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Boy this is worse than the time I was sus
Oh yeah it was definitely green, boy let me tell you he was in that drip the whole time... caught him in the act.

I chose brown because it's the color of poo.

  Guess who's been spending a third of 2021 watching this show? Me. This is a scorecard I never thought I'd be making anytime soon, but given that I've been running low on series that I'm actually interested in, it seemed like Family Guy was my next best bet. I wanted to watch something that would surprise me-- one that would defy any expectations, be it good or bad. Initially, I decided that I would watch Futurama, but because I already came off the hot heels of rewatching seasons 5-8 of The Simpsons along with checking out S9-12 in their entirety, I felt like I was going through the motions again instead of being surprised. Although I really liked what I saw of Futurama, I thought it was too soon to check it out since I already got my fix of Classic Simpsons... so I then randomly decided to drop that show in favor of this one. I think I made a good choice by doing that because my first semester at university (yes, I'm in university now) is going to be defined by this Family Guy watch of mine, and it was a fun ride all the way through. I started my binge on January 16th, 2021, and I couldn't have picked a better date since season 19 would finish exactly 4 months later. This is probably going to be my longest review to date because this show is packed with content, and I know I'm not going to cover everything I want to say since that'd take forever.

HISTORY: As I said above, Family Guy is a show I never thought I'd actually sit down and watch one day, but before I actually watched it from start to finish, I did catch several episodes throughout the years. I recall back in January 2016, I randomly decided to check out an episode and I vividly remember it being the first season 2 episode, Peter Peter, Cavier Eater, and I ended up loving it (I still do). From there, I would watch Family Guy episodes at random points, such as watching Road to the Multiverse only 2 months later, Encyclopedia Griffin in September 2016, and I swear I saw Back to the Pilot in 2016 but can't pinpont when exactly. And then I watched... nothing... until 2019. In 2019, Family Guy became a hot topic for my friend group, as many people in it love the show, and they gave me several episodes to check out: Life of Brian, Seahorse Seashell Party, Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q., Brian Griffin's House of Payne, Stewie is Enceinte, and The Simpsons Guy. I watched all of these between November-December 2019 along with Road to the North Pole and Peterotica on Christmas. Oh, and a month before I began my binge, I saw PTV, Petarded, and Patriot Games.

A trend I caught onto before marathoning the whole series is that, *pretends to be shocked*, the older episodes were the ones that I loved, and nearly everything that came from the HD Period was crap... minus Road to the North Pole and Back to the Pilot-- I loved those two from the moment I saw them. The question is... were these preconceived notions of mine correct? I'll answer that for myself by the end of this review, but if you look at the scorecard, the answer is more than clear.

ANIMATION: Describing the animation of this show would be a hard thing to generalize, so I'll try my best. Early on, Family Guy had some pretty decent animation-- it wasn't the best-looking around, but there was life to it, and whenever they'd parody pop-culture, the animation would be faithful to the original source material, like the Jetsons cutaway in Meet the Quagmires, or the throwback to the black-and-white cartoons cutaway in Brian: Portrait of a Dog. Likewise, the dance sequences had some very impressive and fluid animation, like the one in Patriot Games, or E Peterbus Unum, and the best one of all would be in Road to Rupert where they rotoscoped a sequence from the movie Anchors Aweigh perfectly. There was genuine effort in Family Guy's animation early on, and while it could be a bit sloppy, there was a charm to it. The only point of criticism I have for it is that the backgrounds would look flat, and this is especially evident when you take a look at how the clouds were drawn early on-- they were a solid block color that looked like a random insert instead of naturally being a part of the sky.

However, over the years, Family Guy's animation got progressively worse. The leap in animation quality between season 3 and season 4 is extremely noticeable, and I like to call season 4's animation the bridge between S1-3's animation and HD Family Guy's animation. A lot of the poses Family Guy became infamous for would start appearing in this season, but that sense of life that was present in S1-3 was still present here, so it wasn't that much of a hindrance. In fact, you can take what I said about the animation in S1-3 and apply it to season 4, but also add in the fact that the show's animation got stiffer. Simply put, season 4 is more restrained than S1-3, which I don't mind, since I still like the way this season looks and is animated, and I would have prefered if the show remained animated this way for the rest of its run, but that unfortunately didn't happen.

Season 5 was pretty much animated the same as season 4, but season 6-8 are a different story: They look and are animated nearly identically to the HD era, but there are certain moments that indicated the show hadn't transitioned to digital animation and still used traditional animation, mainly in the way the characters walk since it wasn't what I'd call robotic, but everything else is what I'd call proto-HD Family Guy... minus Road to the Multiverse. That episode has some of the best animation in this entire series, period. The only boost these seasons got had to be the backgrounds since they became less barren and had a sense of depth to them-- this also goes for the clouds as they look like they were plucked out of The Simpsons.

