Family Guy

You theenk theeet's beeaaad?

The McDonalds of TV. Nice once in a while, but too much will make you feel miserable.

I usually don't like humor that revolves around: 1) characters being jerks 2) characters being idiots 3) mindless pop culture references and 4) shock value. Guess which show's whole shtick melds all four together?

My dad got the first three seasons on DVD when I was 10, and we laughed hysterically at them. I've seen them since, and people say it was always the same are wrong. Family Guy began as an admitted Simpsons rip-off, but with the esoteric humor, inspired verbal gags and outlandish premises the Simpsons had long since left behind. Post cancellation, it became a plague on our nation. And now it just sits in the gutter waiting to be put out of its misery.

So I once went to a Q&A with Someone Important in this show and he said every page of the script has three jokes - a great one to keep, a dull one to distract, and a crass one to alert the censors - intending the studio and FCC to cut two of three jokes. While the writers hope the good one always takes, they may cut the good, or all three, or none. This is why people really only like 33% of this, and South Park saw the writers' room as manatees playing pop culture bingo. It's not wrong.

Follows the Simpsons mold with added vulgarity and frequent flashback/cutaway scenes. General consensus is that the first few seasons were pretty funny, with sharp pop culture references mixed into legitimate episode plots. Brian and Stewie were highlights. Show was cancelled, brought back due to DVD sales and performance on late night TV, and then the quality of episodes slowly trailed off until it became the type of show where it just throws random jokes at you until one makes you chuckle.

One of the most overrated tv shows ever made, I just cannot stand this series. The entire show is nothing but a bunch of cutaway gags where its humor is mostly derived from mixing random shit together with pop culture icons in attempt to be funny. There's no originality in it at all, to me it's the equivalent of those Newground animations that feature Mario taking drugs and swearing. There's no real punchline or even satire to it, it's funny because it's crude and makes fun of something popular!

The first two or three seasons really are hilarious, packed with an Adult Swim-esque fast-paced irreverence, making it an excellent example of a more grown-up version of The Simpsons (despite it often having childish humour). Unfortunately, after being resuscitated once or twice, it came back as a "random humour LOL" type of show for teenagers, with reoccurring gags, bland pop-culture references, and very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very drawn-out jokes. D'oh!

Great when it's good, literally hell when it's bad.

(S1-3) Cynicism isn't my sense of humor, but this show is like a transcript of asshole teens on the internet. You're not breaking ground by depicting SJP as a horse. You're digging into the communal wound and making the world a worse place, one hackneyed joke at a time. There are moments of uncharacteristically kind and considerate behavior, for laughs, but I enjoy them. (Especially Stewie) There just isn't enough antidote to counteract the poison.