Family Guy Review

MacFarlane's cartoon premieres after the Super Bowl in 1999, gets canceled in 2000 and again in 2002, and comes back in 2005 because home video sales and late night reruns proved an audience the network could not see. The first three seasons earn that second life. The non sequitur cutaway is a real structural invention: the show can abandon a scene mid sentence for a joke about a cereal mascot and return as if nothing happened, and at its best the technique carries the densest gag rate on television.

In 2009 the Television Academy nominated it for Outstanding Comedy Series, the first animated series in that category since The Flintstones, and Stewie and Brian, written as an odd couple rather than a baby and a dog, could carry whole episodes on dialogue alone. The problem is that a structure with no obligation to plot eventually stops writing plot at all.

The show holds its shape through roughly the seventh season, and the slide is hard to miss by the eighth: the cutaways get longer and lazier, the characters harden into a single setting each, and Peter's cruelty stops working as a parody of the sitcom dad and becomes the entire joke. The warm notices the early run drew hardened into a standing complaint about decline, and the audience talks about the show in the past tense while it keeps making episodes.

The voice work is the axis that beats the overall grade, and honestly so. MacFarlane carries four leads without any of them collapsing into each other, and Alex Borstein and Mila Kunis do real character work on material that gives them very little. A C is what is left when an invention this influential stays attached to writing that quit.