| tobiagorrio |
02-25-04 11:42 AM |
One thing I would like to add here (though I realize this discussion has been beaten into the ground) is that it's not just a matter of taste, or a matter of opinion. If everything were a matter of personal taste, it would not be possible to go online and have debates about whether a show is good or not. The idea underlying these debates is that there are objective standards for what makes a show good, and we can argue about whether a show meets those standards. Now, there's a lot of room for differences of opinion and taste about what the standards are, whether a show lives up to them -- but it's not all opinion. There's common ground. When we say that a TV episode is poorly structured, we're often working from a common understanding of what good story structure is.
That's why arguing about whether a show is "funny" is not as productive as arguing about whether it's "good." "Funny" is basically 100% subjective. Is Family Guy funny? Not to me, most of the time. But that's just my subjective taste. Is Family Guy a good show? That is open to argument precisely because the standards for a good sitcom are not 100% subjective. There are things we come to expect from a sitcom: That the stories should be well-structured, that the episodes should have some kind of overall theme or point (the Family Guy episodes I like tend to be the ones that have enough discipline to make a coherent satiric point, like "E Peterbus Unum"), that the characters should be interesting and that the humor should arise from the characters rather than extraneous jokes (because if you're just going to make a bunch of random jokes, why bother doing a sitcom with continuing characters; why not just do a sketch show?), and so on. There's room for disagreement here, but there still is some kind of basic idea of what a good sitcom is supposed to be; that's why Family Guy fans often argue that it's not really supposed to be a sitcom but a parody of sitcoms -- i.e. that it shouldn't be judged by the standards of a regular sitcom. I happen to think that it should be judged by those standards and that it fails by those standards. Others can disagree. But it's not 100% taste. Let's say it's 90% taste, and that 10% objective standards is the part we can argue about.
Oh, and I don't actively dislike random/surreal/pop-culture jokes. When such jokes occur within a good story, as they do in The Simpsons, they are icing on the cake. When they take the place of good storytelling -- as I think such jokes do on Family Guy -- they become boring, because they all start to seem the same. Not to mention that I think humor is better when it relates to the real world (as it does when The Simpsons shows Bart acting like a kid) than when it relates to pop culture. A good Simpsons episode can make us laugh and teach us something about ourselves; which is not to say it teaches us a Valuable Lesson or anything; Seinfeld, which had no hugging or learning, taught us things about ourselves because it showed us a satiric portrayal of the silly everyday things in real life. Family Guy is so obsessed with pop-culture, not only in the references but in the characters (every character is a collection of riffs on traditional sitcom stereotypes; we know these people from other TV shows, not from real life), that it seems empty; all it has to tell us is that Seth MacFarlane watched a lot of TV in the '80s. And that gets old fast.
There's also the originality issue. I venture to say that people who were fans of "Pinky and the Brain" (as I was) were a lot less impressed with Stewie than people who were not familar with P&B -- because Stewie was so similar to The Brain, only a much less interesting and funny character. Perhaps my P&B fandom makes me resent FG a bit more because I believe that MacFarlane was nowhere near as talented as many other people who, like him, were writing kids' cartoons. He got the breaks, they didn't, but almost any writer on Pinky and the Brain turned out better stuff than MacFarlane did when he was writing similar cartoons.
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