Family Guy has run its course. It's time to end it

Family Guy has been one of my favorite animated series of all time, traveling well beyond The Simpsons and South Park and only getting beaten out by Rick and Morty off the top of my head.

A friend recently put the latest season of Family Guy on our private server and initially I was thinking about how much I love that show and was excited to get into it again so I sat down thinking I was in for a treat. Man oh man was I let down.

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There are a bunch of reasons why I think this show simply isn't funny anymore but a lot of it likely had to do with fatigue and the fact that after 23 years of doing this, you would have to imagine that they have done basically everything that they possibly can with these characters. South Park has gone through the same thing, unfortunately, and the introduction of new characters rarely works and with Family Guy I don't think they really even try to do this.

For one thing, Family Guy seems to have run out of things to pick on and often will resort to political hits and since the creators of the show are clearly of one particular political persuasion, they only go after one side almost exclusively.

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If the person is conservative, Family Guy is going to try to tear them a new one by creating a grossly exaggerated version of that person using one or two traits about them to try to paint a worse opinion of them in the public eye than is really deserved. This isn't comedy, this is activism. For me, I don't really care what a particular show's political leanings are, but when they do this all the time it gets old, it gets predictable, and as soon as I see a real-world person in the cast temporarily, I don't need to really guess what the end result is going to be, it is pretty obvious.

The next thing that isn't funny is that the various characters attributes have already been explore probably well beyond what is actually possible. Everything about Meg, Brian, Stewie, Lois, Quagmire, Peter, Chris, Cleveland, and Joe has already been put on display at one point or another and I honestly believe that re-hashing these already very explored aspects of their personalities would be preferable than attempting to create new ones. We have explored,in 23 years, an exhaustive list of possible scenarios for the characters and it just isn't funny anymore to present Peter as a lazy incompetent boob anymore.

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Another thing that has sort of killed the humor in Family Guy the PC nature of the entertainment world today. The exploration of black stereotypes with Cleveland used to be a lot of fun and the "blackuweather forecast" was always funny.

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Now, because of I suppose potential Twitter backlash, Family Guy steers clear of any potentially controversial takes on society and instead just "plays it safe." Well, for me and a lot of people "safe" is boring.

Yesterday I watched 3 episodes of the Family Guy latest season and didn't so much as smile through all of it. It simply has lost its edge and no longer appeals to me. I have no intention of watching the rest of the season because while Family Guy has been immune to this in the past, generally speaking any series will put what they consider to be their strongest episodes at the beginning and the end of a season. If this the best the season has to offer, I definitely am not going to be interested in the rest.

South Park is kind of suffering from the same fatigue even though they truly don't seem to give a rip about being PC at all. It is just a question of there not really being any more avenues to explore with the same characters and it is actually quite amazing that they made it this far.

the consensus is that Family Guy no longer delivers the sharp, unpredictable comedy that once defined it.

Yep, I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Here you can see the steady decline in viewer numbers over time and while a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that almost no one watches network TV anymore, if we were to dig into the number of streaming viewers you would probably see a similar decline.

It's not culturally relevant anymore and they seem to be afraid to tackle anything that would be controversial without taking the pre-determined California-approved viewpoint on whatever it is that they are talking about.

I'm sure the writers are tired as well because it must be difficult to come up scripts for shows that are not really about anything in particular, for over 2 decades.

I predict a cancellation of the show entirely in the next couple of years. It will likely happen without me even noticing it as well.