Family Guy has become the new anchor of Fox Sunday nights, supplanting The Simpsons which has become patently unfunny. What the hell happened? The past two seasons were simply atrocious, and this season has forced me to make a decision I thought I would never have to make - should I continue watching new episodes of The Simpsons?
[Insert punch line here]
Long gone are the glory days of Conan O'Brien. Sharp, sometimes biting satire coupled with silly and often sweet humor have been replaced by template episodes riddled with awful yuks reminiscent of the DJ 3000 ("Don't praise the machine!"). While some satire remains, nearly all of the jokes have lost their silly quality and have drifted into the "dumb for the sake of being dumb" category. I've lost count of how many times Homer has claimed not to be guilty of some behavior and then do it as soon as he finishes talking. Hardy har har.
You're fired. Aw geez, for how long?
Thankfully, Family Guy has come roaring back to save the collective asses of Fox programming executives. The three episodes I've seen this season (the rest are tucked away safely on my Tivo) have had me cackling out loud for most of the show. Osama bin Laden's outtakes reel followed by the title homage to Police Squad!/The Naked Gun was simply brilliant. The Simpsons used to have that gutty, satirical edge. That's what kept the show popular for so long. "Don't have a cow man" has only a short comedic lifetime, but social and political commentary are forever. Here's hoping that the writers of Family Guy understand that and keep up the great work.
10 comments:
I totally agree on the Simpsons front. I haven't watched a new episode in about 4 years. I think it's just a matter of having held on for too long. What season are the on, 234?
My memories are still the fond ones. Hopefully Fox execs will stop trying to taint them. Damn their oily hides!
What's odd to me now is that looking back, the reason that I never watched Family Guy when it was originally on is it seemed like a bad imitation of the Simpsons -- essentially, another show about a white middle class family with an older brother, a younger sister, and a baby. Except in this one the baby talks, and so does the dog. But now that I've watched the DVDs, it's pretty clear that the shows are totally different in their humor (although I can't really put my finger on why, maybe we can figure that out). I am so, so relieved that when Fox brought it back it was still funny.
I stopped making an effort to catch the new episodes of the Simpsons at least three years ago. Even the Halloween episode this year wasn't that funny. I think really the show seems to just be mean-spirited most of the time. It's almost like instead of people you identify with (but still laugh at) they're more of like a bunch of asshole's that you're glad you don't live next to. But anyway, here's a pretty good article that looks at some reasons why the show has started to suck: http://www.slate.com/id/2078501/ It was written over two years ago, and the show has sadly grown even less funny since then. But the legacy lives on, in DVD format.
Well, the biggest difference I see between Family Guy and The Simpsons of yore (i.e. still funny) is that The Simpsons relied upon satire and sweet humor, with only occasional goofy jokes/gags mixed in. Family Guy, on the other hand, stands on a solid base of absurdity (smartly done). Peter's fart war with Michael Moore had me rolling, and not just because of the fart noises (which is what The Simpsons of today would focus on).
Filler' up with petroleum distillate, and revulcanize my tires, post haste!
DENTAL PLAN!
This probably deserves a very full treatment on each of our blogs. IMO, the Simpsons have gone downhill because the funniest people left and all of the ideas have been used. What more can they even do? Okay, what if, uh, Apu and Homer and Willie end up travelling through time and end up in a Russian gulag?
I remember Matt Groening (I think it was Groening) also said something once that stuck with me as I watch the show roll into and through mediocrity: Homer can only get dumber. He can't ever get smarter. When you watch the first two or three seasons, Homer wasn't very bright ("Homer Simpson, Local Boob") but he wasn't a raving lunatic or quite so brutish. He was more like, well, our dads, if only funnier, balder, fatter and stupider. But it was funny and kind of easy to let Homer get dumber ... stupider ... crazier ... meaner ... but you can't ever go back.
Someone else also pointed out that the show eventually changed from revolving around Bart to revolving around Homer. Absolutely true.
The Slate article was good (although the two episodes they cite in the first paragraph - Furious D and Homer as Mr. Burns' Prank Monkey - are two of my favorite, relatively recent episodes). Running out of ideas, the new writers aren't as good, the show lost its human touch etc.
