Family Guy is Bottom-Feeding Cultural Sewage

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Well I don't know what Flapjack is because I haven't got CN... Just try Adventure time (all on Youtube) and don't try and compare it to other shows. It's completely different from anything I have ever seen!

Indeed.

That's what makes it such an accurate - albeit caricatured - depiction of real life.

Admittedly some of the more long-running themes are starting to wear thin, such as Peter's eternally laughable attempts at self-improvement and the "everybody ignores dowdy Meg" joke. It's probably been going for too long now. There's only so much mileage you can get out of a small pool of characters. "The Simpsons" and "South Park" both started to encounter the same problems after half a dozen or so series.

Last edited by Locustman on 30 Aug 2011, 12:22 pm, edited 3 times in total.

It was funnier in the earlier seasons, but it's not funny because all they do is LOL RANDOM humor and cutaway sequences. Plus, I don't get why everyone is so mean to Meg.

I really like family guy though sometimes they leave the main story behind too many times. Meaning the flashbacks.

yeah, the family guy series, throughout the seasons, it has gone down hill.

it went from clever humor to desperate shock value.

the characters no longer have personalities, but are random and unpredictable just for some cheap laughs. moreover, the are now mouthpieces for macfarlane's political views.

But that's the whole premise of the show.

i am glad that family guy exists. everything you mention is true, but you should be able to laugh at it anyway.

This ^

I did have a point. You obviously didn't read it, but I'll explain it again anyway. If you can't be bothered to acknowledge the point made after this, that's your problem. You haven't started an "argument", you started a fight. You made absolutely no effort to use non-inflammatory language in your original post, meaning one of two things: a clear intention to stir up hostility to amuse yourself, or a severe dirth of ability to conduct yourself in a mature manner. Neither is a good thing. You haven't done this in the pursuit of knowledge or debate, and that's quite obvious to anyone who's made it through high school. You're not displaying the conduct of an adult looking for an intellectual massage, but the behavior of an over-grown child looking at this forum as his personal amusement park.

My opinion on this -and feel free to disagree with me- is opposed to that of MoonMetropolis. When this thread was made, I hadn't seen Family Guy in a while, especially not more recent episodes. But the other day, there was a Cleveland Show marathon on TV, and it was interspersed with some Family Guy episodes, so I caught up a little. I found the show's character had not changed THAT much from its earlier seasons.

Opposing Family Guy to the two other major adult humoristic/satire cartoons, The Simpsons and South Park, is an interesting thing to do. Saying that Family Guy is derivative of The Simpsons, is perfectly reasonable, though perhaps derivative with its negative connotations is a bit too harsh; perhaps saying that it borrows certain elements is more accurate, or even saying that it pays hommage to its predecessor.

Around the time that Family Guy was introduced, I personally (as an individual viewer, not representing the opinion of a group) thought that The Simpsons was losing steam. Around its 10th season, with episodes like Tennis The Menace, I thought most of the cast of The Simpsons had 'Flanderised', meaning they took one defining aspect of a character and blew it up to stereotypical proportions. Where before the characters in The Simpsons, and especially the Simpson family, had appeared like human beings for all their zany adventures, now they had become charicatures in MY opinion.

Enter Family Guy. It was faster, it was less cuddly, it was less forgiving... I dare say, and I will always defend this opinion of mine: when Family Guy came on, it was to the 2000s what The Simpsons HAD BEEN to the 1990s. It was doing what The Simpsons had been doing in the 90s, but Family Guy was more relevant to this new brave decade. I thought it was far more in touch with contemporary society and pop culture than concurrent seasons of The Simpsons were. Bart Simpson especially... he is SUCH a 90s icon. He's up there with Beavis and Butt-Head, Zach Morris, the Spice Girls, Jubilee from X-Men. He oozes 90s, and I know I'm not making myself popular here, but he never should have survived past 2000.

I think Family Guy was more relevant to the harsher, darker world that emerged post-9/11 both in real life and in fiction, even if it was conceived some years before that. So, yes, I repeat, Family Guy was doing what The Simpsons was doing at the time, but it was doing it BETTER. Family Guy was on the level The Simpsons was on in the mid-90s (about the 1993-1998 seasons, BEST Simpsons episodes).

Also, though Family Guy seems to transplant the 5-member family model from The Simpsons to itself, its inter-family dynamics are different. In The Simpsons, it was really Maggie who got the short end of the stick for not being as important a character as Bart or Lisa. In Family Guy, this is reversed: Chris and Megan don't get nearly as much screentime as Stewie. Furthermore, giving the pet the ability to speak was a great move by MacFarlane. The Stewie/Brian dynamic is brilliant, especially because even though they both act like they're adult humans, the writers remember that they're a baby and a dog, and have them act accordingly beside all their cultural snobbishness and political awareness.

At the end of the day, why isn't Family Guy allowed to be slightly derivative? For Transformers, you had Go-Bots. For Pokémon, you had Digimon. Art and pop culture base themselves on their predecessors all the time, doesn't mean there's no quality to it. Renaissance art was often exactly about imitating and emulating the great artists of the Classic Era, the great poets, playwrights and sculptors. Its become the basis for much of our culture today.

