Following this post on the South Park-Family Guy feud a few other sites have jumped onto this observational bandwagon:
Peeve Farm addressed Family Guy back in 2003, and then returned to it in May 2004. Highlights from his rants include:
The Y2K/Apocalypse episode, which is by far the worst example of such clumsiness that I've seen so far in the series, starts out with a literally five-minute long flashback sequence in which Peter fights with a man-sized chicken through the city streets. No reason; no point that affects the subsequent plot. Just a five-minute flashback fight scene that was apparently thrown in there to flesh out a script that wasn't long enough. (The whole fight scene probably took up less than a third of a page of script.) Ditto for the point later in that episode when the family encounters Randy Newman at a piano. Newman extemporaneously bangs out a song in which he narrates Lois's facial expressions as she stares at him. And this goes on for like a minute and a half! Ninety seconds of tedious, less-funny-every-moment variations on the same lame joke; finally, Peter whisks her hurriedly away, but where the hell was he forty-five seconds ago? Did the writers get lost on the way back from the break room? Or did they run out of monkey chow to hurl into the room with the million typewriters?
How long did Seth McFarlane sit in a sound booth refining the voice of the son (whose name I still can't remember), until settling on something that sounds like a frog on a cocktail of crack and helium? At what point did he leap from his chair, shouting Eureka! upon concluding that he'd developed the perfect voice to flesh out a cast perfectly tuned to rub viewers' brains raw with every line they deliver? It's like watching a show predicated on an Urkel/Jimmy (from South Park)/Orko/Ozmodiar/Snarf/Jakovasaur/The Baby From Dinosaurs ensemble. All the most annoying characters ever conceived for TV, together again for the first time!
And that's it! Not even any payoff to all that waiting! No joke to defuse the tension, no punchline to punctuate the scene—it just ends. Total time elapsed: something like two goddamned minutes, during which I heard Lance in the other room bark out a cry of annoyance and switch his TV to the History Channel, where the comedic timing is much snappier.
But I'm afraid that Family Guy fails just as badly, even for such a self-aware, fourth-wall-busting entry starting from such a plateau of studied advantage. Seth McFarlane might have a brilliant brother†, but his ability to parlay his own meager voice-acting talents into an engaging series has thus far struck me as... well, inadequate.
But there's just this thread of interminability running through the show, a sense of the writers simply not knowing what the hell they're doing. They telegraph jokes like they're carrying the spool of wire between two running men in Blue from Baltimore to Harpers Ferry; and I don't want to give the impression that I have no attention span, but‡†The author makes what I believe to be a common error. Seth MacFarlane has a "famous" sister Rachel and a comedian cousin Tim, but no brother. He is in no way related to Todd McFarlane of Spawn fame, mostly obvious due to the spelling of the last name but also because McFarlane hails from Calgary.
‡No idea what the end of that last sentence was supposed to be.
If that isn't enough, somebody has decided to start a blog dedicated to Family Guy entitled Family Guy Steals. The site isn't perfect, at one point unfairly criticizing Family Guy for ripping the "Death" character from South Park (obviously the character was created in 1991 by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon). I've put a couple comments to some of the posts. The thing to note is the vitrolic and one-dimensional attacks by most of the defenders on the blog.
