Family Guy TV Show

After Peter tries to get out of paying a hospital bill by filling out a form stating he was deceased, he is visited by Death himself, voiced with sarcastic perfection by former Saturday Night Live
Weekend Update anchor, Norm MacDonald. Death injures his ankle during an escape attempt by Peter and is forced to recover at the Griffin household. While he’s out of commission, the laws of death no longer apply, and Peter is forced to take on the role of the Grim Reaper himself.

Norm MacDonald’s ultra-sarcastic take on the Grim Reaper is the highlight of this episode. His high level of ingeniously acerbic wit was never recaptured quite in later voice-over efforts by Adam Carolla, who portrayed Death in his subsequent appearances. His interaction with the entire Griffin family is absolutely hilarious. His conversations with Meg and Chris are particularly memorable, and a scene where Lois starts to undress thinking she’ll have to pleasure Death is another awkwardly hilarious moment. The real groan-worthy uncomfortably disturbing highlight is a flashback sequence featuring Death in his teenage years in the back of a car with a girl named Sandy. Death accidentally kills her, and then states, “I’m going to be a virgin forever… or am I?” It’s around this time that we started to see the gloves really come off from a humor perspective, and when it seemed the writers would really push the boundaries of what they could get away with saying or doing on television.

Death also asks Peter to consider what a world without Death would be like, and this leads to another classic Family Guy awkwardly amusing flashback of what if Hitler was alive and was a talk show host.

- FOX

Stewie’s excitement of Death’s arrival is typical for the character at this point in his matricidal development. He’s completely enthralled by the Grim Reaper and is the only member of the family who’s genuinely excited about having him around. However, other than a missed murder attempt on his mother (due to the laws of death no longer applying), Stewie didn’t get too much screen time in this outing. Meg, Chris and Brian’s scenes in this episode were also kept to a minimum.

Peter’s faced with a moral conundrum of carrying out Death’s desire to get the world’s attention by killing the kids from Dawson’s Creek by crashing their plane, or be killed by Death himself. The situation is resolved when he refuses to carry out Death’s wishes, not because he thinks it’s wrong to kill, but because if he kills off the kids then he’ll have nothing to watch on Wednesdays. Of course, Peter blunders and accidentally kills the pilots of the plane, causing the plane to almost crash. However the heroic efforts of actress Karen Black, who starred in the a ’70s disaster flick titled “Airport 1975″. The kids from Dawson’s Creek are saved along with the rest of the passengers on the plane. Death also recovers from his ankle injury and much to Stewie’s dismay, leaved the Griffin home to resume his duties as the Grim Reaper, and sparing Peter’s soul.

In addition to the first appearance of Death, this episode also marks the debut of Doctor Hartman, who makes several significant appearances in later episodes in the series.

Overall, this was yet another extremely enjoyable early episode of Family Guy. While it didn’t feature as creatively cohesive a storyline as in previous outings, there are plenty of memorable random jokes and the first appearance of Death alone makes this episode stand up well to repeated viewings.

Recently I started watching  Family Guy, the animated Fox show that for a long time I assumed was sort of an vulgarized take on The Simpsons, with the jokes made dumber to appeal to the Maxim-reading frat crowd. That assumption was wrong; though there are plenty of surface similarities between the shows, Family Guy represents an entirely different kind of humor—mainly it’s a matter of arbitrary references piled up. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater, these are random stabs, meant to seem spontaneously generated as a reaction to events and seemingly designed to gratify the audience for its ability to recognize the allusions. It’s pleasant to know trivia; Family Guy works on the theory that remembering pointless pop culture tidbits is funny in and of itself. Just remembering there was such a cultural creation as Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life is the essence of the joke. It cuts both ways—it’s flattering to get what the show has dredged up, but at the same time that makes us the butt of joke for having remembered. 

There’s no attempt at coherent satire, like The Simpsons frequently presents, or clever plot architectonics, as in Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, where disparate plot threads are implausibly tied together. Family Guy defiantly rejects any kind of thematic unity, along with the rest of the Aristotelian rules. Its form is more that of a website like Fark.com than a sitcom. It’s anchored in an aesthetic that has probably never made it this close to the mainstream before in the history of mass culture: wrongness.

It’s probably best to define wrongness by what strikes me as the most notorious example, the extended sequences in which Peter, the dad character, fights a giant chicken. These are elaborate parodies of the fights in blockbuster action movies, but that is only part of what is meant to make them funny—that’s just the shallow surface premise. Their complete gratuity, highlighted by the complete absence of relation to the episode’s plot, is also part of the joke, but the core principle on which these scenes are based is their interminableness. They go on well beyond what the audience expects, well beyond the moment at which every possible person will have gotten the joke’s surface premise, and enter a realm of annoyance and discomfort. They seemed designed to provoke the viewer’s anger, to make us shout at the screen, “Enough already!”

One might protest that these are lazy ideas deployed to fill time when the show’s writers’ invention fails them, but these sorts of messed-up scenes are in virtually every episode. They are not accidental. They have their analogues, too, in several other aspects of the show, completing a sort of holistic spirit of wrongness. These moments, when Stewie (the diabolical baby) goes on and on about Brian (the family dog who, in a Snoopy-derived reductio ad absurdem, is the most intelligent and mature family member) and his procrastination about his novel, or when Peter deliberates over stupid Trivial Pursuit non-questions, provoke the same creeped-out feeling that is the basis for the character of Quagmire, the hypersexed neighbor who perpetually takes his advances too far with inappropriate people and derives sexual pleasure from things that are too bizarre. Herbert, the bitter old molester, prompts a similar feeling, as the moment we start to laugh at his skeevy advances, he becomes contemptuous and spews unfunny, ominous insults and threats.

And the show’s lack of a plot works this way too—ordinary markers of the “acts” of a sitcom episode are ignored, conflicts are introduced and then forgotten, unresolved. The show will end abruptly on an off beat, or introduce a digression that takes over as the main storyline. Traditional TV conventions are gestured toward and then suspended, not so much subverted as exposed, taken too literally, pushed too far to the point where they can’t be allowed to function as the shorthand they serve as in other contexts but become instead strange. This makes Family Guy weirdly Brechtian. It often tries to alienate us, as though that were now understood to be a cutting-edge form of humor.

The show’s writers seemed to purposely build in a moment to every episode where they make the equivalent of chanting “not funny, not funny, not funny” into something funny through sheer persistence. The scenes of wrongness refuse to let us sit back and passively tally the orchestrated moments when we are supposed to laugh (which sitcoms customarily choreograph with laugh tracks). Instead we are forced by frustration into a different sort of emotional engagement. It’s a pretty audacious approach, and it’s no wonder the show has been canceled several times. What puzzles me is that there are enough devotees of wrongness to keep getting the show resurrected.

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