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Family Guy is an American animated comedy created by Seth MacFarlane for FOX in 1999. The show was cancelled once in 2000 and again in 2002, but strong DVD sales and reruns on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim led FOX to resume production of the show in 2005 (see "Return to television" below). To date it is one of only a handful of shows in television history to be cancelled and later revived by the power of their fan bases, and one of the few shows to be brought back to air by the same network that cancelled it. (See also Cagney and Lacey and Doctor Who). The title character is Peter Griffin, an inept blue collar head of a lower-middle class family frequently beset by the consequences of his foolish antics. Family Guys brand of humor is notable for the usually brief, frequently nonsensical cutaways (usually featuring oddball pop culture references) and flashbacks to various points in history, geography, and reality involving the characters and their outlandish actions (see "Structure and comedic approach" below). Seth McFarlane voices many of the characters (Peter, Brian, Stewie, Glenn Quagmire, Tom Tucker and others), and works as a gag writer on various episodes. Other voice actors include That '70s Shows star Mila Kunis (Meg), actor Seth Green (Chris), former MADtv star Alex Borstein (Lois, Tricia Takanawa, Loretta Brown and cameo of Bunny Swan), Writer/Producer Mike Henry (Cleveland, Cleveland Jr, Performance Artist, Herbert and Greased-up Deaf Guy), and comedic character actor Patrick Warburton (Joe Swanson). Actress Lacey Chabert provided the voice of Meg for the first production season (14 episodes); however, because of a contractual agreement (it is not clear whether it was at Chabert's, Fox's or the producers' request), she was never credited, and Fox has never officially admitted that she was ever the voice of Meg.
Creation Family Guy originally aired in the United States on the Fox Broadcasting Company on January 31, 1999, after Super Bowl XXXIII. The episode attracted 22 million viewers. The show premiered as a regular series in April and ran for six additional episodes until the season finale in mid-May. The first season had seven episodes which introduced the show's main characters. The second season began on September 23, 1999, and suffered competition from other shows. After only two episodes of the second season, Family Guy was taken off the network's permanent schedule and shown irregularly thereafter. The show returned March 2000 to finish airing the second season which contained 21 episodes. The third season contained 22 episodes and began its run on July 11, 2001. During its second and third-season runs, Fox frequently moved the show around different days and time slots with little or no notice and consequently, the show's ratings suffered. When Family Guy was shown in the UK, and when the DVDs were subsequently released there (November 12, 2001), the first seven episodes of the second season were included with the first season, balancing them out with 14 episodes each. There was a great deal of debate and rumor during the second and third seasons about whether Family Guy would be cancelled or renewed. Fox publicly announced that the show had been cancelled at the end of the second season. In an attempt to convince Fox to renew the show, dismayed fans created websites, signed petitions, and wrote letters; some even sent diapers and baby food to the network for Stewie. A shift in power at Fox resulted in the ordering of thirteen new episodes forming the basis of the third season. Keenly aware of the uncertainty of the show's future, the writers referenced the uncertainty in several episodes (Specifically The Thin White Line where Fox let them say "fuck" for the first time without being hidden by background noise like a bell. It was bleeped, of course.) During the third season, Fox announced that Family Guy was cancelled for good. Revival efforts The show's cancellation in the third season was decried by fans, who renewed efforts to convince Fox to resurrect the show. An online petition was launched, garnering over 10,000 signatures within a few weeks. The petition gained over 100,000 signatures total, but this along with mass e-mailing and letter writing to Fox executives and organized street protests failed to save Family Guy. Later efforts to get other networks, particularly UPN, to buy Family Guy also failed. Return to television In 2003, Family Guy gained its first syndicated run on Canada's Teletoon network, where it quickly gained massive popularity due to frequent airings. Several months later, reruns of the series finally found a permanent home at Cartoon Network's late-night Adult Swim block, where it continues to play as of 2006. According to a Cartoon Network press release, .• The series found further success on DVD, when it was finally released for the US market (NTSC, Region 1) on April 15, 2003. Divided into two volumes, Family Guy sold 2.2 million DVD units in the first year,• reportedly surpassing every other TV-based DVD released in 2003, including Sex and the City and Friends compilations. The significant Cartoon Network ratings combined with the unprecedented DVD sales, led to widespread rumors that Fox was in talks to revive the series. On November 19, 2003, the E! Entertainment Television channel and its website (see below) reported that Fox was negotiating with Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane to revive the show with 35 new episodes. In a February 27, 2004 interview with IGN, Seth MacFarlane confirmed that Family Guy would resume production.