Family Guy by Seth MacFarlane: Commercially Successful Animated TV Show
In America’s long line of satirical animated TV shows, none have been half as commercially successful or critically lauded as The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-Head, and South Park. However, one show is moving ever so close to either predecessor, in both respects, and that show is Family Guy. Created by Seth MacFarlane, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and developed by him and acclaimed Hollywood TV writer-producer David Zuckerman, the series was commissioned by Fox on the strength of MacFarlane’s 1995 animated short film The Life of Larry and, especially, its 1997 sequel Larry and Steve. The sequel was about a middle-aged pilot named Larry who adopts Steve, an intellectual dog, at a dog pound because he was talking like a person but to everyone else, Steve is just barking.
From the airing of the pilot on the 20th Television Century Fox network on January 31, 1999, to the 339 episodes that followed in the show’s 18 seasons (and counting) over 21 years, Family Guy has, like The Simpsons and South Park, garnered immense critical praise and intense criticism for its unabashed brand of satire. Though not a rarity, Family Guy is still one of the few shows in TV history to have the distinction of appearing on-air in two different runs, with the original from 1999-2002 before cancellation until its revival, due to popular demand, from 2005 on. While off-network TV, though, the show found a home on Cartoon Network where it aired reruns on the channel’s Adult Swim time slot of shows. As a former viewer of Adult Swim shows, I can say with full confidence that that is the best thing that could have happened to the series. Why? Because the audience it attracted was exactly the kind of people a show like Family Guy needed to have and will always need to have. An audience who isn’t interested in clean jokes or not offending anyone. Most people like offensive jokes, even ones of pretty bad taste, because the shock value makes it funny. People don’t often realize it but a lot of us like to have that “Holy shit?! Did she really just say that?!” But the truth is ours is a society that is always ready to laugh and, more often than not, in reaction to and/or, at times, when we know we shouldn’t.
Shows like Family Guy, animated or otherwise, challenge us because most of us are thinking, “Oh shit, why am I laughing at that?!?! I’m awful! But, I mean, goddammit! That was funny!” On the other hand, however, we know full well that America is not a monolith, and as such, not everyone found or finds MacFarlane’s humor, as it plays out through the Griffins and Brian or Quagmire, as particularly funny. Some even consider Family Guy to be horrendously inappropriate for children or utterly detrimental to the meaning and sanctity of the word “family,” if not both.
Among the first reviewers to offer the series a thumbs-down critique was Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly. In his April 1999 EW.com article comparing Fox’s ratings-declining but funny King of the Hill to the network’s then-new yet bad-tasted humor in Family Guy, Tucker dubbed it “The Simpsons as conceived by a singularly sophomoric mind that lacks any reference point beyond other TV shows.” Tucker’s criticisms, however, while valid paled in comparison to those of the Parents Television Council, a censorship advocacy group, that condemned the show since its pilot and labeled several episodes as “Worst TV Show of the Week.” Moreover, in May 2000, the Council launched a letter campaign to 20th Television Fox (now 20th Television) in an attempt to convince the cable network to terminate the show outright. Adding insult to injury, the Council named the show to their yearly lists of “Worst Prime-Time Shows for Family Viewing” on three separate occasions in the early 2000s (2000, 2005, and 2006).
On top of all of that, the Federal Communications Commission received a bevy of formal requests petitioning for the show to cease being broadcasted on the grounds of indecency. Moreover, both Tucker and the Council have faulted the show for depicting anti-religiousness and racism. As a direct result of the Council’s many efforts against the show, even some advertisers have pulled out of their agreements with the series and/or the network after evaluating the episodes themselves, and determining them to be unbecoming. It is true, though, that several of the show’s episodes have, in fact, garnered controversy, such as the 2009 season 7 episode “420,” where Brian (the dog) starts a campaign to legalize marijuana. The government of Venezuela was so perturbed by it that they barred the episode from airing on any of their local TV networks. In the 2010 season 8 episode “Extra Large Medium,” a character with Down syndrome reveals that her mother is an ex-Governor of Alaska, strongly implying that Sarah Palin, the only woman to ever hold that office in that state, is her mom. Palin, who actually has a child with Down syndrome, publicly chastised the episode during an interview on The O’Reilly Factor, where she called the creators of it “cruel, cold-hearted people.”
However, on the flip side, many critics and a large segment of the general TV audience found unadulterated laughter and/or comedic genius in Family Guy as much as the Council and other detractors did not. In her 1998 review of the show in its original run, Caryn James of The New York Times identified the main characters as an “outrageously satirical family” in a show that “includes plenty of comic possibilities and parodies.” Echoing James’ sentiments 7 years later upon its triumphant return to Fox from cancellation, Catherine Seipp of the National Review Online opened her review of its revival as a “nasty but extremely funny cartoon.” In 2008, playing to the ‘adultness’ in the show’s adult animated series categorization, The Seattle Times’ Frazier Moore named the series “rude, crude and deliciously wrong” but “breathtakingly smart,” and later, acknowledged its “endless craving for humor about bodily emissions” and how its “blend of the ingenious with the raw helps account for its much broader appeal.” Meanwhile, on the streaming service Hulu, the show has become a megahit and is the second-most-watched show on the platform after Saturday Night Live. Robin Pierson of The TV Critic complimented the series as “a different kind of animated comedy which clearly sets out to do jokes which other cartoons can’t do.” In 2014, even America’s friends in the U.K. tuned into Family Guy so heavily, averaging from 680,000 to 1.2 million viewers for rebroadcasts a week, that the show was ranked one of BBC Three’s top 30 television programs.
Moreover, aside from attracting major celebrities—from Robert Downey, Jr., Rihanna, Britney Spears, and Dwayne Johnson—to becoming fans of the show and making guest appearances, the series has also attracted and won numerous honors from the TV industry. So far, through 18 seasons, Family Guy and its team of voice actors and writers have received 27 Emmy Award nominations, including 8 wins, as well as 43 other award nominations and 30 wins, respectively, from 12 other television honoring organizations. When we take the time to look at the journey of Family Guy, it is humbling and inspiring as all hell. From MacFarlane, like a court jester, impressing the ‘lords’ and ‘ladies’ at Fox with a 7-minute demo film in 1998 to winning a post-Super Bowl premiere for Family Guy on network TV in 1999. To flirting with low ratings and constant time slot changes for its entire original run and being axed in 2002. To its surprising viewer resurgence in syndication and DVD sales before its eventual 2005 return to Fox. I mean, one could argue that a dramatic film on the show’s early struggles to stay on the air is one that would leave fans and most any general audience, for that matter, with a great appreciation for the show’s now-massive success.
With a notable fandom on the strength of the show’s content, coarse as it may be, and its commercial success via favorable ratings and industry accolades, Family Guy is a great example of a TV series that started out undesired by the loud and the few but, ultimately, yet wanted and revered by the louder and the many.
