Monthly Archives: November 2007

I was arguing with a friend. It was one of those stupid, horrible arguments where one moment you’re pulling out of the Target parking lot, wearing your cool new sunglasses, two beautiful women squeezed into the bench seat in the … Continue reading →

There’s nothing in this season — at least the first two discs, which is as far as I’ve gotten and may be as far as I ever go — that came even close to making me laugh as hard as the collective guy-dumbness of Peter, Chris, Brian, and Stewie drinking ipecac for the hell of it, or Stewie’s “Doing a little writing, huh?” taunting of Brian (both, I think, from the previous season). But more crucially, nothing in this “volume” has disturbed me like the Golden Turd mini-film from American Dad or Peter’s ongoing fight with the giant chicken or Herbert the pervert’s heartbreaking musical paean to Chris (delivered from a ladder outside Chris’s bedroom window). Horror has always lain side-by-side with the humor on Family Guy; that Herbert has become a colorful, almost genial minor character who raises not one goose bump is just the most obvious example of the loss of real electricity in the show. What used to be unsettling, creepy, or at least giddily disorienting has become comfortable, almost predictable. At this point, the “This is worse than the time I…” setup is so hoary and worn-out that I almost find myself looking away when the inevitable wacky flashback comes.

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