• MacFarlane provided even more information in a BBC interview.• On March 26, 2004, Fox television officially announced that it had committed to producing at least 22 more episodes of Family Guy for broadcast in early 2005. Adult Swim retained a window to run these episodes, starting on May 1, 2005. Seth MacFarlane was quoted as saying, The fourth-season premiere of Family Guy aired on Sunday, May 1, 2005, 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Fox, and poked fun at the show's former troubles by showing a 2002 flashback with Peter listing all of the Fox shows that would have to fail (and did) before Family Guy would be able to return. An important reason for the show's current success is the Sunday night time slot along with other Fox animated programs. Reruns of the fourth season began play during Adult Swim on June 9, 2005. A Family Guy direct-to-DVD movie titled Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, which combined three Family Guy episodes into one coherent story (with added scenes) was released on September 27, 2005.• The 88-minute film is unrated in the US (in the UK its rated with a 15 certificate) and includes commentary, deleted material, and other bonus features. An edited version of the film was shown as the Season 4 finale on May 21, 2006. The film's plot concerns Stewie finding out what he is like in the future. Originally, the movie was going to be made before the TV episodes, but the film got pushed back when the ideas within the episodes took off. (On the same day of the DVD movie's release, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox greenlit production of 22 additional all new episodes of Family Guy, which began airing on FOX on September 10, 2006.•). A ''Family Guy'' video game was producted under the 2K Games banner, and was developed by High Voltage Software. Playable characters include Peter, Brian and Stewie. The game was released on October 25th, 2006 on the PlayStation Portable, Xbox and PlayStation 2.••• According to GameSpot, it will also be available for the GameCube. There are also rumors of a Nintendo DS version.The video game is rated M for Mature. Characters The show revolves around the adventures of Peter Griffin, a bumbling but well-intentioned blue-collar worker. Peter is an Irish-American Catholic with a classic Rhode Island / Massachusetts accent (similar to a Boston accent). During the course of the series, he discovers he's part African-American and has been known to have Spanish, Scottish, Irish and German ancestors. He is known for his trademark laugh. His wife, Lois who has a similar accent with a mixed voice that sounds like a New England version of Edith Bunker, is a stay-at-home mom/piano teacher, and is a member of the Pewterschmidts, (a wealthy socialite family). Peter and Lois have three children: teenage daughter Meg Griffin, who is frequently the butt of jokes for her supposed ugliness; goofy, low-intelligence teenage son Chris Griffin, in many respects a younger version of his father; and a diabolically evil infant son, Stewie Griffin bent on world domination and the death of his mother. Stewie speaks fluently and eloquently, (with stereotypical British phrases) and even though the family can hear his ambitions of world domination and of Lois's demise, all but Brian (the intellectual talking pet dog) dismiss it as baby gibberish. Brian is the only family member who really understands Stewie, and does not treat him like an infant. Stewie also refers to his parents as Lois and the fat man. Brian is anthropomorphized in that he walks on two legs, drinks Martinis, is romantically attracted to Lois, owns his own car (a Toyota Prius, circa 2004) and engages in human conversation, but the Griffins still consider him a pet in many respects. Occasionally, Brian will act in a stereotypically canine manner, usually for comedic effect (such as his inability to stand up in the back of a car, chasing tennis balls and his fear of vacuum cleaners). On his pride, he does not, however, engage in overly submissive "domesticated" behavior. Other recurring characters include the Griffin family's colorful neighbors: paraplegic police officer Joe Swanson, his perpetually pregnant wife Bonnie, and sex-crazed airline-pilot bachelor Glenn Quagmire who lusts after Lois and just about anything else female. (When sexually enticed, Quagmire exclaims, "Giggity-Giggity-Goo", and "All right!") Other characters include mild-mannered deli owner Cleveland Brown, his wife (ex-wife as of the fourth-season episode The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire, which marks her last appearance) Loretta Brown and their hyperactive son, Cleveland Jr. (who hasn't appeared since Season 3), news anchors Tom Tucker and Diane Simmons along with "Asian Reporter Tricia Takanawa", and mentally ill celebrity mayor Adam West, voiced by the very same Adam West of the 60s TV series ''Batman''. Family Guy has not used an especially large cast of recurring minor characters (though this has changed to an extent in Season 4, with many one-shot characters from prior episodes reappearing in new episodes), and most of the episode plotlines center around the exploits of the Griffin family. There are also several semi-regular characters who serve as running gags. Examples include the Evil Monkey in Chris's closet; Herbert, the creepy old man who enjoys "watching" Chris; the Greased-Up Deaf Guy; Ollie Williams, the weather forecaster, who shouts everything he says in his "BlaccuWeather" forecast and appears to be an "angry black man" version of Al Roker; Jake Tucker, anchorman Tom Tucker's son (who