Family Guy

In ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’ the creator of ‘Family Guy’ tries his luck with the least popular genre of our time

And the humiliating slap in the face to The Simpsons

America’s favourite family doesn’t need cheap publicity stunts

Should Seth MacFarlane apologize to everybody else?

Will the Oscar-hosting gig be the Family Guy creator’s stepping stone to onscreen superstardom?

The ‘Family Guy’ creator hopes to put a face to the voice

A new animated series based in Alberta is brimming with inside jokes for Canadians

This time around, Bugs and Daffy are sitcom characters living in the suburbs

Where did all the major network shows about black families go?

This is yesterday’s news, literally, but Microsoft pulled its sponsorship from the upcoming Family Guy variety special (where Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein will perform as themselves) because they heard the jokes and realized that this was full of “offensive” humour. Microsoft’s announcement makes it clear that they (or the people who greenlit this, anyway) had no idea what the show was about and simply chose to sponsor it because of the demographics:

Maybe it’s because I had low expectations or because it was an island in a sea of Seth MacFarlane, but I actually enjoyed the Simpsons season premiere quite a lot. I didn’t know until afterward that it was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (you know how it is, sometimes you turn away in the precise moment when they’re showing the writing credit), but I did feel like there was something a little different about the “voice” of this episode from most recent episodes. That’s not to say that they brought anything terribly original to the table, and certainly not to presume to guess how much of their work actually remained in the final version, but the episode was short on horrendous puns and self-referentiality, had a story that made sense, and even a few “screw the audience” jokes that felt like they could have come out of season 6 (the scene that seems to be building to a studio buying Comic Book Guy’s creation, only to reveal that another studio already bought it weeks ago).

I never liked Family Guy, but now that they’re doing an episode with such delightful people as Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove, I’m clearly on board.