Music Banter - The Couch Potato: Trollheart's Televisual and Cinematic Emporium

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Television programmes get cancelled. It's a fact of life: no matter how good, well written, or innovative the programme is, as in much in life it all comes down to numbers: if the programme doesn't guarantee the requisite viewing figures, it falls to the axe. I've watched more than my fair share of decent, and in some cases excellent programs fall victim to cancellation, while other --- in my opinion, far inferior programmes --- seem to go on forever. Of course, there have been the odd instances of programmes "coming back from the dead", the most obvious example being the original Star Trek, with other shows in recent memory (Jericho springs to mind) having been saved either by fan campaigns or other factors, and on occasion the network executives have had to admit that they have got it wrong.

But what of the programmes that don't get cancelled, but should? In sometimes appealing to the lowest common denominator, the network will often allow a show to run and run, regardless of its integrity and content, simply because it fulfils the basic television criterion: people watch it. Whether it's good or not is largely irrelevant: as long as people are pushing up the viewing figures, the fact that the show may be on its last legs creatively means little, and some shows can stagger around for season after season, getting worse and worse every year, until somebody decides to finally put it out of its misery, if at all.
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In this series I will be examining some of the shows which I believe should have been cancelled long ago. Some of them were bad from the start, some began well but reached a point where they started to tail off, and just never recovered. The first one I be looking at is Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy, which originally never impressed me, but did win me over for a number of years until it began to fall apart. So what went wrong? Let's look into the history of the programme.

At the time Family Guy was conceived, one animated comedy ruled the TV airwaves: The Simpsons. There was nothing to challenge this behemoth. The Simpsons had revolutionised television animated comedy --- they were no longer called cartoons, and they no longer featured animals running after each other, getting into funny scrapes, getting killed in increasingly hilarious (if quite violent) ways, or even carrying out their cunning plans. Now it wasn't simply enough to be funny: these characters had to speak to their audience, and more importantly, address the concerns of the day. To some degree, The Simpsons became not quite a soap opera but perhaps a parody of what soap operas portray; the real, ordinary, mundane issues that people deal with in their lives --- being stuck in a job you hate, looking after the kids, being a kid, trying to find more and inventive ways to fill up your dull, uninteresting existence. All of these became staples of Matt Groening's superbly successful animated comedy, and anything that intended to try to topple The Simpsons from their throne, or even share space on it with them, was going to have to be very good indeed, and also very different. There would be no point in somebody trying to write another Simpsons: it just would not work. It seemed that Groening had the market cornered on this particular moneyspinner.

And then, just as the twentieth century began to give way to the twenty-first, television saw the launch of the first episode of this new series Family Guy. At first, looking at it personally, it seemed a blatant rip-off ofThe Simpsons. It was, after all, based around family --- father, mother, son and daughter, and a baby --- they even had a dog! Could you copy The Simpsons any more than that? There were five in the family (and five in The Simpsons) there was a dog, and they lived in the suburbs, as did their biggest rivals. The father worked in a drone type job he didn't like (just like Homer) and the mother was basically a moral compass for her husband (just like Marge), while the kids…

Well, this is where it got slightly different. Whereas Bart Simpson was a smart and sassy and generally popular kid, the son in Family Guy was none of these things. He was a fat, pretty stupid, lazy kid who never got the girls, and whom few people liked. The sister, far from being the feminists genius Lisa Simpson has shown herself to be, was, well, pretty non-existent really. The only two people in this new dysfunctional family we were supposed to like who were to have any chance of being the ones to make this show something special were the baby and the dog. Let's look at the family in a little closer detail shall we?

Head of the family --- the actual Family Guy --- was Peter Griffin, an overweight, bigoted, lazy and incredibly either stupid or just childishly naive middle-aged man, who held down a job in the Pawtucket brewery, carrying out menial tasks, with little or no chance or indeed ambition of advancement. Peter seemed at times to live in his own fantasy world, where everything was just as he liked it: essentially, a child in a man's body, refusing to believe the most basic things if they didn't suit him. Peter's wife was Lois, a red-haired, sexy beauty whose only real role in the show seemed to be keep Peter out of trouble, try to keep him on the straight and narrow and show him right from wrong. Chris, the elder son, was as mentioned fat, stupid (like his father) and didn't do much of anything. Meg, the daughter, was not exactly ugly but certainly not feminine: butch might be the best way of putting it, and if anyone was ever destined to become a lesbian in this show it was her. It didn't help that she hid her hair under a woolly hat, and wore thick glasses.

