Off topic, but there was a disturbing moment in The Simpsons (season premiere already??). Lisa leads Fat Tony's son away from the dinner table, saying "Your gift deserves a chance to flower." Camera pans to Bart, eating souffle, as Homer walks up behind him. "Why can't you do anything?" as Homer slaps Bart on the back of the head.

If he had strangled him, maybe. But he actually struck his own son -- for no reason.

"The rape motif threaded through the episode was unsettling and disrespectful"

Have you watched the show before? Unsettling and disrespectful jokes are the show's bread and butter.

Unlike The Simpsons or South Park, Family Guy is proudly amoral.

I LOVE family guy -- but this wasn't funny. It wasn't poking fun at a sacred cow or using it to elicit laughs. It was just sort of disturbing. There's nothing worse than a sacreligious jokes that's all heresy, no humor.

I agree (I think) with Petey: FAmily Guy has long been pretty gross.

"It wasn't poking fun at a sacred cow"

Again, Family Guy is just an amoral show.

South Park pokes fun at sacred cows for ultimately moral purposes. Family guy pokes cows to hear them moo.

Ezra, I hope you know that by questioning this episode of the Family Guy you are stating that all Family Guy episodes are bad. In fact, you are stating cartoons are bad. And if cartoon are bad tv's are bad. If tv's are bad so is capitalism. Clearly this post means that you are a communist who hates America.

I receive all my cartoon related talking points from Karl Rove.

It's a weak start to the new season. However, I did like the bit where Lois gets guilt pangs over her anger toward temporarily clingy Stewie: "I'm like that mother in Texas who gave her son brain damage by holding him under water. I've turned into Barbara Bush!"

I don't know that "amoral" quite gets at it. Seinfeld was amoral - there was no learning, there was no conclusion of any sort to wrap up the actions. It was just people acting without ethics, and that was funny.

On Family Guy, there are resolutions. We're supposed to cheer for Peter in a way that we were never supposed to cheer for Jerry. By building the show around something like a hero, and having him poke sacred cows to see if they moo, I think Family Guy regularly crosses the line from amoral to reactionary.

I hope you anti-Family Guy folks realize that you are aligning yourself with Cartman in opposition to Kyle.

I have to say, I've never been able to watch Family Guy in the same way again after seeing that bit with the manatees.

Speaking of Family Guy's sacred cows, if you haven't seen the held episode where they make fun of Jews, you really should. It's fantastic. And, weirdly, the Jews come off really well.

Speaking of Family Guy's sacred cows, if you haven't seen the held episode where they make fun of Jews, you really should. It's fantastic. And, weirdly, the Jews come off really well.

I think I saw that episode -- the dad wants his son to become a Jew because then he'll be smart? I thought it was pretty good. But how do you see it as making fun of Jews? Maybe I missed some bits at the start, but what I saw was kind of like those episodes of All in the Family where Archie meets a rabbi and makes an ass of himself.

Another point ... it's just so weird to find a thread where people talk about Family Guy as if it were a show that can be enjoyed. I'm not faulting you -- I haven't seen enough of the series to have an opinion --but normally I only hear it discussed among the comic book crowd. And they take it for granted that Family Guy is to cartoon humor what the Bush administration is to policymaking.

"it's just so weird to find a thread where people talk about Family Guy as if it were a show that can be enjoyed."

I know what you mean, but what are you gonna do? Some folks actually have a sense of humor, and thus enjoy unredeemable filth like Family Guy.

South Park pokes fun at sacred cows for ultimately moral purposes

Like hell it does. South Park does plenty of the random pointless jokes; it just doesn't do it nearly as well as Family Guy does (see, for example, the episode where Ben Affleck falls in love with Cartman's hand puppet). And the episodes where it does have a point are extended, preachy strawman arguments (Al Gore believes in global warming! But Al Gore is a nerd! Therefore global warming doesn't exist, because Al Gore is a nerd!).

Last night's new Simpsons was better than last night's new Family Guy.

That hasn't happened in a long, long time.

"And the episodes where it does have a point are extended, preachy strawman arguments"

When I say South Park is moral, I'm just saying that South Park smashes icons to make a a moral point, not that I think their moral point is correct.

Contrast that to the amoral Family Guy, which smashes icons for the pleasure of seeing icons get smashed.

When I say South Park is moral, I'm just saying that South Park smashes icons to make a a moral point, not that I think their moral point is correct.

Contrast that to the amoral Family Guy, which smashes icons for the pleasure of seeing icons get smashed.

But South Park isn't really making a moral point. They mock celebrities because they like to mock celebrities. After a while Parker and Stone started to attach political messages onto the ends of their celebrity-bashing shows, but the messages are only tenuously connected to the content of the shows themselves - South Park is still just about bashing celebrities. So instead of an episode making the point that Policy X is bad, they do an episode where Celebrity Y, an advocate of Policy X, is shown to be an idiot. South Park isn't actually advocating a moral viewpoint; its creators wouldn't recognize one if they saw one. It's just shallow celebrity-bashing dressed up in pretensions of social awareness - or, as you put it, smashing icons for the pleasure of seeing icons get smashed.