appears to have an upside-down face); and Peter's nemesis the Giant Chicken (who originally poked fun at a Burger King commercial), whose fights with Peter parody Hollywood action films and usually cause huge amounts of damage to the city. The incarnation of Death (originally voiced by Norm MacDonald but now by Adam Carolla) has also made a number of appearances. Episodes In keeping with the humorous tone of the series, most episode titles of Family Guy are parodies of popular television shows, movies and slogans. No media product or cultural norm is immune from parody. For the first half of the first season, the writers tried to work the words "murder" or "death" into the title of every episode (e.g. Mind over Murder and Death Has a Shadow) to make the titles resemble those of old-fashioned radio mystery shows. On a DVD commentary, creator Seth MacFarlane says that the writers stopped doing this when they realized they were beginning to get the titles confused and couldn't remember which title went with which episode. Structure and comedic approach The characters live and work in Quahog (pronounced KOE-hog), Rhode Island, a hyperrealistic and intensely satirical suburb of Providence. As a reminder of the true locale, many background shots feature a distinct cluster of three medium-sized skyscrapers, whose features are intended to correspond to a row of buildings in the actual Providence skyline. (The actual buildings in downtown Providence are, from left to right, One Financial Center, 50 Kennedy Plaza and the Bank of America Tower, see comparison at right). This leaves the writers free to make local references and gags specific to Rhode Island culture. A "quahog" is in fact a type of hard shell clam, the state mollusk for Rhode Island, and doubles as a regional slang term for "vagina", much like the word "clam." Characters' lives largely revolve around items and ideas of popular culture incorporated into everyday conversation and events. Some of these references have exaggerated grounding in reality — a paranoid and psychotic version of actor Adam West serves as Quahog's mayor, and public schools are named for Rhode Island natives James Woods and Buddy Cianci — while others unabashedly delve into the realm of fantasy without being questioned. It is entirely possible that we see the world through the eyes of the individual character, instead of the "real" world. This would explain why we understand Stewie's rants, Chris could have an evil monkey in his closet and a talking zit, and Peter could have stars like Gene Simmons pop in to answer questions, an ancestor who is a Jabba the Hutt-type creature and the Transformer Soundwave as a co-worker. As we are seeing the world through each of these characters' eyes, their absurd imaginations become reality. Although Family Guy sometimes maintains a rough sense of continuity, complicated plots are most often traded for a concentration on comedy that is based largely on pop culture references and non sequiturs. Though this style is often played within the characters' world, the series is also known for its use of cutaways, where the plot is interrupted and segues into unrelated, self-contained sketches of variable length — known as "manatee gags," from a South Park parody of Family Guy that implied the jokes were so non-sensical that manatees choosing random concepts could assemble them. Often initiated when a character refers to a past event (accompanied by phrases such as "like that time when...", "I haven't felt like this since...", or "This is worse than the time..."), these sketches are wildly divergent in topic—ranging from classic film scenes to historical events to contemporary television commercials. Many times they encapsulate twisted, humorous takes on reality, and sometimes they are completely nonsensical, such as Peter's being a magic mirror for Kevin Federline, serving as Sandy Duncan's glass eye, or using his bulk to "provide nighttime warmth for Lara Flynn Boyle". The show owes a great deal of its comedic inspiration to the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker's Naked Gun/Police Squad! series (spoof, parody and screwball), whose structural comedic approach has been homaged by Family Guy. Slapstick gags, deadpan one-liners, non sequiturs, flashbacks, absurdity, and pop culture parody have been an influence on Family Guy. Family Guy finally parodied this ultimate parody movie in the fourth-season episode called PTV. Some have also noted that many jokes on the show and the pacing seem like an updated version of the British sitcom The Young Ones whose cutaways frequently revolved around its own world, but were more relevant to story progression and involved more realistic situations than those of Family Guy.•• Though earlier animated series (such as The Critic) experimented with this style, few wandered the line between reality and fantasy so aggressively. Indeed, the use of this style has been parodied by the show itself; an entire episode was revealed to have been a dream concocted by Pam Ewing, a character from the television series Dallas, which retconned an entire season to the same conceit. With this approach, the series reverts to normality by the end of most episodes, and events in past episodes are sometimes ignored. Some reversions to normality are accomplished by tortuous or unlikely means, while others are tacitly implied. The episode He's Too Sexy for His Fat offers examples of each: Peter's extensive liposuction and cosmetic surgery is reverted by having Peter have a car accident and land in a lard factory, where he consumes a whole vat of lard. In the episode The Perfect