So far, so bad. Nothing of real interest here, there'd be nothing The Simpsons should be worried about or feel threatened about. But then you come to Stewie, the baby. Now he's a totally different kettle of fish. It's never been fully established whether or not anybody other than the dog can hear him, but he speaks as an adult, and uses phrases that mad genius in the likes of Bond movies use, and also talks in the same sort of voice, a sort of a caricature of an upper-class English accent. His best friend is Brian, the dog, another original creation. Although he often acts as an animal, Brian talks and stands on two legs and interacts with the humans in exactly the same way that any human would, and they seem to understand him, speaking to him as one of the family. If two of the family can be said to be the most intelligent, it certainly would be Brian and Stewie.

The main problem that I see with Family Guy is that, while Homer Simpson gets into some pretty crazy adventures, and we know he's stupid, there is an endearing quality to his stupidity that we can all relate to. Peter Griffin, on the other hand, does things no sane person would. He seems to operate in a world where he expects there to be no consequences for his actions, where he can do as he likes, and where the normal laws of physics don't apply. Generally, as I've mentioned, he comes across as retarded --- someone you should perhaps have sympathy for but should not laugh at --- and then there are times when he's just plain nasty.

This is really the biggest problem I have with Griffin: he's a bigot. Now, the Simpsons have trodden this ground with Homer, alluding to his homophobia and his racism, among other things, but the point is that these have always been shown within the show to be wrong, the error of his ways has been pointed out to Homer and usually, he learns valuable lessons and changes. Peter Griffin doesn't seem to operate in the same way. Ten people can tell him what he's doing is wrong, his best friends can tell him what he's doing is wrong, his wife can tell him what he's doing is wrong, and he'll continue doing it. It's like he doesn't take advice from anybody and he doesn't think anybody is right except him, and it's a very frustrating, annoying and ultimately infuriating trait, which only makes me personally hate the guy more as the seasons go on.

Of course, we can't blame Peter Griffin: he's a character, a line drawing on celluloid, the creation of one man, and it is this man to whom we must turn to lavish praise or indeed condemnation upon him, or upon the show. MacFarlane is a funny guy --- about that there is no doubt --- however, he does seem to be extremely limited in what he does. As Family Guy went on through the seasons, there was a lot of repetition, old ideas rehashed until finally, all cohesion was lost. There were no more (or very few) clever, intelligent stories. Now MacFarlane seemed to concentrate on just being controversial for the sake of it --- he would insult Jesus, Buddha or even Muhammad if he had to --- and that's fine up to a point. But there needs to be a reason behind it.

Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I'm not a hater of this show. I'm more disappointed with it, because I've seen what it's become. I admit, when I first decided to try the show I approached it with doubt and suspicion; after all, it really did look like a bad rip-off of The Simpsons, and in many ways it did come to be this, but then, The Simpsons had such a huge influence on animated comedy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that really, there was no way that this new show would not reference it in some way. But we wanted to see something different. South Park was different, King of the Hill (although I've never really watched it) at least looks to be different, and there are shows out there who do quite well in the shadow The Simpsons. But their main strength seemed to have been that they had stayed as far away from The Simpsons family format as possible --- of course, nearly every drama --- comedy, animated or other --- tends to have a family centre somewhere, but nobody wants to copy The Simpsons. Nobody, that is, except, it would appear, Family Guy.

As I mentioned, Brian and Stewie were two interesting differences that managed to take what could have been a very pale imitation of Groening's world-conquering animation and allow Family Guy to stand out a little bit, and although initially these two characters were not used to their best advantage, in later seasons they were (mostly because they were the only thing holding the show together). I got into the series after a while, and came to enjoy it for what it was, and had to admit that it was not, as I had feared, so very similar to The Simpsons. For one thing, much of Family Guy's narrative revolves around what are known as cutaways --- vignettes which are told usually from the past tense and which have some bearing --- usually, though not always --- on the current situation. They are usually initiated by the phrase "This reminds me of the time when…" or "This is worse than that time when…" or something similar. Sometimes they make sense, and sometimes they don't; sometimes they are relevant to the scene, and sometimes they are not. One of Family Guy's failings I feel though is that they began to rely far too much on the cutaway, to the point where often the cutway was the only good thing in the episode. There were some very good episodes at the start --- and even later on --- but fairly quickly the bad began to seriously outweigh what good there was.

Family Guy made its appearance in 1999, and was a big hit. But controversial themes that hurt and offended potential advertisers led to trouble for MacFarlane and by the end of the third season the show was cancelled by Fox. Shortly afterwards, the series went on sale on DVD and promptly became the biggest selling DVD of that year. Added to this, syndication on the Cartoon Network and the subsequent popularity of reruns resurrected the old Star Trek idea: although there was no, to my knowledge, fan campaign for the return of the series, Fox executives watched the sales of DVDs and the massive viewing figures of rival networks running the show that had been theirs, and decided it was time to bring it back. So Family Guy was resurrected, and season four hit the airwaves. The year was 2005, and two years had passed. Would the return of this anarchic comedy animation be greeted by boos, yawns or cheers?

