4. The Sheer Laziness
Family Guy have never been known to drive their plots forward with intriguing narrative and character development - rather, they rely on cut-away gags that take us away from the action to keep their audience entertained. The cut-away gags have been criticised in the past - least of all for their occasionally-dark subject matter, such as lampooning (or even murdering) a celebrity - and though I personally enjoy a lot of them, some of them take things way too far and add nothing to the episode. Like the frequent Conway Twitty cut-aways, which just show the country singer crooning for two minutes or more, or the chicken fights - both add nothing to the episode in question and have 'filler' written all over them. If you can't write a 20 minute episode of television without two or three minutes of it being stock footage of Conway Twitty, you should just give the game up.