10 Reasons Family Guy Is The Laziest Show On Television
Are we really lucky there's a Family Guy?
The story of Family Guy truly is an interesting one. The show originally debuted in 1999 and despite cancellation along the way, it has since gone on to run for fifteen seasons and just under three-hundred episodes. Moreover, the show has been nominated for and won countless awards over the years, and when you consider its current quality, that might be the most shocking revelation of all.
Fair's fair, Family Guy was a decent show in its early run. It had to be, otherwise its two cancellations after the second and third seasons would have ended it entirely.
And it was perhaps those revivals that made the show-makers so complacent, giving them a feeling of invincibility? Something certainly seems to be up, as Seth MacFarlane's flagship show has been on a noticeable decline in quality for the last several years. Jokes have grown stale, characters even more stale, and the show seems to do whatever it can to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make a buck.
There's really no two ways about it, Family Guy has become a lazily produced show. In fact, not only is it lazy, it's unforgivably lazy. And the fact that it's still on the air speaks volumes as to just how much something can survive on brand power alone, regardless if it's any good or not.
So, how did one of the true juggernauts of adult animation come to be such an uninspired mess?
10. It Stole Its Way To Success
Even before Family Guy's sharp decline in recent years, its earlier, higher-quality episodes still gave off the distinct feeling that the writers were severely lacking in the creativity department.
Specifically, they just couldn't seem to stop stealing their jokes from The Simpsons, more often than not, verbatim. Plus, there's an argument to be made about Family Guy's base premise itself being a carbon copy of The Simpsons.
What makes the joke-stealing so unforgivable is not necessarily that they did it in the first place, but rather how unabashedly blatant they were about it. What's worse is that Family Guy would then go on to mock The Simpsons for years to come, despite that Springfield's first family was responsible for their early success (whether they wanted to be or not.)
That's not biting the hand that feeds you, that's snatching food from the hand that wasn't for you, then biting it anyway just for kicks. And the fact that some of the episodes of Family Guy that were actually good only got that way because the comedic material was outright stolen speaks volumes about its writing staff.