Season 9 is when the animation fully transformed into what it is today, minus And Then There Were Fewer, which is oddly animated closer to that of season 4 than S6-8. I will say that I very much like how HD Family Guy looks, the colors pop more than they ever had (the early seasons looked a tad pale), and there's shading on all of the characters now, but when we talk about the actual animation... uh.... look, I get why the animation became as stiff as it is: It's because Family Guy is a primetime show that needs to be produced as quickly as possible, and this is the same fate that Regular Show's animation faced after early season 1, but I can't get over how robotic and near lifeless the animation is. Yes, there still are moments where there's a sense of fluidity, mainly in the fight scenes.
  I've been meaning to find an opportunity to bring this up, but the fight scenes in Family Guy are among the best ones in any media. They're all chaotic, the movements are quick and pack a punch, the scope of them is always grandiose, and the choreography of them is satisfying to watch. Plus, all of the fights, especially the chicken fight ones, are instant classics... minus the one in Trump Guy, that one felt underwhelming because not much actually goes on in it. Nonetheless, I can't say many positive things about HD Family Guy's animation other than the fact that the fight scenes keep up the momentum and that the overall aesthetic is pleasing.

Nowadays though, it seems like the animation is at least trying to go back to the way it used to be in season 4. The S19 premiere, Stewie's First Word, had two scenes in particular that managed to raise an eyebrow: The scene where Peter hangs out with Caillou's dad, in which they mimicked the artstyle of Caillou perfectly, and the scene where Lois finds out she's a swearer, but that scene still had a sense of awkwardness to it since it's clear the animation was still restricted. When season 4 had moments like these, at least they let loose completely, but in this one, it's clear that they're bound by limitations. In a sense, I don't get why this is the case since in the episode And Then There's Fraud, there's a scene where Stewie's face droops and it does it so smoothly, realistically, and grotesquely. It's almost as if they blow the budget in HD Family Guy on grossing the audience out cough Herpe, The Love Sore and A Fistful of Megcough.

Oh yeah I really don't like how much more grotesque and gory the later seasons become. A simple punch in the face can equal a fountain of blood in later seasons, meanwhile smashing furniture on each other like in the ending of Lethal Weapons, back in season 3, constitutes nothing more than a scratch. Not only that, but there's a lot more... grotesque imagery to be found in later seasons. I would use Herpe, the Love Sore as an example since that episode had the gall to show several closeups of herpes ON TOP OF A LIVE-ACTION IMAGE OF ONE, but I'd rather go for something else. Do you remember the episode He's Too Sexy for His Own Fat when Peter became skinny? The reveal of him becoming skinny is a scene that always manages to slay me, it's one of my favorite scenes in the entire show, and this episode is also one of my favorites. Compare how Skinny Peter looks in this clip (www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j3Tso… ) to how he looks in the season 15 episode, Family Guy Lite, right here (youtu.be/0KGRdvPLdLk?t=135 ). The difference is night and day, isn't it? One is far more appealing than the other, and is thus funnier to look at. The way they animate his flabby skin isn't funny either, it mimicks that of real life flab, which actually makes it look grosser and more uncomfortable. It's really disappointing how the show only goes all-out with its animation when it does stuff like... this.

tl;dr version: This show had some pretty good animation early on, it moved decently enough and had life to it, in spite of some caveats like a general feeling of sloppiness and flat background designs, but the former of these two had a charm to it just like how Regular Show season 1 had one. Over the years though, the animation would continue to be degraded and then reach an apex in the HD era, where you are guaranteed to find the same robotic movements and poses a million times, in spite of the backgrounds and lighting being improved. The only consistently good thing about FG's animation throughout the years would be the fight scenes, but even those have been become less frequent in the later seasons, and the only times the show goes all-out with the animation later on is when they want to gross the audience out.

CHARACTERS: Family Guy has quite the vast number of characters, and nearly all of them are instantly memorable, even the one-offs, but like the animation, talking about the characters as a whole would be difficult because they're... inconsistent, ESPECIALLY later on.

In the earlier seasons, I'd have to say that my favorite character is... well... I don't know. Every one of the characters was instantly lovable to me, but if I were to be held at gunpoint, I'd say Peter is my favorite. He's like an edgier and more off-the-wall version of Homer Simpson, and I find him just as lovable as Homer because of that, and he does share a lot of similarities with Homer. For starters, he is a man who puts his family first above all else, the first episode demonstrates this part of his character bright and clearly. He can be a trouble-maker, but it's often innocent fun that doesn't hurt anybody, and that's why episodes like I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar, E. Peterbus Unum, Mother Tucker, and so on worked as well as they did, and when Peter takes things too far, he comes to his senses and shows some remorse-- it's why I was perfectly okay with Peter's behavior in Petarded, he apologizes to Lois for putting her in a hospital and states in court that his family means everything to him. Peter was a fun, lovable oaf that put his family first in the earlier seasons, and that was more than enough to make him my favorite.

