Let me start this off by saying I didn’t always hate Family Guy. Hell there are still plenty of episodes that I really enjoy, but in recent years Family Guy has turned into the most offensively terrible piece of programming to ever fucking air on American television.
Let’s pretend Family Guy is a race horse, and Seth McFarlane is its rich, cold-hearted owner. Somewhere around 2010 McFarlane looked at his former prize stallion and realized its best days were behind it and it was time to hang it up. But, being the sick bastard that he is, he decides to put a bullet in one of its legs and then forces it to run just for laughs to see how long it can go before it just keels over and dies. That’s Family Guy, a former prize stallion pathetically limping its way to a slow, painful, and universally humiliating death.
I don’t even know where to start so I’ll just go by category:
1) Writing: Never really the show’s strong point, but what passes for a script on that show now is an insult to anyone who has ever pursued the art of writing comedy or anything beyond an instruction manual really. First off, the dialogue is so fucking straight forward and one-dimensional that it almost hurts to listen to. For a show that more or less functions on being socially ‘relatable’ none of the conversations sound even somewhat believable. In recent episodes very heavy social issues are frequently reduced down to the most banal non-opinions you can imagine, all while Peter (the fucking protagonist of this shit stain on animation) just makes un-funny and unrelated quips seemingly for the sole purpose of making the viewer forget how painful what they are watching really is. The ‘writers’ of Family Guy also seem to have not gotten the memo that breaking the fourth wall is beyond trite, and have now made it one of the trademarks of the show. I get it, sometimes it’s cool to poke fun at yourself. But when all you do is acknowledge how bad your own work is, doesn’t a little part of you start to yearn for something more? Probably not, especially when Fox keeps throwing you millions of dollars for what is essentially complete and total tripe. Where the show really breaks any illusion of believability is when it tries to go for the heart-strings. All too often the ‘minds’ behind Family Guy seem to think that after 20-odd minutes of horrifyingly bad ‘plot’, dialogue, and unbelievable/inconsistent characters I am ready to swallow some half-assed heart-felt conclusion and feel even an iota of care for these shittastic characters and their poorly constructed plights. When I watch The Simpsons, somewhere in there I can believe that this is a family that cares about one-another and the heart-felt moments actually manage to gain a little weight, even more so in King of The Hill, Futurama, and Bob’s Burgers. In Family Guy, these scenes of emotional appeal almost feel like a fucking insult. Seriously? After a 5 minute fight with a man in a chicken costume, or a 3-minute scene of vomiting you expect me to wipe away a fucking tear for any of the wooden characters in this show? Get a grip.
2) Voice Acting: Other than the characters voiced by Seth McFarlane, not one voice on this show inspires the kind of hilarity that those in any of the other animated shows mentioned above do. Frankly, most of them are horrible. There is one voice actor in particular, usually used for one-off characters in cut-aways whose consistently wooden performances make me cringe almost every time. He’s clearly trying to play the believable straight-man, but he just comes out sounding more wooden than a fucking petrified forest. Even worse on the background character front are any minorities, particularly any black characters. Cleveland is fine I suppose, but every other black side-character literally sounds like Isaac Hayes from the fucking ‘Shaft’ theme song. It’s not believable and above-all, its just kind of offensive. It painfully illuminates how limited the Family Guy crew’s world view is and robs such jokes of any modicum of comic potential. As for the main characters… I just don’t even know what to say. It’s like when someone shows you something awful and asks for your feedback, but you know this is basically the best they can do and as such can’t give them any advice. Seth Green, Mila Kunis, and Patrick Warburton seem like cool people, but their line delivery is beyond half-hearted. Adam West is the best voice actor in the show other than Seth McFarlane, and that should tell you everything you need to know.
