It finally happened! After twelve "volumes" of Family Guy episodes released on DVD - volumes that contained anything from thirteen to twenty-odd episodes, and volumes that spanned different seasons with no real regard for organization - the powers that be said, "Hey, fuck it. Let's just call this one Season 12." This release - still called "Volume 13" in the DVD menus and elsewhere - begins with the twelfth season's premiere and ends with its finale. This can't be considered a big deal to anyone else out there at all, but for a guy who's been buying this show's DVD releases for, shit, something like thirteen years now, a very old pet peeve has finally been settled.
That's the best thing I can say about the twelfth season of Family Guy, a show where a majority of the jokes are baldly offensive or at least offensively lazy. Some would say that's always been the case with this show, and they'd be completely right. In fact, I've been right there with them all along. Let's take a quick trip through the annals of Back-Blogged and see what I said the last five times I posted about this show:
Volume 8 (6/21/10) - Family Guy is just animated sketch comedy. There's nothing wrong with that, but it means that the show lives or dies by the strength of its jokes. And frankly, they're just not always funny.
Volume 9 (7/30/12) - There were still plenty of cringe-inducing nonsensical gags and plenty of jokes that felt far more insensitive than funny, but the ratio of "times I hated that I was watching Family Guy" to "times I was interested in what Family Guy was doing" was at the lowest point it's been in years.
Volume 10 (10/2/12) - Don't get me wrong; this wasn't an awful stretch of Family Guy episodes or anything. It just reminded me that Family Guy isn't a very funny show.
Volume 11 (11/22/13) - Yeah, you heard me. Family Guy is better than it was when it was terrible. Take that one at face value.
Volume 12 (5/21/14) - 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?
This twelfth season (and thirteenth volume) provided me with a few laughs, a few cringes, and a whole lot of apathy. In that respect, it was more or less representative of the average season of Family Guy. I don't like that I still watch this show, but then, I also don't mind burning fifteen bucks a year on it, mostly out of some vague sense of tradition and habit. Did you guys know my first ever TV sets on DVD were the first two volumes of Family Guy? Yeah - fourteen-year-old me just ate that shit up with a spoon.
Every now and then I catch an old episode on TBS and I still laugh, but I can't tell if I'm laughing out of some kind of nostalgia or if I find them legitimately funny- new episodes will barely get a chuckle out of me but it doesn't seem like the humor or style of gags has changed much.
ReplyDeleteAlso I'm guessing by the cover this had the few episodes where Brian died and got replaced with another dog? I remember that causing a small shitstorm on Twitter, with lots of people getting overly angry at the show.
To your first point, yeah, well said. The show isn't any different, formula-wise or tonally, than it used to be. It's just way shittier. Was it ever good? Did we get too old? These things happen to long running cartoons; The Simpsons is a shell of itself now, South Park has had multiple years-long ruts, Futurama ran out of compelling stuff midway through its third and final iteration. But Family Guy just feels incredibly lazy.
DeleteTo your second paragraph, yes! I meant to bring that up somewhere in my post, in fact. The family's replacement dog was an Italian guy voiced by Paulie Walnuts himself. It was interesting, but, yeah, Brian and Stewie have long been the only redeeming parts of this show, and to lose either one of them for more than a few episodes in a row would have been a gaffe for sure.