Other characters like Stewie and Brian were equally memorable and likeable. My favorite thing about Stewie is how much of a diabolical genius he was early on, his verbose was amusing, and a lot of his schemes led to both huge laughs and grand adventures. What capped off this hilarity is that he's a baby, and in spite of being a genius, the most mundane situations would always get in his way, like in Love Thy Trophy where he falls in love with pancakes, completely detracting from his plan to kill the owner. Speaking of which, back then, he had an obsession with threatening to kill people, but because everyone views him as a typical baby, any plans of his would be seen as "cute"... or they'd be imaginary, such as when he dreamed of killing Mr. Rogers in the episode Brian in Love, and things like these only added an extra layer of irony. I also like the moments when this show realizes for a second that Stewie is a baby, like the opening in A Hero Sits Next Door when he suddenly becomes dazzled by the Teletubbies, or the fact he has a profoundly strong bond with his stuffed bear, Rupert. However, Stewie wasn't inherently evil all the time early on, as episodes such as From Method to Madness and Road to Rhode Island showed a different side to him, a softer and more flamboyant one, and this counterpart of Stewie was equally enticing. Eventually, this flamboyant side took over, with only a few episodes here and there having him be evil like Mr. and Mrs. Stewie, but I didn't mind this shift in his character at all since he was still recognizable and likeable.

Brian would probably be my second favorite character early on because there was so much to him. He was the straightman, Peter's best friend, and he had a dry sense of humor, all of these made him a funny and lovable character, but the most underrated part of his character is when the show realizes for a second that he's a dog, and then he acts like one. Some of my favorite moments from the show happen when Brian acts like a dog, like the dog whistle scene in When You Wish Upon a Weinstein, the ending of Love Thy Trophy, Brian being afraid of the vacuum cleaner in Brian Goes Back to College, and I could list several more but I'll leave it at that. What also added to Brian's character was that he clearly had mental issues, indicated by the fact he's an alcoholic-- the episode Road to Rhode Island did a number for his character, that scene in the beginning where he was taken away from his mom and became traumatized as a result... that's something I truly felt for. That's not even mentioning the scene where he realizes his mother is dead and wants to give her a proper burial... seriously, Brian early on was such a sympathetic, funny, and charming character. One last thing I loved about Brian early on was how outspoken he was, he used to be vocal about his viewpoints, but never to the degree where he came off as pretentious-- he was a genuinely smart dog, and it's why Brian: Portrait of a Dog is one of my favorites. In that episode, despite all odds being against Brian to get the respect that he believes he deserves since he feels he's a second-class citizen (cuz y'know, he's a dog), he stood by his values and persisted throughout, landing him in a place of victory by the end of it. Unfortunately, this character would slowly but surely go off the deep end as the series went along, but I'll come back to that later.

The rest of the household was also likeable, but I don't have much to say about them, particularly Lois. She never stood out to be in any of the episodes I saw minus a few exceptions like Lethal Weapons, but I did like how she acted as a mediator early on and genuinely cared about her family. Meg also falls into this camp, but I did like how early on, she was a teenager traversing the awkward parts of high school, but sometimes with a twist, like the fact she unknowingly joined a suicide cult in Chitty Chitty Death Bang, or how kissing Neil Goldman goes all over the news in The Kiss Seen Around the World, there's also her affair with Mayor Adam West. One thing that the show lost after season 3 though would be Meg being Peter's little girl, since early on they bonded way more than I expected them to, in episodes like I Never Met the Dead Man and Let's Go to the Hop, and this says more about Peter than it does about Meg, but the fact that Peter went out of his way to create a fake persona to make Meg popular, really says a lot about how well-written and sweet Peter was early on.

I liked Chris, as he was essentially a teenage Peter and he could spout funny lines from time to time, but the show never gave him much attention. I do like how he was an artist back in season 1, and how in the season 2 episode Fore, Father, he was looking for a role model to follow, and somehow found one in Quagmire. The most interesting thing to happen with Chris though is the evil monkey running gag that the series has. Throughout S1-8, Chris was fearful of a monkey in his closet that was out to get him, but by the episode Hannah Banana, they both actually manage to have an understanding of one another, and even bond, it was a somehow sweet conclusion to what was a silly (and funny) running gag the series has, and it's why I like that episode as much as I do. I feel like episodes such as Hannah Banana and Fore, Father, show that there is a lot more that the series could do with Chris, but he's unfortunately cast to the side most of the time, which is sad because the moments he does get a prominent role, somehow manage to be both funny and interesting.

As for the side characters, well, I'd say they're all just as memorable and personality-filled as characters like Brian, Stewie, and Peter. Characters like Seamus, Joe, Quagmire, Cleveland, Mort Goldman, Neil Goldman, Tom Tucker, Jerome, Herbert, Dr. Hartman, and even Ernie the Giant Chicken are all super memorable for their quirky personalities, unique designs, and funny voices. (Maybe I'll talk more about them in a later paragraph)

Of these characters though, my favorites are obviously Joe and Quagmire, Peter's two best friends. When it comes to Quagmire, you'd think that the only thing he'd do throughout this show is hump any sentient being, but there's actually a lot more to him than that. When he's not screwing some broad, he's actually a really humble and nice guy that's supportive of his two friends, and he has a job that he's extremely passionate about. He feels like a character that could exist in the real world, as he is sex-crazy, but that's only a small part of a grander life that he has.

