Why does Family Guy get so much flak for copying the Simpsons

[heathen_earthling]

@orcenio

All I know is that this exact gag was ripped from when Homer was trying to eat chips in Two Dozen and One Greyhounds.

Family Guy also ripped off that episode by having the family’s male dog have sex with a female greyhound while she is competing in a race (“Screwed The Pooch”). Is that really the kind of scene that happens in two different sitcoms by coincidence?

[interface2x]

@garygnu

Does The Simpsons have a talking dog?

Poochie the rockin’ dog?

[monstro]

Except “Joe’s Burgers” (which I cannot seem to enjoy, no matter how much I try), all of Fox’s cartoons have the same basic formula.

Simpson’s, Cleveland Show, Family Guy, American Dad

1. Most of the drama involves the father. Who’s loud, stupid, and gross.

2. The father has a tight circle of friends in three of these cartoons. They meet a local bar. Alcohol consumption and drunkenness is a regular feature.

3. The wife is more attractive, more sensible compared to her husband, and given to flashes of adventure. She throws out a funny line every now and again, but she’s just a sidekick.

4. Surrealness in one of the characters. A talking baby. A talking dog. An alien. An extremely precocious kindergartner.

5. One of the characters departs from gender/sexual norms. Lisa Simpson (though this has been toned down some, it seems). Stewie. Junior and Steve (the weakling sons). Roger the flaming alien.

6. It is not cool to be the girl child. You will either be a insufferable nerd/dork or slut.

There are some idiosyncracies, of course. American Dad is definitely more surreal than the others. Stan does not have any friends and is not a blue-collar guy like his other counterparts. The Simpson’s does not delve into potty humor as much as the others (twenty years ago, who’dathunk that?) The Cleveland Show has more cultural diversity and the characters are less one-dimensional (Donna isn’t the stupid housewife that Francine is, nor is she as saccharine as Marge and Lois are). But there are enough similarities in all the shows that sometimes I get confused about which cast did what.

[digs]

Scott Shaw! had a rant about the lack of creativity on the show even before it first came out:

“As some of you might know, I made the mistake of working on a single episode of this series’ first season (drawing storyboards after turning down the job offer of supervising character model designs for the entire series) – and wound up loathing the experience.”

He quoted a blog from 2004, an excellent list of 10 reasons it’s just not good TV.

Here’s a sample:

5. It’s one of those things that presents itself as “cutting-edge” but is actually gutless. Its “offensive” jokes are neatly calculated to make sure they don’t actually risk offending their fanbase; instead they make jokes that would be offensive to the kinds of people who don’t watch the show – sexual prudes, for example. Any genuinely cutting-edge comedy will risk offending people who watch it; but how is a penis joke supposed to offend the average college student?

Number 6 and 7 are even better.

I could go on, quoting blogs that that blog quotes… but I’ll stop.

(fyi, I agree that it’s a ripoff, and could be so much funnier, but I still watch it…and laugh)

[heathen_earthling]

@monstro

5. One of the characters departs from gender/sexual norms. Lisa Simpson (though this has been toned down some, it seems). Stewie. Junior and Steve (the weakling sons). Roger the flaming alien.

Not sure what you mean by this. Lisa sometimes (inconsistently) departs from being a little girl in being mentally more like an adult, but I don’t think there has ever been anything particularly tomboyish about her. Steve is just a relatively realistic teenage boy, in the episodes I’ve seen. I find him by far the most relatable of the American Dad characters.

[BigT]

@digs

Scott Shaw! had a rant about the lack of creativity on the show even before it first came out

This doesn’t make sense, seeing as the supposed quoted blog post clearly refers to the show after it was on-air.

[Rucksinator]

For me personally, it was the fact that the first FG episode that I watched was a direct ripoff of a Simpsons episode that I had seen recently. The family goes to Las Vegas, against the mother’s wishes. The mother reluctantly throws some dice or pulls a lever or something, and suddenly gets hooked on gambling. ROLE REVERSAL!!! We would have expected the loser idiot dad to be the one becomming an adict!!! Ahh, that justaposition is so funny!

Anyway, that was my experience. Of course, there is this factor to consider:

@Chronos

That’s because, as South Park has pointed out in the past, The Simpsons has already done pretty much everything. Any episode at all of any sitcom, you could claim with some fairness “The Simpsons have done it”.

[heathen_earthling]

I’d say a lot of South Park episodes have no precedent on The Simpsons. I don’t remember Bart ever meeting a singing Christmas poo.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

On the larger issue of imitation, emulation, or inspiration in popular culture, this threadI opened in 2009 might be relevant. In that thread, Eonwe suggested that the low tolerance for similarity and emulation results from the fact that

[…] the issue with imitation these days is that in almost all mediums the original remains available.

If an original is available (or at least a more original), I’m less likely to be interested in something that is a close-but-not-quite.

I think there’s something in this. When the other, older program remains available, a shortsighted and hypercritical audience will often despise and dismiss a newer offering that is similar yet decidedly original in its own way. The sad upshot of that is that the total amount of paid creative work, and the number of people who get to do it for a living, is reduced.