Family Guy: Volume 12

In 2002, back when Family Guy was in its pre-cancelation "Golden Era" of sorts, Fox refused to air an episode called "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein." It did eventually air on Adult Swim, and a few years later on Fox itself, and of course there was buzz and promotional interest in this forbidden episode. This was Family Guy, after all, easily the most offensive and controversial show on network television, so for something to be deemed to inappropriate for Family Guy was a big deal. So, just what was it about this episode that had pushed the envelope too far?

Some potentially anti-Semitic content. The gist of the episode is that Peter does something foolish with his money, then decides he needs a Jewish guy to look after his money, then decides that Jews are great and that he needs to convert his son to Judaism, then ultimately gets talked out of all that in a fairly standard episode-ending "everything is back to normal" discussion with Brian or Lois or the Jewish guy or some combination of all three. It's actually amazingly vanilla stuff, especially when you compare it to other content Family Guy "got away with" both before and since that episode didn't air. By and large, the episode treated the Jewish guy as the straight man and Peter as a buffoon, as always. The episode has found its way back into syndication and DVD releases, and if you were to see it today without knowing about its initial controversy you wouldn't think anything of it at all.

I bring this up just to serve as a remarkable contrast to "Turban Cowboy," an episode of Family Guy that aired in 2013 without any fuss whatsoever. The set-up is fairly similar, in that Peter makes a new friend with different religious beliefs and then makes a misguided attempt to convert his family to that religion - in this case, Islam. There were two enormous differences in the way the two episodes unfolded, though. Where Peter wanted to become a Jew in 2002 because he admired their intelligence, he wanted to become a Muslim in 2013 because of how subservient Islamic women are to their husbands. Yeesh. And then, where Peter gets talked out of becoming a Jew through a somewhat formulaic conversation, he only decides not to be a Muslim once he realizes his new friend is a member of a terrorist cell.

So, to reiterate, in 2002 an episode was deemed unfit for TV broadcast because there were a few Jewish stereotypes in it, but in 2013 it was cool to depict American Muslims as womanizing terrorists? There's got to be a reason for this. Have broadcast standards fallen that drastically since 2002? Are the big wigs at Fox far more willing to denigrate Muslims than Jews? By the way, I'm not suggesting that "Turban Cowboy" should have been banned or anything - I'm just sort of amazed that it wasn't, given that "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" once was.

I've now rambled way too much about one specific episode on this volume of television, but then, what else am I going to say about a stale cartoon Ive discussed four times previously on this blog? I'm already as bored with this post as I was by most of these episodes, so rather than highlight some of the good stuff - and there was some good stuff here - I'm just going to call this one finished and move on.