this is a great comparison of the two. It speaks to the fact that the simpsons has an idea and message overall along with smaller messages in each episode, while family guy is just 20 minutes of funny with a loose plot to follow. Simpsons will always be better than family guy because it has an actual theme behind it
In my opinion Family Guy had either good or bad episodes from season 7 to 16. I can’t think of a single episode from any episode from season 17 and after that I like… except the one where Peter eats out Babs.
Marge Vs. the monorail is easily one of the best episodes of the simpsons every made, Ive been watching it all my life and have always loved that episode, I never knew or even really thought that lyle lanly was a reference to anything, so point proven. I would bet that 90% of the people who watch that episode do not know that and It is never the less loved universally by fans.
Man I just typed in “why I stopped watching family guy” and this didn’t come up. RU-vid SUCKS. Luckily I remembered I subscribed after the last one so I could find it!
I think futurama also does references great too, like the forwards Time Machine episode, when fry was kneeling in front of the destroyed Statue of Liberty, I feel like that was a reference because family guy did a similar thing with Adam west when he saw the statue of liberty’s foot that Peter had questionably attained as a gift for quagmire
I think there's a layer to the family guy joke that you've missed, and maybe I'm looking too far into this but since it was Stewie, a baby, who set the joke up, and all he probably knows about Abbott and Costello is the very famous "who's on first" skit. He also probably knows from his children's books that the dog goes woof, the cow goes moo, and the owl goes hoo. So in his baby mind, he has put 2 and 2 together that Abbott must be an owl and thinks people are saying Owl and Costello since they do kinda sorta sound similar.
The best example I have of how modern Family Guy sabotages its own comedic potential is the first episode of Season 15 when Brian and Stewie start a band. At the end, when Stewie asks who Olivia is going to continue the band with, Brian says “probably some dog we’ve never met” before they show Olivia with Vinny. That joke would’ve been really good if Brian never said that. Instead, it completely ruins the joke by making it fairly simple to guess what will happen. Humor should never be lazy or predictable. Family Guy does both way too often.
My favorite go-to example is the Goodfellas reference when Chris first goes to the Italian school. It’s 40 seconds of walking through rooms with the “Obviously-Making-Reference-Laugh-Damnit” style in a really insufferable Writer’s-Inside-Joke-Fuck-The-Audience way
Maybe this is a unique experience but another thing that made the Simpsons Who's on First joke so funny to me is it is a common stage skit and I have seen it done on stage my amateurs more than once INCLUDING BY MY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS
Btw I gotta say, the algorithm is rooting for you 😂 This has been my first recommended next watch for over a week even on some not related videos. This one didn't entirely win me over since a lot of the takes were a little weak but I still agree with the thesis, watched the whole thing and look forward to more
Oh yeah! I'd like to see you talk about other shows too. Like the Simpsons or bob's burgers. I think it be cool to hear your thoughts on them. Lastly, this maybe just me, but I think the golden age of the Simpsons didn't end til season 22. I grew up with the early seasons, but as a kid fox would show season 10 and newer episodes when i watch on tv.
The atheism bits in family guy are weird. They feel less like jokes and more like preaching. Although you can say that ten fold for the Simpsons. Seriously take all the Christian jokes and line them all up. It's hard not to believe there's an agenda on display after seeing all that lol. Also I'm surprised you didn't talk about Not all dogs go to heaven in the atheist part of the video. I think the video would have been better if you left out this part. Cause you don't have anything to say. Good video!
The big difference is that The Simpsons uses references in a transformative way. If they reference Pulp Fiction or whatever else, then it's the Simpsons characters imitating certain aspects of the thing they're referencing. Family Guy doesn't do that. They just .. cut away to grotesque versions of the actors, celebrities, or fictional characters doing "the scene" / "the moment". Like, take a random event that happened in our world like the Tom Cruise freak-out at Oprah a decade ago (or so). It has been lampooned to high heavens and without looking it up, I can safely say that probably both Simpsons and Family Guy did that joke. In the Simpsons that reference would have probably been a freak-out by one of these Simpsons characters either with a guest-starring Oprah, or maybe even an in-universe character like Kent Brockman as the other person in the scene. The freakout would've also led to some kind of action, or a move towards the episode's plot. It would've been detached enough to work as its own thing. In Family Guy that reference was probably like "Brian, you are crazier than Tom Cruise when he freaked out on Oprah!" and then we cut to a cartoonish Tom Cruise just, idk, humping the pillows on Oprah's couch uncomfortably long, while Oprah looks shocked.
TIME for Family Guy to be better again & have jokes that dont look down on us viewers and making Brian, Peter, Lois & many other characters that started as great to awful to great again. Family Guy DONT need to be mean-spirited, gory, disgusting & filthy, ESPECIALLY all the time! And NO stupid jokes, ESPECIALLY that drags for a long time! Family Guy went DOWNHILL like Simpsons, My Little Pony: FIM, Steven Universe & Rick and Morty!
The reason you don't see an episode where Cleveland leaves quahog is because that is the pilot of the Cleveland show. Also i would say the Quagmire vs Brian is already a bit developed by this point
They leaned into Brian being an Atheist because creator Seth McFarlane is one. I always found this to make little sense because they have shown to hang out with Jesus and saw him perform miracles so he should at least know he exists.
These seasons is where you can really tell the decline is the writing starts to take a nosedive. The comedy becomes much more hit or miss, plots are more nonsensical & hollow, and the characters started becoming much more unlikable. It's also around these seasons where most of the OG writers left the show so that would explain some of Family Guy's decline in the writing. The creator even stopped writing around Season 4.