"South Park isn't actually advocating a moral viewpoint; its creators wouldn't recognize one if they saw one."

Again, just because you don't agree with the show's moral/political viewpoint doesn't mean it lacks a moral/political viewpoint.

As I'd guess you are aware, many pixels have been killed by folks opining on the South Park Republican viewpoint.

Again, contrast that to the impossibility of folks opining about a Family Guy moral/political viewpoint.

Again, just because you don't agree with the show's moral/political viewpoint doesn't mean it lacks a moral/political viewpoint.

Again, I'm not making the argument that South Park is not political because I don't like Parker and Stone's politics. I'm making the argument that South Park is shallow and amoral because it never puts forth an actual political argument. The global warming episode could've made any of the standard climate change skeptic arguments, but it didn't - it just spent half an hour making one prominent global warming spokesman look like a dweeb. The anti-hybrid episode didn't even pretend to make a rational argument for why conserving energy is bad; it just tried to make prominent conservation advocates look insufferable (and, more to the point for this crowd, gay).

It's fine and dandy to make celebrities look like idiots if that's what you want to do, but don't pretend that there's anything more to it than that. South Park's "politics" aren't based on any actual coherent political ideology; they're based on a fantastically shallow conflation of cultural figures with the issues they talk about.

"I'm making the argument that South Park is shallow and amoral because it never puts forth an actual political argument."

So all the folks who write extensively about the libertarian viewpoint that is ridiculously foregrounded in many South Park episodes are hallucinating?

"South Park's "politics" aren't based on any actual coherent political ideology"

The weasel word here is "coherent", of course.

South Park's politics aren't particularly coherent, but many political ideologies aren't. I don't think Bush-ism is particularly coherent. Neither do I think Kos-ism is particularly coherent.

But coherent or not, the underlying moral/political viewpoint of South Park is not particularly hard to discern.

Cartman absolutely nailed Family Guy.

Petey's right. Glibertarianism isn't a particularly coherent or healthy moral/political viewpoint, but it is one, nonetheless.

On the other hand, Petey's wrong about Family Guy. Family Guy is unfunny, boring, poorly written, parasitic on better shows, and weakly animated. I don't say this because I lack a sense of humor, but because Family Guy is a lazy amoral piece of hackwork that requires an audience conditioned to laugh, or at least drool, at contextless references to bad 80s TV.

It only survives because people my age are capable of feeling nostalgia for Mr. Belvidere.

"It only survives because people my age are capable of feeling nostalgia for Mr. Belvedere."

Heh.

"Family Guy is a lazy amoral piece of hackwork"

Please stop insulting the manatees. They're sensitive.

So all the folks who write extensively about the libertarian viewpoint that is ridiculously foregrounded in many South Park episodes are hallucinating?

No, they are projecting. Both libertarians and conservatives believe they're marginalized by their culture and its surrounding media. Of course they're going to latch onto any show that bashes people they don't like - in this case liberal celebrities and "hippies." For god's sake, Jonah Goldberg has appropriated The Simpsons as a conservative show. Does that make The Simpsons actually conservative?

The weasel word here is "coherent", of course.

Toss out the weasel word, then. To what political ideology, period, does the show ascribe? Being embraced by libertarians doesn't make it libertarian. Being embraced by conservatives doesn't make it conservative. The only ideology the show has adopted is an anti-liberals one - not anti-liberal, mind you, but anti-liberals. The show fails to articulate what it is about liberalism that's bad, other than that it's embraced by liberals.

Glibertarianism isn't a particularly coherent or healthy moral/political viewpoint, but it is one, nonetheless.

But the whole point of calling something like that "glibertarianism" (or "shmibertarianism" or whatever) is to point out that it's not a political ideology. It's just a bunch of people taking the libertarian label because they think it makes them look better. It's not ideology, it's fashion.

South Park pokes fun at sacred cows for ultimately moral purposes. Family guy pokes cows to hear them moo.

Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you want to be moralized by a television cartoon when you come home at the end of the day.

Please stop insulting the manatees. They're sensitive.

By all appearances, they also seem to ghost write for South Park. How else would we get the episode where the kids help a talking, pot-smoking towel escape the U.S. military to get their video game console back, or the one where Barbra Streisand turns into a giant Toho-style monster and slugs it out with a variety of giant transformed celebrities, or the one where Cartman enlists Radiohead in his scheme to trick another boy into eating his parents, or the one where a spaceship grows out of Cartman's ass?

I'm sure Petey can show me the subtle thread of incisive conservative thought here, but let me point out that not only are these episodes full of random nonsense, they're also some of South Park's most classic and best-remembered episodes. This is the show that started out as a "Santa Claus Versus Jesus" short. Its increasing preachiness in later years hasn't taken away from the fact that it's more concerned with trading in non sequiturs than anything else.

"Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on whether you want to be moralized by a television cartoon when you come home at the end of the day."

To me, it's basically a neutral factor. I like both moral art and amoral art. What matters to me is quality.

And since I think South Park and Family Guy are both very high quality comedies, I like 'em both, despite their fundamental differences.