Well, surprisingly, considering how bad I thought the episode was, it received what can only be described as rapturous response, even gaining nomination for an Emmy award of all things. But I thought it was terrible. The very poor and tasteless dig at Mel Gibson and his movie The Passion of the Christ I didn't think was funny at all. To be fair, after this the series settled down quite well and there are some very good episodes up until season seven, which is where things for me start to go wrong. Badly wrong. Episodes like "Petergeist", "Peterotica" and "Peter's two dads" raised a smile, and gave me the hope that perhaps the series was going back on track. Then came season seven.

This contains some of the worst episodes ever to air on Family Guy. Again a terrible and tasteless take on O.J. Simpson, the introduction of a new black character presumably to fill the space left by the exit of Cleveland Brown, a character who never really worked, and the death of newscaster Diane Simmons, which really took out two characters: news anchor Tom Tucker only really worked as a character due to his verbal fencing with Simmons. The thinly disguised contempt each held for the other made their relationship. When she was killed off, the new news anchor did not in any way fill the shoes Simmons had left behind. It's all very well to kill off perhaps not major, but at least recurring characters, but you need to have planned what will happen afterwards. When The Simpsons took out Maud Flanders, that was really okay because she didn't have a huge impact on the main storylines and in the end, it led to some interesting adventures for Ned. But the death of Diane Simmons did not open up new vistas for Tom Tucker; on the contrary, he became less and less relevant as each episode went on, to the point where they actually had to write (pretty nonsensical and stupid) episodes in order to feature him.

So would the writers learn a lesson from this misstep? It would seem not. As the episodes degenerated into nothing more than a string of fart jokes, bad taste references and increasingly absurd storylines, one thing that kept this show going was the relationship between Stewie and Brian. Their occasional trips in Stewie's Time Machine together became one of the only reasons to watch the show that I could see; rather like a Simpsons episode with Mr Burns, you were pretty much assured of a good episode, if only just one. As the baby and the dog got closer, and the relationship was explored in more depth this came to a head when they were accidentally locked in a bank vault one weekend and confided their true feelings to one another in a way they would never have done had they not expected that they might actually die. It opened up thrilling new possibilities for Brian and Stewie, and quite possibly the show itself. Perhaps this would save Family Guy?

So what would the next move be? Well of course, it was obvious: Brian had to die. Yes, MacFarlane in his wisdom decided to kill off Brian, one half of the only thing left worth watching this show for. And unlike Star Trek, where dead characters can come back the next episode, when Brian died he really was gone. In fairness, they did a very good job of showing why --- as we would have expected he would --- Stewie could not simply go back in time, undo what he had done and save Brian, but it did leave a sour taste in the mouth, especially when Brian was replaced by another dog. That simply shouldn't have happened. And was there to be the same sort of relationship between Vinnie, the new dog and Stewie? Well, to be honest, I'm not quite up to speed with the new season yet so I don't know for sure, but you would really have to think that such relationships are built over time and can't be forced, so if Stewie and Brian are to become Stewie and Vinnie, well you would think it would take a little bit more time than a few episodes.

I understand the shock value of killing off Brian --- let's call it the 24 factor --- but again, as with Diane Simmons, there seems to have been no exit strategy for this idea. Apart from simply replacing him as the family dog, what was the point of killing off Brian? Shock value, certainly, but what after that? Family Guy had spent years showing us that Brian was not just a family pet, and now we were supposed to accept that he's gone, just like that, and they can replace him by going down the local pet shop or dog shelter? I don't buy it.

There's so much more I could say, and will say, but I plan a very in-depth companion piece to this article later on, so will hold my comments for that. All I can say at this point is that after ten years, a cancellation and a reprieve from the brink, the joke has worn wafer-thin now and the ice is ready to break. It's time to move on, admit it's been fun (some of the time) but the party is over and Seth needs to find his coat, keys and mobile phone --- possibly also his pants: it's been that kind of party! --- and head blearily out into the early morning. You can't stretch out one joke forever, and you need to know when you've reached that point where it's no longer funny. It's kind of like watching a car crash: fascinating in its way but you feel bad, not just for the people involved, but for yourself for being so insensitive that you can't just look away.

Time to pack up your things in a box. Seth.
Time to take down your pictures off the walls.
Time to pay the final week's rent and cancel the milk.
In short, time to go.