From the moment Joe debuted, I knew he would be one of the show's shining stars. The biggest standout about his character is obviously that he's crippled, but they actually manage to make him a badass regardless. There are a lot of chase sequences involving Joe where they show off his atheltic abilities like Ready, Willing, and Disabled, and, like Quagmire, I like how much of a humble guy he is on the surface, but can randomly explode with anger at random moments. Patrick Warburton puts so much energy into Joe's voice to the point where anything he says, even the most mundane things, are hilarious to me, and it only adds to why I like this character as much as I do.

Cleveland is the most quiet and reserved of the group, but that doesn't stop me from liking him a lot. I like how he's the counterbalance to Peter, Quagmire, and Joe's antics, and can go just as crazy as them when he feels like it. Just like Joe, the voice work done by his VA, Mike Henry, makes most lines that he says get a smirk or laugh out of me, like his iconic line "Ohhh that's naassttyyy". My favorite performance of Cleveland has to be in the episode The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire, not only was that episode probably the best "character learns not to be a pushover" plot I've seen, but it showed how pure Cleveland is. Even when he realized his wife, Loretta, cheated on him, he couldn't get angry at her at all, and seeing him try to be angry and tough was funny to see.

Oh wait, my actual favorite of the side characters has to be Mayor Adam West. One thing that every character in this show has in common is that the voicework done by their VAs makes it sound like they're having a blast, and it reflects on the characters too. Adam West has to be the best of them though because this character is so quirky and weird and funny. Instead of being a cliche incompetent town mayor, Adam West is instead a strange person. So many moments with him will have you both weirded out and laughing, like the fact that he's apparently 95% helium according to Road to the Multiverse. Every single time he's on-screen, he's guaranteed to get a big laugh, and I'd explain how, but that's involve explaining jokes in which he appears in, and I'd rather not do that.

tl;dr version: I like how diverse, likeable, and energetic this cast is. Many of them do appear one dimensional on the surface, like Quagmire, but have a lot more to them early on in terms of their personality and daily lives. I also like how several characters like Brian and Peter, despite being comedic characters, have a sympathetic layer added to them because they really are earnest people at their core. In fact, the whole Griffin household was a constant joke machine back then, Stewie would be diabolical, but could also have fun roadtrips with Brian, Brian would be the straightman, Peter would be the troublemaker who always put his family first, that kind of stuff. Peter's friends, Quagmire and Joe, were also fun to hang around since they could provide over-the-top adventures or be badass, and the rest of the side characters have memorable, unique designs, and funny moments, with several shining appearances (which I'll tackle in my next section of the review). yeah this section was kinda clunky but wtf do you want me to say

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE SHOW: When I first sat down and watched the first episode of Family Guy, I was completely surprised by what I was witnessing. For years, people have been memeing and criticizing this show for its nonsensical writing, cutaways, and unlikeable characters, but watching Death Has a Shadow, and the rest of season 1 (I watched all of season 1 in 3 hours)... it gave me Simpsons vibes more than anything else. In fact, I'd call early Family Guy an edgier Simpsons, period, and just like the early days of The Simpsons, early Family Guy was both consistent and top quality. Of the first 5 seasons, I dislike absolutely no episodes, and every single one of them are episodes I love, minus A Picture's Worthy a 1000 Bucks, but even that episode had its funny moments. Seriously, I can't overstate how much I love Family Guy at its prime.

There's no single way that I could use to describe this show early on, but I can say that watching S1-5 made me feel all sorts of joy. If I was ever in a sour mood, I could put on any episode from this era and laugh a lot. The brand of humor that early Family Guy had was immaculate-- so many different kinds of humor that somehow blended together, and even the kinds of style of comedy you'd expect to fail, ended up succeeding perfectly. I was never a fan of anti-humor or dragged out moments, but scenes like Peter hitting his knee in Wasted Talent, and some of the jokes in PTV, are how you do those kinds of jokes correctly.

Surprisingly though, the stories early on were really strong too, and some could be heartfelt. I loved the adventurous feeling episodes like Meet the Quagmires and Let's Go to the Hop had, those two episodes are somehow really sweet, funny, and in a way, heartwarming. I'd also like to give a mention to Holy Crap (honorable #21) since it was an episode that explored Peter's relationship with his overly religious father, and it was nice trying to see him reconcile. A lot of early Family Guy provided fun adventures that'll have you hooked for 22 minutes because so much stuff was going on. As of writing this review, I randomly watched the episode Lethal Weapons, and although this episode didn't have the greatest story, the comedy was absolutely brilliant. Jokes are being fired from all sides, and even if one or two miss, ten others are guaranteed to land. But, if you wanted the complete package of what made Family Guy such an iconic show, look no further than Road to Rhode Island.