Agreed Ezra, that episode was near the bottom of quality for McFarlane. But I wouldn't count him out just yet, last season was fantastic overall, especially the Osama opening montage. I still have that one saved on my DVR!

So I didn't agree with Petey and the world makes sense again. This strikes me as right: Family Guy is unfunny, boring, poorly written, parasitic on better shows, and weakly animated.

I'm not going to dispute Ezra's judgement of the episode, not having seen it, but I'm still curious about how it was "disrespectful". "Respectful" is not a word I would, or would want to, associate with Family Guy. Why is it a bad thing in this episode?

"I'm still curious about how it was "disrespectful"

It basically mocks rape victims.

And FWIW, I thought it was a middling episode in the Family Guy oeuvre. There have been worse and there have been better.

Family Guy is unfunny, boring, poorly written, parasitic on better shows, and weakly animated. I don't say this because I lack a sense of humor, but because Family Guy is a lazy amoral piece of hackwork that requires an audience conditioned to laugh, or at least drool, at contextless references to bad 80s TV.

A-freakin'-Men. And since I missed most of 80's television, I have never, ever laughed at any of their jokes. On the other hand, The Simpsons is one of my favorite shows. Simpsons does an especially good job with the music, too.

Having a big bong-hit makes almost any show funny. The difference between a funny show and an unfunny show is how much they make you laugh when you're straight.

Family Guy is ONLY funny if you hit the bong first. And during the show. And during the commercial breaks. Then it's pretty funny.

What Alex said. Family Guy was always crap; so glad Ezra finally noticed.

Now, how about some Wire blogging? You are watching, aren't you?

"Now, how about some Wire blogging? You are watching, aren't you?"

Episode 4.2 is really, really good.

Rather than trying to write a full FG apologia for the sense of humor impaired, I'll just point to Nancy Franklin's New Yorker review, and provide two pull quotes:

describing cartoon characters is a losing business—so much depends on the voices. “Family Guy” is almost like a radio show, and that’s one of its pleasures.

...

"Family Guy" is laugh-out-loud, timelessly loopy—it’s a Dadaesque vaudeville turn, often literally

"Family Guy is ONLY funny if you hit the bong first. And during the show. And during the commercial breaks. Then it's pretty funny."

Same story with The O'Reilly Factor.

Episode 4.2 is really, really good.

Excellent. I'll watch it tonight, while Jody is watching Gilmore Girls on the other TV (I gave up near the end of Season 6).

Wow, so much loathing for Family Guy that I didn't expect. The season opener was funny and much better than the Simpsons I thought. The funny part about Family Guy is how incredibly stupid and selfish Peter is--the season opener was no different. I was not disappointed. The Simpsons' opener was very disappointing, though. The jokes were obvious and rushed and the only funny part was Homer playing with his man-boobs. However, this is all subjective so feel free to tell me what's wrong with my sense of humor.

As for South Park: It's a great show and sometimes has a coherent political message. More often than not, though, the message is glib and unthinking. One of my favorite episodes is where Jimmy takes steriods and at the end they call out McGuire, Sosa and their ilk for cheating. Not a political message, but an effective and coherent one, nonetheless.

family guy humor revolves solely around boy-man geeks high-fiving each other for remembering pop culture ephemera without any context.

And if folks want a kickass cartoon with a moral/political viewpoint you can embrace, I highly recommend watching The Boondocks.

They've done some really amazing episodes.

while Jody is watching Gilmore Girls on the other TV (I gave up near the end of Season 6).

Hear, hear. I held on far too long as the quirkiness slid into soapiness. It's supposed to be oddball, folks, not an endless rehash of "Will [insert relevant couple here] break up, or not?" And when they had to rely on Lane's life to provide the sole surreal elements, it was the handwriting on the wall. And don't mention Kirk around me, either.

Wait, what is this Family Guy about which you speak?

Soapiness is precisely the problem for me too, mds. The writers got lazy (or bored or tired, or just ran out of ideas) and went for the lazy writers' technique: if you don't know what to do with the story, break up a couple.

Christmas: "How else would we get the episode where the kids help a talking, pot-smoking towel escape the U.S. military to get their video game console back...?"

Bad example, because "Towelie" did have a point (beyond a deliberate exercise in creating the worst character ever). The boys were so blinded by the pursuit of their Okama Gamesphere that they failed to notice they were in a real-life adventure! Or was it too subtle for ya??

The Boondocks isn't always funny, but it's got enough going on that it's still good even when it's not funny. And it's usually at least a little funny.

So Petey's correct about that, even if he can't tell the difference between an incoherent collage of pointless mean-spiritedness and contextless obscure references and timelessy loopy, Dadaesque vaudevillianism. Or maybe the two are, in fact, one in the same and the latter just isn't all that funny.

Grumpy,

I think you're confusing not noticing with not caring.

Episode 4.2 is really, really good.

Indeed it is. My review is here.

"Some folks actually have a sense of humor, and thus enjoy unredeemable filth like Family Guy."

Petey's confused. Outside this thread, the standard criticism of Family Guy isn't that it's just too badass and irreverent. It's that the show is dumb, clodhopping, predictable.