Family Guy Offers Hyper Animation, in Triplicate

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Cleveland from The Cleveland Show, left, and the characters of Family Guy

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Correction Appended: Oct. 16, 2009

Fox, never one for verbal restraint, calls its hit Sunday-night cartoon block Animation Domination. And there is one animator who dominates it: Seth MacFarlane, the writer — producer — voice actor who calls the toons on three of the four shows. It's a turnaround for MacFarlane; Fox canceled his Family Guy in 2002, then brought it back after it proved hugely popular on DVD. In 2005, Fox added MacFarlane's American Dad, a war-on-terrorism-era CIA spoof. This fall came The Cleveland Show, TV's unlikeliest spin-off since The Ropers, focused on Family Guy bit character Cleveland Brown. For 90 minutes a week, MacFarlane has the loudest megaphone on TV. Is he saying anything with it?

The trouble with Family Guy is that it seems to want to say everything. It's The Simpsons on Red Bull, with a dysfunctional family — the Griffins of Quahog, R.I. — but twice the outrageousness and thrice the pace. Its signature move is to cut away from a story line for a non sequitur gag (a pop-culture parody, a celebrity spoof, a Star Wars reference). The Simpsons is a satire, but it's rooted in its family. Family Guy is less a half-hour narrative about characters than a delivery system for unconnected jokes the writers can't bear to part with. (See the top 10 TV dads.)

The series is often hilarious; there are so many jokes, it is statistically impossible for it not to be. It has a fantastic sense of showmanship (MacFarlane, who voices dad Peter and others, loves writing musical numbers to show off his Broadway side) but suffers from comic ADHD. A send-up of Family Guy on South Park revealed it to be written by manatees picking colored balls with random joke topics inscribed on them.

But the show's fans love the randomness. This season's premiere (a spoof of the sci-fi series Sliders) was almost self-parody: evil tot Stewie invents a dimension-travel device and takes talking dog Brian (the best-developed "person" on the show) to a series of parallel universes, where we see them drawn as Disney characters, Washington Post cartoons and so on. The manatees were working overtime. (See the 100 best TV shows of all time.)

The Cleveland Show was meant to be a kinder, gentler Family Guy. The Griffins' African-American neighbor Cleveland returns to his hometown, where he marries his high school sweetheart. The pilot showed promise: Cleveland, a good-hearted sad sack, is sweeter and more sympathetic than Peter, and he has actual motivations — starting his life over and connecting with his awkward son and two stepkids. But Cleveland pretty quickly became Family Guy II, with similar characters and dynamics (Cleveland's toddler stepson Rallo is essentially Black Stewie) and the same taste for quick-fire cutaway jokes and pop-culture references (including self-conscious ones about white writers making sitcoms about black people).

MacFarlane's best show, American Dad, is also his lowest rated — maybe because it isn't simply a remake of Family Guy. Yes, its protagonist, CIA agent Stan Smith, is a nuclear-family patriarch. And where Family Guy has a talking dog and Cleveland a talking bear, Dad has both a talking alien (a show-tune-obsessed card with a voice like Paul Lynde's) and a talking goldfish. (See the worst TV spin-offs of all time.)

But next to the frenzied Family Guy and Cleveland, Dad is practically Mad Men. What makes Dad good isn't its political point of view. (MacFarlane, whose liberalism sometimes surfaces on Family Guy, uses Stan to send up post-9/11 jingoism.) It's that the show has a point of view at all. It's about something — satirizing the war on terrorism — and it invests time in its characters without ping-ponging between gags. It's still outrageous: the season premiere had Stan take nerdy son Steve to a Vietnam War re-enactment to toughen him up. (Sending up Vietnam-flick clichés, it played "Fortunate Son" over Viet Cong paintball ambushes.) But by focusing on father and son trying to connect, the episode also ended up touching and real.

It's too bad the same can't be said of MacFarlane's other shows. Sitcoms like The Office (and, still, The Simpsons) prove that the best comedies aren't always those with the most jokes per minute. MacFarlane has the talent to be in their league. But he needs to control his gag reflex.

Because of an editing error, the original version of this article incorrectly suggested that the entire series Family Guy is a spoof of the sci-fi series Sliders. In fact, just this season’s premiere is a spoof of Sliders.

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