stupid, maudlin people are saying, and that makes you smart and hip. The show mimics “The Simpsons” in every other way; why couldn’t they have studied it harder and learned that that show manages to be subversive and intelligent at the same time?
They could use “Family Guy” as a video textbook of how not to tell a joke. Every single punchline you can see coming a mile away. In the rare cases they do manage to get in an unpredictable punch-line or reference, they drag it on so long that they manage to pound all the humor out of it. The fantasy/flashback sequences are overused past the point of being annoying. And the stuff they joke about is so tired it’s embarrassing: Jews are cheap! Supermodels are really thin! Southerners are dumb and inbred! Rich people are snobs!
To give credit where credit’s due: I’ve seen a lot of the show, because Adult Swim insists on airing it between two shows that I really do like. And of the hours and hours of this series that I’ve watched, there have been exactly two moments that made me laugh:
When Peter’s trying to come up with a fake name by looking at things around him, and comes up with “Pea - tear - Gryphon.”
When Peter says “I don’t take coupons from giant chickens since that last time,” and it launches into the really, really long flashback sequence. It’s only because of the timing – it goes on so long that it comes back around to being funny.
The point of all this isn’t just to rag on the show (as much as I like it), but to counter the implication that if you don’t like the show it’s because you’re either a prude, or a snob, or you don’t “get it.” (I’ve had friends accuse me of being a snob because I don’t like the show). It’s just not clever enough to be truly offensive, and it’s not offensive enough to be funny, and it’s not funny enough to warrant the whole self-satisfied attitude.
You mean not all those stereotypes are true? Gosh, I guess that’s why those are JOKES, as opposed to STATEMENTS.
In the words of Robin Williams (whoever HE stole them from):
Joke’em if they can’t take a fuck.
And to whoever posted that the show is going back into production, got a link? I only heard about the possibility of a Family Guy straight-to-DVD movie. If the show is going to have more episodes, I would like to know about it.
I think the show Family Guy most resembles is Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It’s not about plot or character (and really, most of the characterizations were wildly inconsistent) The plot exsists merely as an excuse to hang a bunch of gags off of, the more absurd the better.
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Took the words right out of my mouth. I mean, literally; as I read the thread I was planning a reply that would start “Why are you comparing Family Guy to The Simpsons? It’s not a family sitcom, it’s a satire. IT’s more like Monty Python.” The comparison isn’t totally apt because Family Guy does have a set dramatis personae, but it’s 75% Python, 25% Simpsons.
The Simpsons does do the same thing occasionally, but Family Guy is all about satirizing sitcoms. It’s a response to the ridiculous, irritating spectacle of Idiot Man-Child sitcoms, like Tim Allen or Ray Romano’s show, which invariably follow the same plot every week:
- Idiot husband and father does something stereotypically man-like and insensitive
- Intelligent but somewhat shrill wife is angry
- Idiot husband tries to fix things The Wrong Way, through deception or stupidity
- He is thwarted by A Dumb Plan Gone Horribly Awry
- Wife finds out and goes apeshit
- Idiot husband pronounces He Has Learned A Valuable Lesson
- The next week, idiot husband has forgotten Valuable Lesson
Family Guy satirized that, and everything else about 70’s and 80’s TV shows. The entire point of the show was just to make jokes at the expense of 1. TV shows, and 2. People’s sensibilities - also a satirical component of the show if you want to go that far, since TV sitcoms are invariably super-politically-correct. It has its own little jokes, of course, like Stewie.
That’s lovely. Bash the show, but not the viewers, okay? Everyone has a different taste for comedy and this isn’t yours. It doesn’t mean that the viewers who like it aren’t intelligent.
Adam West is brilliant as the mayor of Quahog. I really like Family Guy and wished I’d watched it more when they were still making new episodes. However, the Chumbawumba episode was less inspired than many (my opinion) and seemed copied (and less funny) than the Futurama Grunka Lunka episode.
As I said earlier, I think the show Family Guy compares to best is The Young Ones, because there is that regular ensemble and established setting, yet no regard for things like story-by-story continuity. (Both shows are also, of course, brutally offensive and abrasive.)
The odd thing is, without meaning to the Simpsons has started to become more and more like Family Guy. There’s almost no humanity and warmth left in the Simpsons anymore; the plots relentlessly send up junk TV culture or out-of-control consumerism while the characters basically get swept along for the ride. I don’t think the Simpsons pulls off this sort of material as well as Family Guy, probably because it’s dragging 300 episodes of continuity and viewer expectation along behind it (the show’s own lack of originality is now one of its most frequent running gags), and they’re having to scrape the well more and more to come up with material for new episodes.
I realize I claimed that FG and the Simpsons can’t be properly compared, then went on to compare them. I think perhaps I bristle a bit at the suggestion, made by one or two posters above, that Family Guy can “learn” from the Simpsons’ example how to be funnier and/or smarter, when in my (admittedly minority) opinion, the Simpsons has been neither particularly funny nor particularly smart for a good many years.
“The Simpsons does do the same thing occasionally, but Family Guy is all about satirizing sitcoms.”
It’s the other way around–the Simpsons has done far more to satirize sitcoms than Family Guy ever did. So far as I remember (and I think I saw most of 'em in reruns last year,) all Family Guy did is repeat your idiot man-child plot, but omit the final “husband learns a lesson” step…and it did it over and over again.
The Simpsons has done the same thing, but they did it first–really, show me something on Family Guy that wasn’t done first on the Simpsons. More importantly in their prime the Simpsons satirized other aspects of sitcoms, ranging from the clip show (“And who can forget that Itchy and Scratchy episode…” “What does that have to do with anything?” “Nothing, but you have to admit it’s prety funny.”) to the end-of-episode reset button (Armand Tanzarian) to the fact that an idiot man-child hero would be intolerable in real life (Frank Grimes,) even to the show itself being over the hill (Poochy.)
Most of the Peter-centric episodes of The Family Guy actually had no interest in the sitcom form at all, and just use it as a backdrop to a bunch of blackout gags and sketches. Whoever compared it to Monty Python was right, in terms of structure anyway–most Family Guy episodes are really sketch comedy saddled with a bunch of continuity and a fixed cast of (as I said before) rather dull characters.
Nice analysis, SolGrundy!
I’ve watched Family Guy several times and i’ve **never **laughed. It strikes me as a lame *Simpsons * imitation, written by lowbrow middle-school students. The Simpsons–like Beavis and Butthead, which rocked–is a smart show about dumb people, while Family Guy is a dumb show about almost-smart people (Stewie aside).
but what do I know–I like Mission Hill.
Um… what? Try reading my post again. I wasn’t saying that the stereotypes were offensive, I was saying that they were tired. I think even the Dead Sea Scrolls make cracks about Jews being tight with money. It’s old, dusty, tired old obvious jokes and references that are just way too predictable for a show that prides itself on being “subversive.”
My first response was: “Why not? I’ve heard time and time again, both on this message board and in real life, that if you don’t like the show, it’s because you’re a prude who doesn’t want to be offended, or you’re a snob who can’t appreciate a dumb, pointless joke. The problem isn’t that I don’t get the show, it’s that I get it and it’s just not funny.”
But that’s petty. So I’ll just say, yes, the problems with the show are the fault of its writers and not the audience. I’d prefer not to see the show constantly being trotted out as a classic bit of television and praised as a refreshing alternative to predictable pablum that’s on most programs, since on the rare occasions “Family Guy” does get serious, it’s just as predictable and tired as anything else on T.V. But to each his own.
Sorry, except for Stewie and the dog, the Jerry Springer audience has FG beat, in terms of humor and grossing out.