how i spent my summer vacation....

--fancier dan

cartoons and what-not...

---Family Guy is the Two and a Half Men of the animation world.

-----Both:

-are popular

-are poorly written

-feature 1-dimensional characters

The biggest excuse I hear for the show, from those who understand it’s not perfect, is that it still has its funny parts, if only few in each episode. I relate this to the time spent with a hooker: there are brief moments of singular satisfaction that can come out of this encounter, but the rest are only awkward interactions leading up to these moments and then worse feelings following as you count your dollar bills and she slides her dress back on, as I assume.

It’s a joke-and-shtick show, I know. It’s just that I got bored with it. I can find a good pop culture joke humorous as much as the next guy, but then I can only take so many bone-picked, forced political messages, overused jokes that feel more intended to make the writers laugh rather than the audience, and the constant use of totally-random/it’s-funny-because-it-makes-no-sense humor just before it stops being funny.

I remember I loved this show back in middle school. I thought it was the greatest. I evolved out of this. I guess that’s when I realized that playing a song from the 80s wasn’t actually a joke.

The original fans didn’t give up on McFarlane because he sold out, I think many gave up on him because they got tired of the cyclical nature of Family Guy, something once thought to be a one-hit wonder until 2004 rolled around and the episodes never stopped.

Seth McFarlane seems like a nice guy. He shouldn’t be the highest paid television writer, but he’s still a nice guy. He definitely jumped the shark as soon as he got the chance, and he went with it. But what begins to bother me is the bluntness, no sharp wit but just straightforward “this is the joke, get it?” He never brings us anything new, just another wacky family doing wacky things, something the Simpsons had already been doing more than a decade before any of this hoopla (I’ve watched interviews with the guy, and he just outright says that when he was in college he saw the Simpsons and said he wanted to do that, and that’s what he did).

I’m also confused by the fact that he just produces animated shows about families and fathers, something he generally shouldn’t have any experience with because he’s unmarried and has no children, leading me to believe that his view of the world has been adapted by how fictional families interact on television alone (at least Matt Groening tried to branch out with Futurama). Why can’t he play with something new? Why stick with something so ground level, so safe, when you can now basically do whatever you want? You can at least animate your shit better—we get it, the Flintstones did it 40 years ago, let’s move on.

This has all been said before far better than I put it. Mainly I’m just frustrated that Venture Bros. still hasn’t been nominated for an Emmy yet, even though it’s both well written and well animated, two reasons an animated series should be nominated.

Don’t even get me started on Robot Chicken…

-fancier dan