Maybe I’ve seen seasons 1 through 3 way too many times. Maybe I’m getting mature. Maybe the South Park episode about why Family Guy sucks flipped a switch. Or maybe Seth MacFarlane traded humor for trying to preach about the wonderful benefits of gay marriage and the evils of Wal-Mart, errr I mean Superstore USA or whatever.
I still think that matricidal infant geniuses are funny. I still think that alcoholic dog geniuses are funny. But how often does Stewie try to kill Lois these days? And Brian seems to have traded the bottle for saving the world.
In other words, I’m not laughing. Family Guy is approaching the comedic level of Saturday Night Live. The current SNL. I watch not because I expect to see funny things. I watch because I wonder if they’ve righted the ship.
Through most of season 4 I didn’t laugh much. Although once I saw the episodes repeated I appreciated them a bit more. Maybe I just have to give the new season more time.
Maybe I need to try to take the show less seriously. But this is becoming more difficult, because the creators obviously want to be taken seriously. If they want me to seriously believe that Wal-Mart is destroying the world, by literally sucking the energy out of a community, then I have to point out they don’t understand energy or economics or dynamics or really much of anything of importance.
(By the way they’d like to thank you for going to your local big-box store and buying enough DVDs that the show got brought back on the air.)
The sad thing for the show is that they are now not preaching well nor being funny.
The sad thing for me is that I’m taking cartoons seriously.
