I've said much of this on "Jump The Shark," but Family Guy is definitely a show full of hills and valleys, but for some of us, the hills are more than worth the valleys. For a "low-brow" comedy, it often seems to go out of its way to AVOID a low-brow joke, especially a really well-worn one. For instance, it often has little old ladies and "trailer park" type women, without those lame, lame "hirsute woman" jokes. (I'd like to see more than a tiny number of "Patty and Selma" scenes on The Simpsons do without those!) and there was the episode where Brian makes friends with the elderly woman. Instead of a lot of worn-out geriatric jokes, they made it a sort of comedy-drama! And in the "Asiantown" episode (which was kind of hit and miss), there were a lot of jokes of Asian food, without one of those cat and dog ones (you know the ones I mean), in spite of the fact that a MAIN CHARACTER is a dog! I know these are irritating things that Family Guy DOESN'T do, but there are so many funny things it DOES do. The religious jokes (not SO much in the current version as the first one) can be genuinely clever. Where else can you see Jesus looking embarrassed because he got credit for a miracle performed by an Indian god standing next to him? (The jokes about religion on countless other comedies - yes, including The Simpsons - get so "preachy" in THEIR OWN right, instead of being "nonsensicle" like that.) And then there are the movie and TV parodies, like "Homicide : Life On Sesame Street." And most recently, the "Brokeback Mountain" one. The current version, unfortunately, has too many unfunny medical jokes (regardless of whether they're in bad taste), and too many gross-out jokes (in spite of what I mentioned earlier), but the good moments still easily outweigh those, for me at least. I could go on and on.
Review of Family Guy
