S
o I picked up Hulu Plus a few weeks ago, and the one thing that's stood out is being able to watch some of my favorite shows in their entirety.
I can chart Troy's evolution through the first three seasons of Community or see how the jokes evolved on Arrested Development.
But one of the most interesting finds I've come across in these couch-bound travels is that Family Guy isn't as good as I thought it was.
Seth McFarlane is good, his work is still good, especially the spin-offs he's helmed (American Dad and The Cleveland Show). But something about Family Guy just falls flat where it never did before.
In a sense, Family Guy has already won TV. They got cancelled, then uncancelled, then Emmy nominated and basically, all around they came back to win it.
It has a dedicated fanbase, a loyal viewership and overall is in very little danger of being cancelled anytime soon.
Subsequently, Fox execs have to back off. You can't mess with Family Guy because it works. We know that. American Dad doesn't get that special treatment.
It's more confined to conventional television formulas, and as much as we rail against execs meddling in our shows, there's a certain amount of quality that comes with that.
Once Family Guy hit it big, especially with their cutaway gags, we saw those gags take the spotlight. What was once a great side dish has become the main course and the show suffers for it.
The great episodes of Family Guy, even the great jokes we remember, all seem outside of what we watch every Sunday.
American Dad doesn't play that way and it's a McFarlane show.
Every episode has a clear and engaging story built on something concrete in the characters. Family Guy tends to run around on Peter's immaturity or the family's revulsion of Meg. Or, alternatively, Stewie and Brian doing something together.
American Dad gives you these characters, throws them pinballing into one another for some classic sitcom action, but also tends to satirize things as well.
Not only is the whole show one giant play against the typical Republican household, it actually portrays them both politically neutral (Family Guy gets more political than American Dad, strangely) and politically charged.
When Stan and Francine sabotage a rival couple's birth control, Francine casually asks: "Why wouldn't they just abort it?"
Stan turns deadpan to the camera and says: "Because they're awesome." It's a joke. We laugh.
But it serves more purposes than that. It fills plot holes, it satirizes political policy and at the same time it pokes fun at traditional gender roles. (For example Stan, the man, telling Francine what another woman is going to do with her baby.)
This one, throwaway joke informs and entertains us just like a cutaway gag does, but its subtlety actually empowers the storyline whereas Family Guy's jokes usually happen outside of the story.
We as a generation consume more entertainment than any generation before, which means that self-referential comedy is a big hit.
It's why we love Community and 30 Rock. We get television, we watch tons of it, so that style of comedy sticks with us.
But Family Guy exists in this weird bubble between two spaces.
The cutaway gags are great. Robot Chicken is a show built on this; they are literally dozens of cutaway gags making fun of pop culture for an entire 15-minute show. And that's great.
Community, on the other hand, has a story. Troy and Abed build a blanket fort and it informs us on their characters. Jeff and Annie subvert very typical will-they-won't-they tropes and it contextualizes those plots.
Family Guy doesn't really commit to either side of the spectrum.
Cutaway gags are funny, but they have no relevance to the story. And the story is wonderfully absurd, but it's absurd for no reason, rather than driving these characters or informing us about storytelling.
If, say, one were to be combined with another, using cutaway gags as something that seriously enhances the viewer's experience, well, maybe there you have something.
But as it stands, the formula that Family Guy has built for itself just isn't sustainable.
Not to mention that, despite his own self-indulgence, I'm not very sold on McFarlane.
He's a good writer, clearly he understands how to build stories and jokes, but as a producer, I'm less than impressed.
Take, for instance, The Venture Brothers, a tiny animated show that's best known as the brainchild of Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick.
Like a lot of animated shows, Publick and Hammer voice plenty of the characters. But, unlike Family Guy, very rarely do those characters bounce off the voice actor.
If Publick voices one-half of a conversation, the other half will almost always be Hammer (or any other of their talented vocal cast).
Family Guy does the opposite. McFarlane gets paired with McFarlane for episodes at a time. Literally, the 150th episode, "Brian and Stewie," had one voice actor: McFarlane.
And that episode, while ambitious in that it stayed away from absurdist plots and cutaways, fell flat because there isn't a dynamic between Seth and himself. At the end of it, I don't feel like Family Guy is necessarily bad. It's not even overhyped.
It's just not what we thought it was.
Jokes on wheels, ladies and gentlemen, isn't Emmy material. It's barely TV Guide material. So, why do we tout Famiy Guy as the show of our generation?
