Reign of the Simpsons

The one true American family

Sweet Jesus on a pogo stick, do I feel vindicated.

This vindication, however, has been a long time coming, and now that it has arrived, I’m uncertain of how to handle it. One thing is certain, however. For my generation there is one great and all-telling question—a question so divisive that it can tear friendships asunder in little more than an afternoon. The question is this: To which animated television show do you pledge your allegiance, The Simpsons or The Family Guy?

The debate began my sophomore year of college when I found to my utter dismay that a large contingent of my friends had become serious fans of Family Guy’s animated Rhode Island family, the Griffins. I tried to get on board. I watched the DVDs, I laughed along when they slipped into the baby Stewie’s effete British purr, and I even went so far as tacitly admitting that I found some of the show’s gags “hilarious.” But in my heart, I couldn’t understand how my peers could have so callously turned their backs on the greatest television family of all time, the Simpsons.

For years my anger simmered, occasionally lashing out in drunken arguments with people who had the audacity to declare that the Griffins were “more fully realized characters” or some other such nonsense full of such intellectual laziness that I wondered if the person knew about the list I keep titled “Dumbest Shit I’ve Ever Heard” and was intentionally trying to crack the top five.

Now, with the premiere of The Simpsons Movie, I can finally sit back and revel in just how right I was.

It’s not that the big-screen incarnation of the yellow-skinned Springfield denizens represents the show at its pinnacle of achievement. Far from it. The Simpsons, while still one of the sharpest, funniest shows on network television, reached its creative peak sometime when I was in middle school and has been on a downward slide (with the frequent peak and occasional valley) ever since. The movie is like a longer version of an above-average episode, which is to say I could easily watch it once a week for the next five years and still look forward to the next viewing. The plot is a no-brainer (Homer screws up), and I missed a lot of my favorite ancillary characters, who get only minimal screen time (I almost decided to list them, but that would have taken another paragraph entirely).

The lesson, however, is in the big picture. When creator Seth MacFarlane made a ghastly attempt at a Family Guy movie, the result was a straight-to-DVD embarrassment that had even more heavy, clunking jokes than the typical episode. On the other hand, Simpsons creator Matt Groening (a Portland boy like myself), proved that after nearly two decades of doing the show, he and his legion of writers could still capture an audience’s laughter and sympathy for its favorite piece of crass, callous, and lovable Americana.

So allow me to pound one of the final nails into the coffin when I say, The Family Guy is not—and never was—a good show. Even die-hard fans will admit its characters are breathtakingly bold rip-offs of the Simpsons. From the beer-guzzling, dim-witted father, Peter to the perpetually forgiving, cartoon-MILF, Lois, the family dynamic is painfully cribbed. The show’s only innovations are Stewie, the talking baby, and Brian, the family’s intellectual (and talking) dog. These characters alone managed to carry much of the show's hyperactive comedic zeal, and I admit, at times I certainly found them funny, but this became one of the show’s central problems: Whenever it wanders to characters other than Stewie and Brian, its lack of creativity becomes stunningly apparent.

Furthermore, The Family Guy works a kind of blitz when it comes to its humor, using the Griffins as little more than a vehicle to arbitrarily bludgeon easy targets. Moreover, if a particular joke bombs, the writers often extend it to nearly unbearable lengths, like a particularly bad storyteller who will just keep piling on events to his tale in hopes of eventually eliciting an eventual response from his audience. As a result, the show is more a mish-mash of sex jokes and pop culture references than it is a sustained narrative (which, I fear, may be one of the reasons it became so momentarily popular amongst my age and gender group). Back in college, I enraged my friends when I sat down with a piece of paper and a pen during every episode and tallied the hits and misses of the jokes. By the end of each episode, I would have a scorecard that looked like the end of Cleveland Browns game. My friend argued that any show (The Simpsons included) could not withstand that kind of scrutiny, but the point of the exercise was to demonstrate how often the show swung for the fences (which is nearly every ten to fifteen seconds) and how often it whiffed (often—really goddamn often).

The Simpsons, in stark contrast, offers apt, wry commentary on the state of small-town or suburban America’s mass-consuming, media-ingesting population. With the constraint of limited vulgarity (and admittedly, no one is less of a fan of limited vulgarity than me), it takes a subversive look at the nuclear family, ingeniously embracing an old-fashioned standard of morality while at the same time ridiculing the social norms that such a morality supposedly entails. Meanwhile, any similar subversion found in The Family Guy is merely a blatant copy of what The Simpsons has already explored.

Here it is easy to say that The Simpsons Movie did not live up to the high expectations fans and the show itself have set. My friend Phil wrote an essay on the matter, and by the end of it I had to call him to make sure he wasn’t suicidal. I feel this is largely because Simpsons fans are a slightly less pathetic version of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings fans. We’re just as dedicated, just as encyclopedic, but ultimately cooler because our obsession does not involve reading. The expectations for the movie were stratospheric when all one could possibly ask is that the Simpson family toss us a bevy of clever jokes and a few truly dumb ones as it cements its place in the American conscious, which frankly wouldn’t take all that much cement in the first place.

For Family Guy fans, I can only say two things: First, I feel sorry for you. And second, never in a million years could Seth MacFarlane think of something as simple and clever as Montgomery Burns slyly cooing, “Ahh, now finally the rich, white man has the power.”