Moving South Park into the assessment, I find it funny that people can call Family Guy crass, rude, and violent, and then mention South Park as its better. Because honestly, much as I like South Park, it is FAR more rude, violent, gory, and crass than Family Guy. It was like that in its earliest seasons, it remains that way now. And South Park has also been doing the same thing for over ten years without changing its formula much, not unlike The Simpsons and Family Guy. How you can knock Family Guy for things you perceive as offensive, than go on and praise South Park which is far more offensive (though sometimes enjoyably so) in the same departments, is beyond me.
I saw MoonMetropolis mention 'bad voice acting' in Family Guy. Honestly, voice acting in Family Guy is miles ahead of South Park. Now, I know South Park intentionally features bad voice acting, with all characters done almost exclusively by Parker and Stone, as part of its appeal, just as its visual style invokes the notion that kids glued this show together from bright-coloured paper, custom Christmas card style. But sometimes, the voice acting is just bad (personal opinion), especially obvious in more dramatic scenes that are not necessarily funny, and it can also get tiring to actually hear the same voices over and over as Matt and Trey go through the limited cycle of their own voice acting range. Makes me want to say "Hire more voices, you guys!"

So yeah, though I won't set my schedule to go and watch Family Guy or other MacFarlane shows at 9:00 PM anymore, I did see some recent epsiodes, and found them funny. As funny as the first season. The Simpsons I can't even make it through anymore, South Park I can still enjoy. At the end of the day, though, it's my opinion that none of these three shows, NOR Futurama, NOR American Dad, NOR Cleveland Show (which is just a continuation of a Family Guy thread), are as fresh and original as they were when they started out, and have each become pretty dated. That includes Family Guy. If people want to continue to watch any of these shows, and it speaks to them, and the shows can maintain a steady viewer base, then more power to everyone. Meanwhile, I will be curious to what the next big thing is going to be in adult animated satire. A new generation has matured, after all.

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The only problem I have with it are some of the jokes go on for too long, although sometimes funny, mostly they aren't.

The short jokes are the best ones, such as "GET IN THE HOUSE FATTY!" When Stewie looks out the window in rollers and a face mask.

Mostly I like it because it's quirky. Like when that woman was dating a crayon, people dating dogs like they're human, just different.

American dad is good, but none of the characters are as funny as Peter Griffin. The simpsons is an all time classic and I always get a laugh out of it.

One word: Satire.

In the end, everything in the world that's created by man is stupid. Predjudices, ideas, internet memes, religion, etc, everything is stupid.

As a satirical comedy, Family Guy takes the middle but liberal ground, and thus is free to make fun and ridicule anything that can possibly be ridiculed, in other words, everything. By showing the anti-semitic beliefs they're demonstrating how stupid that particular belief is by exaggerating it.

They in no way are exemplyfying anti-semitism, nor anti-gay, nothing. It's all one big joke, and I concede I don't like the bodily functions humor, but it all a JOKE. Except for the underlying theme or moral point, everything said is a JOKE. Humor, plain and simple. And they do it well.

Also: South Park is fantastic and much better than Family Guy in some ways, but they both have their merits and detractors, and if they make people laugh then they've done their job.

You do know they write South Park episodes almost the same way right?

I'm a casual Family Guy fan. I'll watch it once in a while and think it's funny. I don't get all the jokes about politicians. If you've ever seen American Dad, you know that show isn't much different. One episode there was a gay couple and the father of one of them made fun of the neighbor who was supposed to go along with the idea that the man's son was seeing his wife, so his dad wouldn't think he was gay. The Dad kept calling him a sissy and all those anti-gay words. In the end the Father never accepted it, but guess what? The main message was to gays them selves. They had to accept that not everyone is going to accept it and although I hate how people hate gays, he's totally right. Not everyone's going to accept it. That's life unfortunately. You can make an episode with a happy ending and say the guy finally gave in, but nope. That's not life a lot of the time. =/

Yes, Family guy is juvenile and the thing you're against seems to be that it's well...edgy. That seems to be key to a comedy series. Keep pushing that envelope.

The only time, actually i think twice, Seth tried to push his atheistic point of view in one episode. I don't care that he's atheist. No problem there, but when the lesson is that atheism is the only way. He was being all preachy about it. pppffft. That was the episode where Meg found God and was praising God for everything. It woulda been one thing if she was casual about it. I don't think she was very pushy about it. But at least one of the posters said that many writers/directors of comedy shows like South Park or Family Guy have sort of an agenda to push their views. Good point. I just thought Seth was a little too pushy.

But really as far as the humor as long as it makes you laugh, I don't care. Have your opinion, but you really are kinda on a high horse here.

One of the problems I used to have with Family Guy was Seth's potrayel of the Deep South because I was born and raised in Georgia. But as I started watching more of the episodes, I realized his jokes on the Southern lifestyle are all based entirely on unbelievable negative stereotypes so most likely he's not being serious about it. All comedians get their humor from poking fun at stereotypes, and it's not like he doesn't make fun of every other group including his own.