Another problem people are having with Family Guy of late is the obvious uses of fillers to complete the allotted time for an episode. While the well-known 'and here's Conway Twitty' jokes were original and funny to begin with, in Episode 9 of Season 7 "The Juice is Loose", they played an entire clip of a Conway Twitty song with no gags before, during, or after the song. Played in its full entirety, the long-running joke was heavily criticised on message boards and forums, and the episode as a whole was received poorly. As cited in the episode review, how stupid do the writers think the audience are? Why on earth would they be happy with three minutes of a song the demographic have no clue what it is? This is an age group Family guy panders to but they most certainly won't know the reference? The joke was funny when the song was getting 10 seconds of play in an episode, but having the full song for that episode was definitely a mistake. The same goes with the 'Peter Vs The Chicken' fights. The longest ran for a similar amount of time as the Conway Twitty song in one episode, which equates to around 15% of the episode's running time. It's seemingly very lazy by the writing team as it's clear they're using such gimmicks to eat up episode time rather than to make the audience laugh.
Crippy Cooke, 23, is a freelance Football Writer contributing to What Culture. He's had work featured on Zoo, MSN, London 24, The Telegraph, The Huffington Post, and was recently named Writer of the Year on FTBpro - while also a nominee for Best Male Blog in the Football Blogging Awards.
