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.

This is from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Metaphorically, it seems all cartoon writers with prime-time aspirations are Groenings now: which is to say, it’s near impossible to imagine any new mass-market cartoon emerging that didn’t boast some Simpsons-esque combination of hapless heroes, pop-culture-centred wisecracks and apropos-of-nothing tangents.

In the case of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, the debt is even more obvious than usual.

Who is the archetype of foolish masculinity who falls for chick flicks tonight and decides to make his own entry in the genre, entitled Steel Vaginas?

The answer is MacFarlane’s Peter Griffin, though of course you could easily have imagined Matt Groening’s Homer Simpson behind the camera. (That said, Homer wouldn’t have come up with quite so crude a title.)

For the viewer, Family Guy has one key advantage over The Simpsons: while watching the former, you’re not distracted by the nagging thought that the series’ best days have passed.

The present episodes of Family Guy veritably bounce with energy, as if the writers regarded their ideas like soft drink - in immediate danger of going flat. One minute, baby Stewie might be plotting revenge against a former flame; the next minute, the writers might veer off into an extended riff on Luke Skywalker’s lack of sensitivity, or a rant against infamous sitcom catchphrases of the 1980s, or an exposition of the making of Steel Vaginas.

In short, Family Guy’s scene-by-scene ingenuity and uncouth antics are quite a joy. Over the course of a few episodes, however, it’s not hard to see that Family Guy is missing one of The Simpsons‘ key qualities: namely, heart. A sort of nihilistic misanthropy is Family Guy’s stock in trade.

Pessimism about man’s capacity to live with man helps Family Guy’s writers score some effortless laughs (Exhibit A tonight: Peter’s graceless encounter with Sideways’ Sandra Oh), but the cynicism occasionally declines into flat condescension, especially towards the female characters. The Griffin family matriarch Lois is sassy, but the rest of the women tend to be either losers (like daughter Meg), serpents (like Stewie’s former flame, Olivia) or hot but witless dolts (like Brian’s girlfriend Jillian, voiced by Drew Barrymore).

Inevitably, these female others are painted less sympathetically than the MacFarlane-voiced trio of Peter, Brian and Stewie. If there is a whiff of misogyny in all this, then that is perhaps unsurprising: after all, it was America’s fratboy crowd that lapped up Family Guy episodes on cable and DVD after Fox initially cancelled the cartoon in the US, and thereby catalysed Fox’s renewal of the show. On balance, I’m grateful to the fratboys for helping to revive Family Guy.

But I can’t help but think that their beloved show too often flatters rather than challenges the prejudices held by some of their number. The Simpsons, it must be said, has rarely been guilty of the same crime: all prime-time cartoon writers may be Groenings now, but some Groenings are better than others.