Family Guy! The Television Series!

Some people love it, some people hate it. Family Guy’s a rude, ethnocentric and obnoxious cartoon series that’s been showing on Fox for many years now. It was cancelled before, but the fan support was so huge that they decided to start it up all over again.

Family Guy revolves around the Griffin family of five, their talking dog Brian, Quagmire (a sex-addicted pervert and neighbor), Joe Swanson (a paraplegic police officer), Cleveland Brown and a vast assortment of wacky characters that lives around the area. In my opinion, of their whole cast of out-of-this-world characters the most interesting two would be Brian Griffin, the alcohol loving talking dog, and Stewie Griffin, the two year old mad genius that speaks like an Englishman.

Family Guy would be somewhat similar to The Simpsons meet South Park. It’s animated similar to the Simpsons style, while it’s rude similar to South Park. Yet it still manages to stay away from just being a merger of both. For one, Family Guy isn’t as “swear heavy” as South Park can be. Family Guy still have curses and swears, but they appear to be much more refined as it’s not used excessively.

Secondly, Family Guy seems to be more mature than Simpsons. I agree that Simpsons isn’t a silly animated series all the way but Family Guy strikes me as more mature because a lot of real world issues is reflected or parodied in the show.

On that note, I recently read an article that “bashed” Family Guy because it doesn’t discourage some of the negative issues that is portrayed in the series. It merely makes fun of the controversial issue. Well, I do agree that merely making fun of a very controversial issue will appear quite rude to many but then I thought of something else as well. Family Guy isn’t a show that is a proponent of either side of the story, it isn’t there to tell you that “hey! What you’re doing is wrong!” or vice versa. Rather, it’s a show that enlightens many on the issues that do exist and lets them make up their on mind on it.

Let’s put it this way. If a show comes and tell you that you’re wrong, chances are you’d get turned off. However if a show comes and reminds you or makes you aware of something that you have, chances are you’d be more accepting wouldn’t you?

Of course, this is all coming from a long time fan of Family Guy. But I do admit that Family Guy can at times poke fun at very sensitive issues.

Writing as a Malaysian with little experience with the American culture, I have to say that at the very least, Family Guy depicts (and vastly exaggerates) the American culture. I’m not saying take everything in the show literally, but rather just try to enjoy it and laugh along. Family Guy makes heavy usages of “inside” jokes, jokes that people would find it hard to understand and laugh along if they didn’t keep themselves up to date with the U.S. in general. Jokes related to the general beliefs or culture of Americans are often the theme of the entire show.

Oh, and Family Guy has mini “sing and dance” segments every once in awhile. Naturally, that’s a winner for me.

But at the very end of the day, a show is supposed to be entertaining. Is Family Guy entertaining? Definitely.