Road to Rhode Island can stand toe-to-toe with the best of the best of Classic Simpsons. It's a Brian and Stewie episode, for starters, and these two are always a joy to watch. Something I never brought up in my review is how these two have a weird relationship, as they can either be nemeses or friends-- they're frenemies. If Patriot Games was Brian and Stewie's nemesis at its peak, then Road to Rhode Island is their friendship at their peak. We see them traverse several different locations: the airport, a motel, the back of a truck, and a train. It really does feel like a long journey home. The true star of this episode though, would be Brian. I thought that the first minute of this episode was sad, but the scene where Brian wanted to reconcile with his mom, only to figure out she's dead... that hit even harder than I thought. For once, we see a different and vulnerable side to Brian, and it sheds a new light on his character for why he isn't mentally well. A lot of people say the subplot is inferior, but I honestly liked it since it was, in my eyes, one of Lois' shining appearances. The fact she was able to understand why Peter got addicted to those "tapes" and entice him instead of devolving into a cliche marriage crisis plot. In fact, it's the opposite: We get to see Peter and Lois' relationship spiced up, so this subplot still has value. Oh, and this episode's song... it's brilliant. It might be the best song FG has ever done, and I'll explain why below.

It seems that every time I say a show has the best music I've ever heard, the next one I watch always proves me wrong. Initially, I thought SpongeBob had the best music, then Simpsons, then South Park (I think Steven Universe's music is good but it never stood out to me as one of the best of the best, minus the movie.), but I think the clear winner between all of these is Family Guy. What made Family Guy's songs distinct from every other show is that the orchestration of its tracks would be grand and epic, like a theatrical film... at least, that what Seth McFarlane, the creator of this show, wanted, and I'd say it shows. The music in this series is incredible, every single song in this show is always done in a big broadway style, just listen to the songs You've Got a Lot to See (Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows), Road to Rhode Island (lol), Bag of Weed (420), The FCC Song (PTV), the song in Road to Rupert, Christmas Time is Killing Us (Road to the North Pole), Mr. Booze (Friends of Peter G.), Shipoopi (Patriot Games), and every song in Brian Sings and Swings. This show's soundtrack is an absolute bop, and I feel as though most of these songs are interjected because Seth McFarlane has a really talented and good singing voice.

This show could also parody and satirize pop-culture really well, and there are too many good examples of where to even begin. How about the Star Wars specials? They're all awesome, though Blue Harvest ranks the best of the three. I haven't seen a single Star Wars movie, but the roles that the main characters and side characters got is perfectly fitting and hilarious-- Cleveland being R2D2 and Stewie being Darth Vader are things that crack me up thinking about them. I mentioned this earlier in my animation section, but the dance scene in Road to Rupert was rotoscoped from the movie Anchors Aweigh, and to perfection. North by North Quahog is even better than SP's take on Mel Gibson (The Passion of the Jew), and the whole episode is pretty much one giant showdown against him, and like that South Park episode, this one demonstrated how insane Gibson is in an over-the-top way. There's also PTV, the episode that's a master of anti-humor, and humor period. Every single second of this episode was sheer brilliance, and I love how the episode used its comedy to convey how pointless censorship is. Those last two examples are exactly why I consider season 4 of Family Guy to be the peak of the series, as the season was the perfect representation of what I love about this series. Every single episode is filled with laughs and classic moments, and although the season is more comedy-driven than S1-3, the comedy was superior to the previous seasons. I can pick out a random season 4 episode and laugh hard at it for the entire 22 minute runtime, the season is just THAT good. Ditto for season 5.

That's... all I really had to say. Those are all my notes I had for the first 5 seasons of Family Guy. Even I was expecting to have more to say, but I do not. I mean... it wasn't that long of a run anyways. 99 episodes, and every single one of them was incredible minus one episode (I still like it tho). I dunno, it's just that early FG really hit home with me in terms of its style of humor and storytelling. It wasn't AS groundbreaking as Simpsons or South Park, but this show does have its place in cartoon history as an amazing series with an off-the-wall comedy style and memorable, iconic characters.

Okay, maybe it'll make a lot more sense as to why I like early FG as much as I do once we cover... something else I've been trying to ignore. Christ, it's like with every long-running series, there has to be a paragraph like this....

WHAT IN THE LIVING HELL HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW AFTER SEASON 10?: I saw it coming, you saw it coming, everyone saw it coming. To absolutely no one's surprise, Family Guy had a... huge decline in quality. Actually, huge wouldn't begin to describe what happened to this show after Season 10-- catastrophic is. The later seasons of Family Guy are so bad, that any clean track record this show once had became invalidated by the existence of this series past S10.

