If anyone doubted my dislike, often bordering on contempt, fuelled by disappointment, of Seth Mac Farlane's comedy answer to
The Simpsons, Family Guy, my recent article "Time to go? The case against
Family Guy" will have cleared that up for you. It"s not that I hate the show, it's just that it could be so much better if its creator bothered to actually write, rather than just, as Blackadder once opined, getting drunk, sticking on a funny hat and trusting to luck!
But the blame can't only rest with that show. MacFarlane's other effort,
American Dad, while it is marginally better, still suffers from the same contrived plot devices, poor and often tasteless humour, racism, bigotry and lazy writing as its parent show. This could not be more clearly illustrated than when recently, one of the characters actually died --- he fell off a cliff, sacrificing himself --- and not in the next episode, not in the next week, but in the very next
minute he was alive again. What was the explanation you ask? None. None was offered. This overconfident, fat lazy bastard seems to think he can kill a character and bring him back to life in the same breath without all that inconvenient explaining how it was done, and people will lap it up and not ask questions?
Well not
this guy, mate! I'm taking you on, MacFarlane, and I'm going to be asking the hard questions you seem unwilling --- or perhaps unable --- to answer about your two creations. We'll see how the two of them stand up to proper, intense and logical scrutiny, obviously within the parameters of both being animated comedy shows: we're not going to go mad here. But no matter what type of show you're writing, as I said in the lead piece, you have to credit your audience with some sort of intelligence and not just write whatever you want, without ever having to be called upon to explain yourself. You can do that if you're writing for yourself in your bedsit; when you write for a major television show that goes out worldwide, you have to pay attention a little more and be ready to back up your plot devices with sound pretext.
I have no real interest in featuring either show here, but what I would like to explore is both the at times staggering similarities between the two shows, and the clear evidence that Seth has not learned his lesson, and with
American Dad is still churning out the same crap he got, and continues to get away with, on
Family Guy.
So as a companion piece to, and follow-on from that article, in this section I will be comparing, episode to episode, season to season, the two shows, noting where the same ideas, concepts and even occasionally the same jokes are used, and asking what, if anything, the difference between the two shows are.
To be fair and not too biased, I'll also note and award points for when new ideas are used, where certain concepts, characters or themes work better than others, and decide which show wins out. In the end, I'll then make a determination as to which show is better overall, or whether each is as bad as the other.
There will not be reviews in my usual manner, and my comments will of necessity come across as biased, because after several years of watching
Family Guy I have come to the inescapable conclusion that it is well past its prime, and now, watching its successor I can see the same sort of malaise creeping in as Seth’s now-legendary lazy writing takes the show by the throat and threatens to throttle the life out of it. This will happen --- there is no evidence anywhere that MacFarlane listens to his fans and tries to accomodate them, and like both his main characters he seems to think he is always right, no matter how obvious it is that he is not. But before
American Dad goes down in flames and becomes a pale parody of itself, following in the footsteps of
Family Guy, I want to compare like to like, and see where the rot set in, what happened when it did, and how, if at all, it could be stopped.
Stay tuned...