Hey, you know what Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show all have in common?  Assuming you’ve even heard of the Cleveland Show by now and have also NOT committed suicide knowing it exists, I’ll tell you: all three are the projects of a guy named Seth MacFarlane.  Seth, after an attempt in the 90’s to make children’s cartoons (and failing miserably), was eventually responsible for Family Guy, a mostly garbled animated sitcom with a lot of pointless pop culture references and segues that veer straight off a cliff into the unfunny unknown.  The show’s low percentage of actual humor is countered by shock laughs, sex gags, and uncomfortable subjects that kids shouldn’t be watching, but probably are because hey, it’s a cartoon right?  Cartoons can’t be bad.

Warning: Cartoons can be bad.  Very bad.

See, the thing about MacFarlane’s humor is that it’s funny to him and was never very funny to anyone but him, until he convinced a lot of idiots that his formula was a display of utter brilliance and laughs, the same idiots that still watch the Simpsons hoping it will ever be as good as it once was, and even then it was overrated.  The allure of making an animated sitcom is hey, you can make your characters do practically anything without worrying about budget or props, and thanks to MacFarlane, they can say anything they want too, much to the dismay of people who aren’t impressed by constant flashbacks, and those who don’t drag their knuckles when they walk.  Can anyone count the number of times in one episode without losing track, just how many times Peter “remembers the time” he <did something zany> with <famous person>?  If you said yes, there’s a good chance you’re a liar, seeing as sitting through an entire episode of that shit means you probably can’t count nearly that high.

The sad thing is, Family Guy is his best show.  It gets the most attention from writers and advertisers and as much as I hate to admit this, has a broader base to build upon than something like American Dad or The Cleveland Show.  (Trivia: The theme song originally contained a line referring to Cleveland’s “happy black-guy face,” but this was replaced with “happy mustached face” to make the song more racially sensitive.^[8])

They actually changed the song to an animated Blaxploitation sitcom to be more “racially sensitive”.  Amazing.  Even if by some miracle this show does not get canceled, its fans can feel dead on the inside knowing that they kept a humorless husk plodding along.