NOTE: A lot of what I have to say below is outdated since the more I watch from later Family Guy, the more I realize it isn't the worst thing ever like one of my later sections makes it out to be. I still have so many problems with the later seasons, but one day I'm going to revamp what I have to say below since it isn't as black-and-white as I thought.

There's something else I need to clear up: I never brought up S6-10 (yes, I'm throwing in S10) of Family Guy much in my review praising the prime era of this show, but I want to make it clear that I do think that S6-10 can line up with the show's golden age. Yes, they do have more stinkers, with season 6 being home to the first bad episode of the series, but the good ones carry all the good qualities of earlier episodes and can line up with them easily. Nothing is perfect, after all. Plus, episodes Blue Harvest, Lois Kills Stewie, I Dream of Jesus, Road to Germany, And Then There Were Fewer, The Big Bang Theory, and others, more than justify these seasons' existence. Hell, I can justify S10 existing since its high points line up with earlier seasons, and S11 spat out the last true gems, and the last third of this season was incredible, so it can stay too.

But when we talk about S12-onwards... oh God. I think the first place to begin here would for me to say that, when watching this show past S10, I was SO CLOSE to dropping the series. Season 11 bored me out of my mind most of the time and it struggled to keep my attention, but as I said, the good episodes were good enough to justify its existence, though it did present a problem that plagues every season afterwards, and I'll get to what it is.

Wanna know what's my biggest issue with this series in S12-onwards? The cutaways. Most episodes are filled with these things, and when earlier seasons did them, they were spare, and y'know, actually FUNNY. But the cutaways in later FG are just... inescapable, they're more frequent and hell, they're lazier than they used to be since most of them don't even have a proper punchline. I can't even consider them anti-humor since anti-humor has an underlying punchline somewhere, but the cutaways in later FG come off as filler more than anything else. In fact, it's not only the cutaways that got neutered, but the comedy as a whole just... died. I guarantee you that in every single episode past S12, you're going to find a joke akin to that of Peter hitting his knee in the episode Wasted Talent. These jokes started to become more frequent by S7, but they still had the same edge Peter hitting his knee did. The moment that these kinds of dragged out jokes died was the Dad noises joke in Seahorse Seashell Party, where we just listen to Peter make noises for at least 30 seconds, and it's as annoying as a real person doing this.
But if you thought that was bad, how about the joke in Quagmire's Mom where a cutaway involved Peter waiting for a song to start for a FULL MINUTE while there's minimal animation? There's also the whale scene in Peter Problems, the spinach joke which goes on for 45 seconds in Herpe, The Love Sore, and hell, THE LATEST EPISODE, Tales of Former Sports Glory, HAD A JOKE LIKE THIS WITH QUAGMIRE DRIBBLING A BALL 40 TIMES, AND THEY DID THIS JOKE TWICE. I could list so. many. more. moments. like this, but even thinking about these jokes makes just the slightest bit annoyed, since they're an insult to the concept of comedy. They drag out jokes that were never even funny to begin with, anada they do this OVER, AND OVER AGAIN, and it makes me worried about how the older episodes with jokes like these will hold up.

   But hey, if frequently unfunny and drawn-out cutaways aren't your style of humor, then later FG has two other options for you: bad fourth wall jokes and meta-humor, or bad shock value jokes. If you recall what I said in my animation section, I said the show became more gory in later seasons. I can't pinpoint when exactly, but I can say that the episode A Fistful of Meg is the start of this series treading into full-blown grossout territory, as the episode's subplot has Peter be naked throughout all of it, and eventually Brian too (dear Lord his shaved design is disgusting), and the main-plot has Meg defeat her bully with spewing pus and showing off her gross body. S12-onwards is filled with so much puss, gore, and other bodily fluids.. and do I even need to mention Herpe, the Love Sore again? That episode had the audacity to show detailed herpes, and a live-action image of them. Yeah, that's how low the style of comedy has sunk, and it's not the only episode with crass jokes like this. The episode Fresh Heir is one incest joke on loop, and then there's other shit in there like Peter cutting off a deaf kid's head off-screen, carrying castrated testicles, and shooting his "hairless twin". I don't know how anyone can find... any of this stuff funny, and for the record, the grossout still persists to this day. The episode And Then There's Fraud has such a disgusting side-plot with Stewie getting plastic surgery, and his final design is just horrendous to look at, especially when his face drooped-- that genuinely terrified me on first viewing. There's also the scene in Short Cuts where Brian gets nearly castrated, only to be saved by Stewie last minute, and while he's giving some boring ass monologue, we see some blood dripping from his slightly cut penis. The fact I even had to say that makes me want to castrate myself on the spot, but I'm not kidding when I say that most of the humor in later FG is basically this, and when it's not...