Castaway, Peter is seen eating Joe's legs for food while Peter, Joe, Cleveland and Quagmire are stranded on Quagmire's raft of blow-up dolls in the middle of the ocean. Joe is seen without legs until the end of the episode, and when asked how he now has legs, he claims to have received them from a death row inmate who got the chair. Unfortunately for Joe, the man was also paraplegic. In another episode, Brian is viciously attacked by Stewie; he has shards of glass embedded in his head and face, is beaten repeatedly with a towel bar and toilet seat, has his legs broken with a golf club, is thrown down a flight of stairs, is shot through both knees, and is roasted by a flamethrower. Despite the immediate effects of the injuries, he is unscathed in his very next scene, akin to traditional Warner Brothers' cartoon style humor. But there are also episodes making changes in continuity upheld and even embroidered in later episodes, such as Peter's occupation being shifted from a toy factory assembly line worker to a fisherman, to a lowly worker at a beer factory; the breakup and subsequent divorce of secondary characters Cleveland and Loretta Brown; and the recent birth of Peter's son via sperm donation — and Stewie's resulting half-brother rival — Bertram, to a lesbian couple. In a recent fourth season episode, The Fat Guy Strangler, Brian picked up a rock and hit Peter in the head, telling him that it was revenge for keeping the window rolled up when Brian tried to jump head-first into the family car, which Peter had repainted at the time to resemble the General Lee — an event that took place in the season 3 episode, To Live and Die in Dixie. As a native of Kent, Connecticut and alum of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), MacFarlane has written a number of in-jokes and references into Family Guy which allude to real life places in Rhode Island and the surrounding New England area, including Providence, Pawtucket, Narragansett, Barrington, Newport, and Warwick in Rhode Island; Hartford in Connecticut; and Natick, Framingham, Upton, South Attleboro, Webster, and Boston in Massachusetts. In fact, Natick, which is referenced as being home to a Twinkie factory in the show, was home to a Hostess factory — the maker of Twinkies — for many years, although it was closed in the late 1990s. The last scene of Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story features an aerial view of the RISD, and some episodes show or reference to Brown University, which is located quite near RISD. Criticism
TV to other media The TV to DVD media has become a very successful enterprise. When Family Guy was previously canceled there were no reruns aired because no station had the rights. In 2003, Family Guy Volume 1 was released on DVD, and later that year, Volume 2. Several TV stations obtained rights to the show and began airing seasons 1-3. Having the episodes available on DVD gave the series a huge boost in popularity. Because of the DVDs, Fox realized that the series was widely popular, and the decision was made to bring it back. Then in November 2005, Volume 3 was released on DVD, followed by Volume 4 which is scheduled for release on November 14, 2006. DVD movie The direct to DVD movie released on September 27, 2005, focuses on Stewie searching for his biological father, who he adamantly believes is not Peter Griffin. Three separate but continuous episodes, originally intended for the end of the third season and start of the fourth in the event that the show would return, were instead combined into a full-length film. A one-minute scene from the movie can currently be viewed here. The movie was shown in the form of the individual episodes played in order serving as the show's 90-minute fourth-season finale on May 21, 2006. The open and close of the DVD feature long "news"-like sections covering the film's "premiere". These and several other scenes were edited out of the TV broadcast, as the 81 minute movie needed to run for 65 minutes on television. Due to commercials and credits, the TV version ran for 90 minutes, and included one new scene: a parody of the end credits for Soap closed part 2. UMD On November 25, 2005, the first and second seasons were released on PSP UMD.• Also Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story was released on September 27, 2005.• Family Guy: The Freakin Sweet Collection became available on UMD as of May 9. The third season was released on September 19, 2006.• Theme song and score Composed by Walter Murphy (A Fifth of Beethoven), the familiar theme music of the show begins as a parody of the opening theme of All in the Family, where Peter and Lois sing at the family piano, similar to Archie and Edith Bunker. In keeping with the series's malleable comedy, the traditional opening song has been occasionally dropped for other themes, including parodies of Law & Order, Family Ties, Police Squad!/The Naked Gun, 24, The Simpsons, the Rocky movies, and the Hope-Crosby "Road to..." movies. Most of the early episodes have original music scores (consisting mostly of musical "stingers") also composed by Murphy, while others have tracked music either from earlier episodes or other Fox animated shows (this was a practice done for television shows produced from the 1950s through the early 1980s). Podcast A free podcast is available for MP4 download from the official site or from iTunes. Twenty - eight episodes have been released. On several of the podcasts, cast members discuss upcoming episodes and joke amongst themselves.• See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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