This was an interesting retrospective overall. I agree that the show changed over the years. That being said, I still catch up with Family Guy to this day. The recent seasons can give me a few laughs per episodes. And sometimes, that's all I need from it. Keep up the good work, man.
Off-topic, but the thing about that meme at 17:12 is that even if you took what that graph says to be true, it wouldn't prove that religion repressed scientific advancements. Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were all societies so religious that the notion of atheism didn't even exist, and yet - look how much progress that graph shows them making!
It's a shame this series ended right before you've had a chance to touch on Seahorse Seashell Party, because HOO BOY. That episode is Family Guy at it's absolute lowest point. It's everything wrong with Modern Family Guy neatly compressed into a single episode, it is profoundly awful in a way only a handful of other episodes down the line even come close to reaching.
It's basically a whole lot of unfunny jokes, and a poorly done abuse story with Meg. Were she comes to the conclusion that she should be abused, so her family don't fight???
18:21 Yup, that's pretty much 1/3 of modern Family guy jokes in a nutshell. The only jokes we get are: writers' biases/opinions on things, reference = joke, and longer is funnier. Outside of the show trying to be more disgusting in the 2010's era, most of what you said about seasons 7-9 still applies to the show to this day.
KC! Don't brush your teeth right after eating! The acids of your food and the mix of your mouth acids and food slightly soften your enamel for a while, making brushing it strip away some of that enamel. It can be a problem over time.
I think Road to the Multiverse would have been better if Brian and Stewie ended up in the Steve & Larry Oh What A Cartoon! short as it would be an alternate universe to the mainstream Family Guy world and a nice easter egg.
That would've been so much more interesting. They did do the Steve & Larry easter egg much later in the show but it just comes off pretty underwhelming.
The characters in the modern era of Family Guy are so different compared to their earlier seasons counterparts. Makes me wonder if they’re even the same people.
I personally disagree about them not dropping subtle clues that Diane was the killer in the episode. She’s the first one to blame someone in that scene of everyone blaming someone else, that being Tom, which coincided with her plan, and in that overhead shot of everyone arguing, she’s nowhere to be seen.
Cool videos! Thanks for this trilogy. Absolutely have to agree with how the series decayed, but particularly with how seasons pre cancellation were amazing.
which family guy series is the most offensive most political which push its limits for boundaries out every series ever done but you would only series 1-9 so that will do for me why dont you do southpark after this
The "Walt Disney was an anti-semite" jokes always came off so stange to me, because it's so laughably false. It's so easily disproven, even with a google search, yet FG kept insisting otherwise and people just sorta...believed in the gaslighting. This happens a LOT with Family Guy, for some reason. Like how FG also started the trope of Marcy and Peppermint Patty of the Peanuts as lesbians, despite how canonically BOTH have had huge crushes on Charlie Brown. If anything Marcy was far more outspoken about it, and outright confessed her feelings towards a stunned Charlie Brown. Hell, BOTH have even kissed him at some point! They're about the farthest thing you can get from lesbians, but that never stopped this show from pushing a narrative for cheap jokes.
As much as I loath Modern Family Guy, I'll always have a soft spot to the early seasons. This video is a great trip down kemory lane that really hammers home why I still feel that way.
i saw early family guy as a kid and it is probably the funniest thing i have ever seen in my entire life. the only thing rivaling it could be beavis and butthead or some youtube poops. early family guy was a firework of fast pace over the top jokes. the dumb humor was so unpredictable back then.
I have met so many americans on the internet justifying their use of the nuclear weapons that it doesnt surpriced me that one of the could be in the family guy writing room. Americans always jump through some serious hoops not to see them as the bad guys
Whoa, Slick. We're Americans and get all the references in Family Guy because we have access to films, TV and the internet. I don't know which deserted island you come from that magically has electricity, but you ain't the intended audience. An actually intriguing idea for a show would be this: How did The Simpsons animators in South Korea replicate such a beautiful baseball swing for Chalmers in that bit? That's right, you wouldn't have noticed that because it wasn't a cricket bat. Would their animation quality take a nosedive having to draw a football quarterback passing? Or a person eating a pulled pork sandwich at just the right angle to keep it from dribbling out the sides? How do you say "pulled pork sandwiches" in Korean?
Completely agree with the Mystery episode. I get its a fan favourite and the aesthetics are on point - but there really is NO mystery here because there are zero clues or structure. Key pieces of information, such as Diane being replaced on TV or her relationship with James or her intern, should have been teased throughout not just expo dumped afterwards. Likewise, the fact nothing pointed to Diane meant they had to reveal it was her through the stupidest mistake she could make, just bluntly stating that she bought a dress for her first solo news show already... and brought it with her? Its actually impressive how little work they put into the detective element. Oh and the version on D+ has this weird cut where they removed a Consuela joke about her thinking the word "vacuum" means more that it does, which is so odd they censored just this one joke of hers when FG has done far "worse" with her
Generally I like the rule of thumb that a story should be improved in some sense if you know the twist going into it. Obviously you miss out on the mystery and surprise, but you get to appreciate the clever ways the twist is built up. Of course, with this episode there's really nothing like that.
It’s funny, after the first part I almost commented about how I liked the joke I didn’t know the reference to more and how that seemed to go against your point about it being worse for people who didn’t know. But watching the second half, yeah actually I found those jokes funnier thinking they wrote them and now that I see just how blatantly they ripped the original off, I just can’t enjoy it the same way.