3) Animation: Family Guy has always had an amateurish quality (or lack thereof) about it. But where it contributed to the fun of the early seasons, as the show went on it’s crappiness just became an accessory to the show’s all-around suckiness. It’s not that the drawings or character designs are bad per-se as much as it is that it all feels sort of soulless and flat. This has only gotten worse as the show has transitioned into HD. wWhere outside backdrops were already kind of uninteresting (compare them to The Simpsons where just about any exterior scene can be paused to reveal a great gag) they have now become outright empty. The incorporation of computer animation into the show seems to be an accessory to further laziness on the part of the animation staff rather than a tool to expedite the addition of more gags and greater detail. Where the Simpsons took full advantage of the HD leap, Family Guy just became flatter, duller, and more or less completely soulless. The motion in Family Guy’s animation, for lack of a better term, just fucking fails to ‘nail it’ about 90% of the time. Every time I watch an episode of the Simpsons, I see something and think “I need a gif of that”. I never think that when I watch Family Guy, and that’s because the animation is just plain flat. You don’t get the impression anyone put much time into the small details, and even worse I suspect these people lack the artistic sensibility to even know how. I’m not an artist so I can’t get into technicalities here, all I know is that everything in this show screams ‘nothing special,’ and that that is a problem.
4) Sheer Offensiveness: Now I am not usually the kind to get hung up on offensive content. An aspect of white male privilege is the ability to not be offended by most jokes, but god dammit Family Guy takes that idea and fucking revels in it. Seriously, if you ever need to illustrate White Male Privilege to someone, any episode of Family Guy from the last 3 years or so would be a pretty good place to start. Unfortunately, I don’t really know where to start when it comes to the multitude of levels on which Family Guy is just outright offensive. Now before you cry “FREE SPEECH” or “Have a sense of humor man,” let me transcribe an offending example of this show’s reckless mockery:
In a recent episode in which Joe’s son reappears after deserting the Iraq War (an all around terrible episode btw), Quagmire’s father, a post-op transgendered Woman suggests that the women at the table all go to the powder room to leave an awkward situation at the dinner table. Lois Griffin, the show’s female protagonist, replies to this with:
"You can use the yard".
What in the ever loving fuck is that. Seriously, comparing transgendered people to fucking animals? I could MAYBE excuse the joke if Lois Griffin were supposed to be looked down upon and laughed at as an out of date bigot, but this character is supposed to be liked and related to. That line partially justifies and encourages the vicious murders and attacks that transgendered individuals all around the world have to fear every day and I don’t think that’s funny at all.
This instance is a text book example of the carelessness with which Family Guy carries itself. For the sake of brevity in a post that’s already too long as it is, I’m only going to bring up one other example, and that is the episode in which Chris Griffin falls in love with an Autistic Girl who then winds up being abusive towards him.
The worst part about this episode is how it clearly goes out of its way to make sure you can’t call it offensive, i.e. “How is it offensive I he likes her, if she bullies him, etc. etc.” In other words, the writers of Family Guy basically thought it was a fun idea to troll autistic people. Like so many of Family Guy’s more tasteless moments, it’s like they refuse to commit to being offensive so that they can just play it off like they’re the good guys. Think when someone insults the fuck out of you for like 10 minutes and then pulls you in, gives you a nookie, and says “AH you know I love ya!”. NO matter what they may or may not have intended their words still sting and you don’t appreciate being made to feel like an idiot for being upset. That’s what’s ultimately so irritating about Family Guy’s pursuit of offensiveness. In the past Family Guy mostly seemed happy pushing societal buttons all in good fun, mocking things like religion, politicians, and some of society’s sillier taboos. No longer content with that, Family Guy has turned it’s intent towards mocking any and everything that does not embody their straight, white male point of view. Unlike South Park, which goes balls deep and in a way lessens its level of sheer offensiveness in the process, Family Guy’s half-hearted attempts to pull back at the end of episodes just adds insult to injury and makes the viewing experience all the more frustrating.
I fucking hate Family Guy, and to be quite frank I’m not to keen on the people its more recent episodes appeal to either. I can understand if you watch it just because it’s on, but if you are laughing at and agreeing with a good 80% of the content in this sorry excuse for comedy, I really can’t say I have any respect for you, which seems fair given that I can’t assume you have much respect for anyone else either.
