If I’m being honest, I haven’t found Family Guy funny for a long time. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I felt like the show went flat, but at least the last few seasons have been almost painfully unfunny. Jokes are often stifled, cutaways are overused, and the characters have become miserable, terrible people. Yet, I feel myself drawn to it. Part is nostalgia, the type of viewing loyalty of a long-term watcher whose been there since the beginning, cancellation and miraculous rebirth. But there’s something else there that was difficult to pinpoint for me until the season premiere of the current seventeenth season, when I realized that Family Guy isn’t funny anymore, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be.
In a way, the two-part premiere of season seventeen crystallizes what Family Guy has become. It features Brian getting into a too-good-to-be true relationship that takes a swerve into situation where he is trapped in a joyless marriage with someone he despises. He hates her so much he does nothing as she sits there and chokes to death. She magically revives at the end of the episode, not allowing Brian his escape and being dragged into the second part where he becomes a morbidly obese, depressed mess. Eventually, we find out his wife is equally as miserable, they agree to be miserable together, and then she dies off screen in the reset button sequence that features the Griffin family being vile to each other as Brian dumps his once miserable wife’s ashes into the wind to be a forgotten one-off character.
The tone drips misery, like the whole show does now. You wonder if the writers like the show anymore with how nasty it’s become. Even in the early, tamer years Family Guy was willing to go to places their contemporaries would never dare tread, from divorcing a major side character permanently or allowing a forbidden flirtation of early seasons between two characters to accumulate into a full, if brief, relationship. But the show has gone well behind that. An episode rarely goes by without Peter and Lois complaining about their broken, loveless marriage. Brian is an overly obnoxious parody of his early season self, Meg and Chris are both shown as damaged, neurotic children dull to life, and even the ever-transgressive South Park would never dare to develop a story as raw as “Send in Stewie, Please” to show Stewie as a psychopath in development. That’s not to mention the side characters who also have crumbled into broken marriages, unexplained hatred of the world around them, and crying messes who have lost hope and all self-image while sitting on a toilet eating pie.
No matter how you slice it, the whole show is miserable. And maybe…that’s the point.
The more I thought about the season premiere, the more I couldn’t help but think of the world now. We live in a world that seems hurdling toward environmental disaster, fascism is on the rise all over the globe, inequality is reaching Gilded Ages levels, and we live in an hyper polarized political environment that’s produced a broken system and divided nation that can’t agree on reality itself. Despite the supposed booming economy and stock market, and stats that show us to be living in the best time period on Earth, for a lot of average people out there, it’s a miserable time to be alive with little hope of anything changing soon.
While The Simpsons dips its toes in pessimism, it stays an even portrayal of fun, happy and unchanging characters in a dysfunctional, but loving, family. While the quality of the show has become a point of contention (I actually think for a show that’s gone on for literally my entire life, it’s stayed better than expected) it’s always retained a high-brow sensibility with an assured reality that these characters will return to their joyous selves episode to episode, season to season.
Family Guy may not have started by casting itself as a low-brow, everyman alternative to Fox’s eternal flagship, but it developed that way as time passed and seemed to fully embrace that in last season’s premiere, “The Emmy-Winning Episode” where the series relished the fact it had no Emmies compared to the thousand or so The Simpsons have, or the multitude of other comedies raking Emmy wins in the current Golden Age of TV.
Family Guy hits the same reset button, but the show has become painfully self-aware, and as tired, of that trope as the audience probably has. When characters aren’t pointing out that everything returns to normal, the show throws an absurdist twist like the family getting slaughtered by Mongoose.
And while the situation may reset, the misery does not. It lingers and grows. Like many blue-collar families in real life, the Griffins continue a path that becomes more grueling, less fun and heavier with every day.
Not to try and portray the show as realistic per se, after all a character dies in some brutal way in a cutaway almost every episode to return fine in the main story. But it does tap into something true to life in a way that I think The Simpsons long past, Bob’s Burgers avoids and even South Park misses.
It’s not funny, but there’s a humor there all the same. We see the characters getting angrier, more bitter, nastier, but they keep on slogging through life even if they’ve all given up on any real happiness. We may never see financial struggles (which we almost never see on shows portraying apparently financially struggling families), but Family Guy captures a dread that stems from that, a internal sigh for someone who wakes up, looks at the news and their bank account, and knows it’s just another day on the grind.
The only show that I think captured the same feeling for me was adult swim’s Morel Orel. It was a short-lived, but emotionally draining, story about a young boy living with parents who neither want him and do whatever they can to crush his spirits. Orel, against all odds, rises up to living a happy life.
Maybe there lies the attachment to Family Guy despite its misery. Peter and Lois’s relationship gets more bitter and petty, Chris and Meg more neglected, Brian more obnoxious and self-parodying and Stewie skates toward a broken home. But perhaps they can pick themselves up and manage to drag through this continual spiraling world until they dig up some degree of happiness. Their suffering is less our comedy and more a strange relation to our own misery as we drag ourselves through an increasingly dark and depressing future. For a show that’s now the most over-the-top adult animation on television, it somehow has its feet more on the ground to the average joe than any other. In that, we can still find some humor in a show that’s done its best to kill any of the joy it had and why we keep coming back.
Or maybe it just sucks, and I have terrible taste. That’s probably it.