The other point: this happens to all truly funny shows that stick around for awhile. They get less funny. The best jokes have been used. Cheers. Seinfeld. All in the Family. MASH - definitely MASH. Frasier. Taxi. The Cosby Show. Friends. In some ways, this was inevitable. In fact, I'd argue that Friends had one of the most precipitous drops in TV history. Don't judge me. I'll put more up about this on my blog.
As for Family Guy, it's essentially Dali and Picasso to the Simpsons' Monet (Or is it Manet?) I mean, Monet's work is brilliant. It's stunning. But even though it's pointilism (I think it's pointilism) it is still supposed to look like real life. Picasso and Dali made something else entirely to the point where you know what you're looking at, but it's completed reimagined.
Is this a good comparison or is this just BS? You tell me.
The Simpsons was ever funny?
I don't think Monet is pointilism, since he used plenty of full brush strokes in his paintings, even though he didn't disguise them. Annnnnd...I'm a nerd.
I think Josh's point about Family Guy being smartly absurd is right on the money. But I think Family Guy as a sweetness at its heart too. One of the best episodes is the one where Brian works for that old lady who was a near-celebrity singer, and he ends up singing her a song about what she missed from the past couple decades (didn't the show win an emmy for that song?). I haven't really seen too much of that this season, though.
Here's my plan: I'm going to watch both The Simpsons and The Family Guy tomorrow night, and try to blog about them on Monday by picking them apart and figuring out what is funny/not funny about each. Hopefully both episodes will work for this idea, and by looking at the blurbs for each, they will be. Dissapointment disorder? Come on!
"See Homer Run" Episode #1621.
Homer's reaction to Lisa's Father's Day book causes her to develop a disappointment disorder.
"The Courtship of Stewie's Father" Episode #419.
Stewie steps up his efforts to kill Lois, who orders Peter to spend more time with him.
I'm sure ideas are hard to come by, but that can't be used as an excuse. Episodes don't have to have monumental ideas to be successful. I mean, Seinfeld succeeded as the complete antithesis to that. Which, now that I think about it, brings me to a similarity between Seinfeld and The Simpsons in its heyday.
Seinfeld basically had 4 different storylines each episode, with each character having his own storyline. The brilliance of the writers allowed them to have 4 disparate stories woven together perfectly for the ultimate comedic effect. The Simpsons used to follow that same idea, with two or three storylines in each episode (Bart doing something, Homer doing something else, sometimes a seperate Marge storyline). They could focus on three smaller ideas and have them be funny without the trouble of coming up with 22 minutes of comedy focused on a single idea. Why they got away from that we'll probably never know.
I think the Seinfeld-Simpsons comparison isn't bad, but two points about it:
1. Seinfeld wasn't as funny at the end as it was in the beginning and middle, just not to the same degree, which was partly because they ended to avoid going out poorly.
2. Seinfeld's whole schtick was that it was about nothing. Even then, the show was still ostensibly about something - they wait in a Chinese restaurant, they lose their car in the parking lot, they're on an airplane, working for the Yankees, celebrating Festivus. It's just that the show treated everything as relatively insignificant and no one ever learns a lesson or grows.
The Simpsons, on the other hand, really started as a family-type show. Sure, most families didn't have a son that tried to jump the Springfield Gorge on his skateboard or have a dad who saved the town from a nuclear meltdown by accident. But it was still oriented around the idea that they were a family. The show evolved into something more absurd, but even then the show was pretty linear.
The Monorail was a great episode and utterly ridiculous (also the only episode written entirely by Conan O'Brien, I think). But the show revolves around one or two plots and eventually resolves the issue, like most episodes ("Then the children were rescued by, let's say Moe.") There used to be some sort of moral, even if Homer was still Homer next week.
So in some ways, the Simpsons could never really be about nothing. So as the show pushes further and further into nothingness, it gets less funny.
Family Guy is absurdist. That was the premise from very early in the show's run (although it's still more absurd today than it was in the very beginning). But Family Guy sells out to absurdism - it's totally absurd. Stuff isn't supposed to make sense. Peter is supposed to be a giant idiot. The dog talks. The baby talks. Peter fought a chicken. Meg slept with Jimmy Fallon. It works because they're committed to it and they do it well. The Simpsons, I'd argue, are stuck in between and don't do either well anymore (the funny family stuff or the absurdist stuff).
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