...then it's bad meta-humor. Some people have told me that Family Guy changed up its style of humor in S16, the supposed "experimental" season. Guess what? Season 16 is... fine, as it may have gotten rid of the grossout, but it replaced it with a style of comedy that I find... once again fine. I've rewatched a majority of this season, and it has been a pleasant surprise how it's nowhere as bad as I initially thought, but at the end of the day, it's nothing impressive. The only actual notes I have for this season is that I've come to love the three-parter stretching from The D in Apartment 23 - Crimes and Meg's Demeanor since they actually pulled off this kind of story arc that we have not seen since... what? The first two season 3 episodes? I've especially come to love The D in Apartment 23 because of how it shows what cancel culture does to people. Brian is an awful character at the start of it, and the first third is him being a dumbass hitting on girls for the millionth time, but the rest of the episode throws this out and replaces him with an attitude that reminds me of Brian: Portrait of a Dog, it was a really solid and somewhat funny episode with a great story to back it up. [I'll finish up my season 16 reevaluation later]
The point where style of meta-humor got on my nerves was in like... season 18? You get trash like Disney's the Reboot, since just about every line of dialogue is explaining what the punchline of jokes are, or whatever they're parodying/appealing to. I also recall a joke in Throw it Away where Chris states he's "1930s Work Whistle Angry" and then he turns into a 1930 Work Whistle, the joke doesn't work because you fucking pointed out the punchline before it even arrived, and it pains me this joke had to be in what otherwise was a great episode. It's not even the worst example of these kinds of jokes being done, there are so many moments where a character, primarily Peter, looks into the camera and points out the punchline of a joke before it even happens. There's that scene where he points out cries like Snoopy, there's a scene he points out his mood changes depending what song is playing on the radio, there's that scene in Who's Brian Now? where he points out he's doing a 'Roadhouse' callback. Does this show think its audience is too stupid to figure out what jokes they're trying to tell? Because that's exactly the feeling I get when I watch most later episodes, and it's not like there's much else redeeming in the episodes.

   The comedy wasn't the only thing that jumped into a volcano by S12, but the characters... oh good Lord the characters. I thought Steven Universe did a number on its main characters, but no, I was dead wrong. I hate nearly every single character in this series starting by S12, and where else to begin than with Brian? [INCOMING GARGANTUAN ESSAY]

I hate Brian, I hate him so fucking much in later episodes. I have no idea why we went from an intelligent character who was outspoken with a dry sense of humor, and suffered feelings of isolation, to a dumbass stereotypical liberal who wants to stick his dick in anything sentient. Brian's character started to become a lot more inconsistent around season 7, with episodes like Love, Blacktually turning him into a sore loser. He literally falls for a girl just because she's an atheist (Not All Dogs to Heaven was probably the first red flag for this character as this episode is Brian spouting atheist beliefs for 22 minutes)-- that's it, his relationships were THAT shallow. Remember in Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows when he slowly fell in love with a grumpy old lady named Pearl and made it clear he wished he could've spent the rest of his life with her before it was tragically cut? Well screw that, here's a million episodes of Brian falling for a random bitch and then either treating them like garbage or cheating on them, and most of Brian's plots later on devolve into this. I can say whatever about his character in S7-9, but at least we got episodes like The Man With Two Brians and Excellence in Broadcasting, two episodes that portray him in a respectable light because he had that old characterization of his. If they really wanted to turn Brian into a full-blown liberal, then the least they could do is have his characterization in the latter camp because he actually knew what he was saying, but no, instead we need to turn Brian into an actual idiot-- most of the time, he has no idea what he's saying, and he himself acknowledges this, only to continue to have an arrogant attitude towards everyone and everything.
  I'd bring up the episode Brian Writes a Bestseller as an example, but in that episode, his arrogant attitude felt forced and cliche-- of fucking course the person who gets famous will have become an arrogant ass, I've seen this plot type done in every other cartoon ever, so instead I'll bring up Dog Bites Bear. People like this episode, for some reason, but Brian's portrayal in this episode is absolutely despicable. He admits that he tore up Stewie's stuffed bear, Rupert, because he was jealous of him, and even when Stewie shows just the slightest bit of grief, Brian brushes it off with "it's just a toy". Where do I even begin with how wrong this is? First of all, really? We're gonna destroy this character even more by having him get jealous of a stuffed bear? What an absolute degenerate, and even in the scenes where Brian and Stewie talk things out, there's this nasty ungenuine feeling from Brian that ruins any kind of "emotion" the episode goes for. It makes shit like the ending feel manipulative more than anything else, since it's clear that the actual Rupert is gone and Brian just got a look-alike replacement.
That isn't even the worst Brian has done. Remember the episode The Former Life of Brian when Brian spends time with his son and by the end of the episode says he'll always be there for him? You know where I'm going with this, but the follow-up to this episode, Brian's a Bad Father, completely shits on anything that that episode had. Here, he wants nothing to do with his son, and only shows interest in him when he says he's working on a Disney sitcom and they need writers. Shit like this only validates my point on how much of a manipulative scumbag Brian is in later seasons, and the worst part is that this episode EXPECTS ME TO FEEL SORRY FOR BRIAN. But I don't, he ditched his son, and proceeded to "care" about him when he heard about his show. Just so you know, this episode came AFTER the episode Life of Brian, when Brian was supposedly going to be killed off for good. I completely ignored talking about both this episode and Christmas Guy because I don't even want to dignify them, but it's undeniable that this character became a monster once those two episodes were over, and he was already showing signs of deterioration before that, like in Be Careful What You Fish For, where Brian dates Stewie's preschool teacher while Stewie's preschool has become a prison zone, and doesn't lay an eye on it until he knows Stewie's teacher is cheating on him.
Actually no, none of this is the worst thing Brian has done. The worst he's ever done is date a cancer patient named Jess in the episodes Married With Cancer and Dead Dog Walking and was upset at the fact that his girlfriend would survive her cancer. Even worse is that there's a scene where Jess is choking to death, while Brian does nothing, and then she actually does die, but when it's revealed she's alive, Brian cries about it. He was literally hoping that a cancer patient that he willingly wanted to date would DIE, that's evil on every level of the imagination.
I could make an entire list of every horrendous act that this character has done: he's given HERPES to Stewie in Herpe, the Love Sore, along with Chris. Why? Because he's ashamed to tell anyone that he has herpes. So now we've gone from this character being a loser, to being a COWARD and a liar, he took advantage of his son so he could get a writing gig, he tore up his supposed best friend's stuffed toy because he felt jealous, he's cheated on numerous women throughout various episodes and has taken advantage of them like when he dated a blind girl in The Blind Side, he's cowared when everyone got angry over a stupid tweet of his instead of standing his ground, and there's this one thing he did in the episode Boy (Dog) Meets Girl (Dog) that pisses me off. In the episode, Brian: Portrait of a Dog, Brian says that dog shows are humiliating and that he never wanted to partake in one, but because early Brian and current Brian aren't the same character, in this episode, he's WILLING to join a dog show, just so he can fuck some dog. Sorry, but this was already done way back in S3's Screwed the Pooch, a far superior episode at that. He's also tried to hit on Patty, a TEENAGER in the episode Scammed Yankees, he's kissed Bonnie in the episode The Heartbreak Dog, even though he knows she's married to Joe.

