12. PTV
Season: 4
Episode: 14
Original Air Date: November 6th, 2005 A lot of people feel this is one of the episodes where Family Guy truly began to turn the corner and become a special show. The biting commentary in this one is very strong, with the Federal Communications Commission looking terrible, and for good reason. A wardrobe malfunction at the Emmy Awards causes the FCC to censor television after their leader, apparently Cobra Commander of GI Joe fame, receives phone complaints about the incident. Peter doesn't like the new censorship, so he starts his own television network, PTV. On PTV, shows are broadcast uncensored, and you even get original programming by Peter and his friends, including the Peter Griffin Sideboob Hour, which is a hilarious look at various shots of sideboobs... including Peter's. As PTV expands and gets more popular, Lois becomes fed up with the raunchy programming that the channel is airing, feeling that it's a bad influence on children that shouldn't be watching. Even though Peter and Brian try to talk her out of it by telling her that it's up to parents to control what they children are able to watch and not watch, Lois still contacts the FCC about PTV to get it shut down. Peter, Brian and Stewie perform a scathing song-and-dance number about the FCC's rules and regulations, but it isn't enough to get PTV saved. Unfortunately for the citizens of Quahog, the FCC oversteps their boundaries and begins to censor real life (an air horn "bleeping" out all curse words, FCC employees holding black bars over genitals to hide nudity, audible farts banned in public, and no overly sexual situations), causing Lois to realize she may have made a mistake, and it's now up to Peter to take his fight to Congress to get the FCC out of his life. You don't often see Family Guy writers climb atop their soap boxes for anything more than a single line or joke, but they really went the South Park route here with their commentary on a single subject, and it worked.