Family Guy: Anticipating the New Season and Looking Back on What We Have Shared with the Griffins
With the perennial workhorse, The Simpsons, showing it’s age, Fox couldn’t have had better timing. Being a Simpsons’ fan for all of its many many seasons, it was hard for me to accept that the show just wasn’t quite as funny as it had been. It was their own fault, of course, setting the bar so high. So with an inevitable vacuum of animated mayhem looming, Family Guy’s return to production was like a drink of cool water in the middle of the Sahara.
Now, many critics may say that the transition from The Simpsons to Family Guy should be painless, considering Family Guy is a rip-off of The Simpsons. There is a valid point therein, however, it is a bit too broad to apply. True, both shows center on the exploits of a fat, alcoholic, working class dolt, his stay-at-home wife and their ever suffering children, but the Simpsons started out with focus on Bart, not Homer, and I can’t for the life of me ever recall Santa’s little helper talking, much less Maggie for that matter. But I am making an argument that can easliy get bogged down in minor details, and that is not my purpose here today.
Family Guy is the kind of comedy for those who don’t need linear stories or continuity in any sense of the word. That is the genius of Family Guy. Does it make sense? Rarely. Does it make you laugh? Often, if not more often that your sides would like, depending on your fitness level. The jokes are parodical, satirical, and yet at the same time rather broad and base. The show makes fun of other shows, and more often than not, itself. Nothing is safe from parody, but instead of becoming preachy like South Park can or schmaltzy like the Simpsons have, Family Guy thinks outside the box, and outside of its script, which for a member of the ADHD generation, is a welcome respite from traditional comedies on televison.
Family Guy started out inocuously enough, as a short cartoon featured on a showcase on Cartoon Network. Fox executives offered a deal to the creator, Seth MacFarlane, and the short cartoon’s characters were redrawn and written as Peter and his dog, Brian. The rest of the family was added, too-good-for-her-husband Lois, daughter Meg, and sons, Chris and Stewie. The family structure that has served as the root for so many sitcoms over the history of TV is probably the only normal aspect of the program. That is, if you ignore the fact that both the dog and the infant son talk, and talk with a much higher level of intelligence of those who inhabit the world of Quahog, Rhode Island, a fictionalized suburb of Providence.
Fox proved to be a rather shaky home for the cartoon. And Family Guy proved to be a rather shaky prime time slot holder for Fox. Fox pulled an episode in that first season for a joke about JFK, an action which became a precedent that was to be repeated later for the an episode in which Peter needs a “jew” in “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein”. The issue of pulling an episode would later be parodied in a South Park episode, which also poked fun at what the “writers” really do to come up with the non-sequitors for which the series has become known (think manatees and random words written on balls, and you will see why South Park remains the parody champ in the cartoon universe).
The “Weinstein” episode would not be aired until after Family Guy lost it’s slot in the Fox line-up and no longer in active production. Family Guy found a cozy and popular home on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. It wasn’t until the Cartoon Network’s ratings spike during airings and the massive DVD sales (let’s just say record-setting, beating Sex and the City record setting) showed Fox that there was demand, and quite a bit of it, for Family Guy. In a rare example of programming intelligence on Fox’s part, Family Guy was renewed. We got our first taste on that fateful May Day in 2005, and our wait was rewarded with a devilish jab at Fox and all of the shows that came and went (the PJ’s) while Family Guy was wandering the syndication lowlands.
What can we expect from the new season? Who would have guessed that there would ever be a Season Five? The creators leaked out a bit at ComicCon 06, and here are some of the better spoilers. An entire episode will take place in the Star Wars galaxy, Meg and a drunken Brian make out at a school dance, Peter will find out he is an illegal Mexican immigrant (which is all the funnier because in a past episode he also found out that he descended from a African slave), and perhaps the most aniticipated episode, rumored about since the premiere of MacFarlane’s other animated sitcom, American Dad, a crossover in which Stewie is questioned by the CIA.
If you haven’t watched Family Guy yet, well, you should. It is a show that is only interested in making you laugh. Sometimes, you may not know why you are laughing (e.g. when Brian dons a banana suit and sings about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – I was forced to explain that one to so many people that I witnessed laugh their keisters off, but couldn’t tell me what the hell they just watched). Just forget all of the conventions of the Cosby Shows and the Friends we have been force fed since birth, and try to remember that the joke doesn’t have to make sense within the plot, and sometimes a diversion into another joke, genre, and time altogether can be fun.
New episodes start on Fox, but you can catch up with the rest of the class with the numerous outlets for the first four seasons, Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and TBS’s Too Funny to Sleep line-ups. If you are really anal retentive and have to watch the show in order from the first episode, well, maybe you should watch something else, but if you just want a little piece of Family Guy to keep forever, there are about a million different outlets for that need. The DVD’s collections are numerous, from Season by Season, or a compendium of Seth MacFarlane’s favorite episodes, or the direct-to-dvd movie, or the comedy CD of Family Guy Live in Vegas.
It paid for Family Guy fan’s to be patient for the series return. Let’s hope the same with happen for Futurama fans…
