| Family Guy, Volume Eight Posted: After watching volume 8, I think I'm done with buying Family Guy sets. I may still rent them from Netflix or something, but I'm glad I waited until the price came down into the mid-twenties on this one before buying it.
Family Guy has gone downhill, and badly. What used to be a show that made me burst out laughing in most of its episodes has degenerated into something where the most I'll get out of it is a chuckle and a sense of anger about what these guys have started thinking is funny. To the writers: graphic violence isn't funny. Why is there so much of it? For the record, I liked the graphically violent movie Hot Fuzz, so it isn't the gore per se that bothers me. It's that they try to play it for laughs, and I can't think of a single time that it hasn't been way more gross than funny (incidentally, this is one of the reasons I don't enjoy South Park as much as I could). Even bits that I thought were funny, like the guy who eats the Peppermint Pattie and has to make an arduous journey back home from the frozen mountain top, include this garbage for no reason. When that one ended with the guy engaging in graphic cannibalism, I think I might have even said out loud, "And we're back to this s@#! again."
Evil Stewie was much funnier than Gay Stewie. Goofy Jerk Peter was much funnier than Completely Stupid Peter. When I watch some of the older episodes, I still laugh out loud, often. Even some of the jokes that I didn't think were all that great back then seem like comedy gold compared to most of the junk in this series.
To top it off, the show has become almost unbearably preachy. The episodes about legalizing pot and where Meg finds religion didn't even seem like they were *trying* to be funny. They just felt like somebody on a soapbox ranting.... At least when South Park gets preachy (one of the other big reasons I don't like that show), they keep the jokes going. It's telling and sad that one of my favorite moments of this DVD series was when Quagmire lays into Brian and enumerates the many ways that he's a complete jerk.
I'm giving this two stars instead of one because there are still some sparks of funny left in the show. But if they can't do better than this, then maybe it's time to hang it up and move on. |
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