I’ll begin this editorial with a brief personal account: Way back in my youth, around 3rd or 4th grade, I discovered what would eventually become one of my favorite entertainment blocks in all of television: [adult swim]. Granted, there’s no way of justifying some kid who isn't even 10 yet watching content meant for people much older, and my parents certainly didn't condone this, but the block had a hand in shaping a lot of my taste and sense of humor, for better or for worse. Though back then, my attention to the block really only spanned through two shows that headlined the block throughout every weekday: Futurama and Family Guy. Both shows were cancelled at the time and airing through syndicated reruns, and funnily enough, it was those reruns that most likely gave the shows a second chance at life. In any case, aside from maybe The Simpsons, these shows were pretty much my first outlet into the realm of more adult entertainment. And I enjoyed each of them very, very much.
With that said, allow me to preface this for the many who aren't aware of who I am and what I like: I’m not able to call myself a fan of Family Guy anymore. I haven’t been in years, and if it weren't for the fact that I’m older and have already vented enough about my distaste for the show in years past on the forum, I’d probably feel more inclined to write an article dedicated to slamming the show in its current state. However, that’s not what I’m here for. Quite the opposite in fact; I’m going to be talking about the aspects Family Guy that I actually liked. My slightly younger self would've been put off by this very idea, but I've come to realize that I don’t have to spread the hate of a show like this back to the early moments that I actually enjoyed at one point. And going back to those earlier episodes, I can honestly say that they can still get a laugh out of me. Why is that, you ask? Well I’ll go on to tell you right now.
This overview will be less like my previous ones, in that for the sake of keeping this article rather condensed around a single point, I’m only going to be reviewing pre-cancellation Family Guy. The reason for this is not only because of my distaste for the episodes that came after the revival, but also because I stopped watching, for reasons that are self-explanatory. Therefore it wouldn't be just for me to even analyze those seasons beyond broad criticism. Anyway, let’s begin.
Season 1
While I give a lot of the late seasons crap, I honestly can’t go back to this season and really applaud it for anything either. I wasn’t old enough at the time to be exposed to any of the reactions to the show initially, but I’ve gotten second-hand vibes over the years of the reviews essentially making a lot of observations of it just being a Simpsons clone. It really didn’t help things that the Griffin family was practically an exact parallel to the Simpson family: you have the fat husband, the slim, doting mother, the boy and girl kids, the baby, and the family pet. The only real difference between them is that Brian and Stewie talk while Maggie and Santa’s Little Helper don’t.
It’s kind of easy to see why the premise felt so confined at this point in the series; like a vast majority of shows out there, both good and bad, their early seasons are often very rough around the edges writing-wise in retrospect to the material that comes later. A lot of the reason for this has to do with breaking in each of the characters and finding out what exactly you should do with them to keep them interesting, which is why at first shows can tend to keep a character confined to a quirk or a gimmick before eventually letting them breathe a little bit.
Season 1 Family Guy is full of instances like these. First off, there are the obvious two examples in the form of Stewie and Brian. Their role at first is basically relegated to being very blatant comedic irony. “Hey, this baby can talk, and is evil and wants to kill his mom!” and “Hey, this dog can talk, and he’s very intellectual and smokes and drinks martinis!” is essentially what they try to hammer into your head in every appearance they make. Pop culture has been so desensitized to these characters at this point that it’s hard to really put yourself back into the time period where this show premiered to imagine how weird, funny or shocking people found this at first. Due to lacking that exposure, however, I can really only judge it based on how I look at it now, and in this instance it just feels very one note.
They aren't the only ones that really fall victim to this though. While Meg wasn’t just relegated to blatant punching bag status, she was almost worse off early on as a very typical “teenage girl” character. It also doesn’t help things that she wasn’t voiced by Mila Kunis yet, and while I have my own issues with her voicing Meg in later seasons, I think she definitely helped add a little more flavor to the character in the next few seasons. Same thing with Chris, for the most part. He always has been the dumb teenage boy, but at first it was executed in a pretty dull manner that didn’t really spotlight anything. And then there’s Lois, who is played off as a very safe, doting mother character, only unlike Marge Simpson, she was never really put in a proper spotlight to highlight these behaviors other than an ordinary wag of the finger at Peter whenever he does something wrong.
Again, while I express these gripes, it isn’t anything that particularly annoys me. For the most part I find it humorous considering the vulgar and no-holds-barred approach to writing that the show took post-revival. An example of this that I’ve sited a lot of times before from a Season 1 episode is where a joke involves Meg being cut off by Lois before calling herself some variation of the word “bitch”, which is funny when you move forward in the series and characters are willing to drop F-bombs left and right and characters get maimed in brutal ways. To throw this season a bone, I can give the episode "The Son Also Draws" come credit for starting to break the show out of its shell a tiny bit, having Lois succumb to gambling problems and showcasing Peter and Chris in some awkward and funny father-son moments. Even then I'd argue that later episodes like "The Weiner Is..." manage to pull of a similar kind of plot in a much more entertaining manner.
With all that said, it’s time to move on to the next two seasons.
Season 2 and 3
Here’s where the bulk of the article will lie. Ultimately if I had to sum up the main reason why I these seasons work while the later ones fall flat, it’s because all of the characters are still actual characters rather than solely existing to be outlets for jokes. Underlying commentary is still there from time to time, but it’s a lot easier to digest because rather than throwing a certain set of ideals in your face, it instead throws the characters into certain politically-charged situations and lets them go nuts. Case in point is the episode “Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington”, in an episode that essentially revolves around cigarette smoking, the episode isn’t completely overtaken by any sort of message. Peter ends up taking down a cigarette company that is hungry to increase sales through exposing cigarettes to children; while one can take this episode as an anti-smoking message, it’s really not significant enough to ever detract from the actual story, like Peter’s crazy antics as President of this new company, or Brian going through withdrawal after quitting smoking. No matter what your stance is you can enjoy the episode because the characters themselves are enjoyable.
On that note another aspect to this season that puts it over the rest is the sense of sympathy that you get for the characters. That’s not to say that you have to agree with a character in order to find them entertaining, which is not the case. However, in the context of a purely comedic, dysfunctional family sitcom in the case of Family Guy, it’s kind of important to give you some sort of reason to care about the characters. And while the show would eventually deviate from that, I feel as if these two seasons do a pretty good job of giving you good reason to like the characters. Peter acts like an imbecile and often at the expense of others, but he faces repercussions and still realizes that he makes mistakes. Brian, while maintaining his status as the stereotypical intellectual type, still experiences problems of his own and isn't put on a pedestal above other characters solely due to his politics. And the same can be said for basically everyone else.
The animation also strikes a good middle-ground between the general sloppy look of the early season and the stiff “moving arms back and forth in a ¾ angle perspective” look of the later seasons. While the designs are still pretty simple and don’t really impress as far as originality or detail is concerned, the fact that the show was at least slightly dynamic at this point in time really made all the difference. The characters still move, and while this choice of words is a bit too dramatic for something of this caliber, they feel so much more alive as a result.
Of course, when it comes to Family Guy one of the most recognizable aspects of the show is its reliance on non-sequitur cutaway gags. While present in Season 1, these two seasons are where the show truly starts to become known for them in the way that people think of them today. And while there’s really no difference in execution between the flashbacks during these seasons and the ones that came post-cancellation, simply put, these flashbacks were just much funnier. Maybe it’s due to not showing up after every other line of dialogue that a character says, but the flow just feels more natural. Often times in later episodes flashbacks are used in order to provide an excuse to transition to another scene, serving as the punchline rather than the characters themselves providing it. It still happens in these seasons from time to time, but it’s handled a lot more gracefully. It never feels like they ran out of ideas for jokes and just threw in something random to compensate.
With that all that said, which episodes in particular stand out to me in these seasons? I already mentioned “Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington”, which is up there, but there are others that I looked back to in particular when writing this article that I consider to really be the best that this show has to offer. To me, “Da Boom” is really the moment where the show starts to break off into a lot of the largely non-sequitur territory that it's known for, and “The King is Dead”, an episode about Peter essentially sabotaging Lois's production of The King and I, is a prime example of how well these characters used to interact with one another. “Road to Rhode Island” is noteworthy for arguably being the first episode to showcase Brian and Stewie in what would inevitably become one of the most prominently featured character interactions of the entire show; not to mention that it paved the way for even more “Road to…” episodes. These seasons also treat us to a pretty great Christmas episode acutely titled “A Very Special Family Guy Freakin’ Christmas”, which was packed to the brim with jokes and would change things up throughout the plot enough to keep the characters and the story interesting and chaotic.
The Verdict
It's kind of crazy to think that the show has been back on the air for a decade by now in what could be considered its current format of writing, animation and presentation. It's to the point where those episodes make up the bulk of the show's run, but unlike The Simpsons, which had a much longer golden age and thus is associated with those episodes above all else, Family Guy is primarily known for the way in which it's written today, for better or for worse. The early episodes are kind of a relic in that regard, and almost make it seem like a completely different show entirely.
In short, going over these episodes, I think it’s easy to see exactly why the show ended up becoming so popular in the first place, despite initially seeming like a little show in the shadow of The Simpsons. While it may have morphed into something completely different in the future, I still like to give the show credit for what it once was. If you haven't seen any of these episodes in a while, I recommend checking them out.