  Oh, and need I mention the episode Brian's the Closer? Quagmire pays for Brian to get a new set of teeth, and the rest of the episode is about Brian trying to scam Quagmire. Seriously, this character is just so nasty and heartless in later episodes... or a dumbass. The episode "Who's Brian Now?" has Brian be a full-blown dumbass because we're talking about a stereotypical liberal (Brian) living in a house with relatively intelligent people.

Brian's not the only character who's gotten massacred, just about everyone else did too. Peter got hit nearly as bad-- he went from being a good-natured guy who put his family first to... a stereotypical dumb cartoon dad, with a nature that could only be described as psychotic. There's a line where regular stupidity crosses into psychopathy, and episodes such as Peter Problems and the sideplot in Brian's a Bad Father have Peter be an actual psychopath. Compare this joke from Padre da Familia (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixr5ZE… ) to the whale scene from Peter Problems. I understand why some people may not like the former joke, but I think it works because Peter reacts in a way that you'd expect early Peter to react, and you can see him panicking trying to fix what he's caused, only to fail. In the whale scene, he just has a blank expression on his face the whole way through, which isn't what Peter was in early seasons-- he was an expressive person. Oh, and the sideplot in Brian's a Bad Father had him repeatedly shoot Quagmire in the arm... for no good reason, it's not even a funny joke either because you can see the punchline from a mile away. He similarly shot Joe in the eye in the episode "Lottery Fever" because he refused to do a dance for him-- this isn't something Peter would normally do.
  In the episode Connie's Celica, he randomly rips people's faces off for no good reason. In Herpe the Love Sore, he whips his family for no reason. In Shanksgiving, he intentionally gets arrested to avoid spending Thanksgiving with his family. Every single one of these actions is completely contradictory to anything Peter did in earlier seasons. I remember in Peter Peter Cavier Eater when he told Lois that he'd give up living in the mansion if meant she was happy, but in the episode Boopa-Dee Bappa-Dee LOL NOPE, he wants to stay in Italy even though Lois told him she's not happy there. You thought Brian the Closer only hurt Brian? Well, just about everyone in this episode is horrible, including Peter. He's such an asshole to Brian in the first third and causes his teeth to get knocked out just because he selfishly wanted Brian's rope, and then because this show doesn't know how to do comedy, Peter no longer wants the rope and tells Brian he can't pay for his teeth. Just like Brian, the carnage on Peter's character is immeasurable.

Good thing they also took down Lois and Meg with him. Lois was never one of my favorites, but she went from being a caring mother and a mediator to a sex-crazed woman later on, and this derailment happened even before S10 hit. In the episode Go, Stewie, Go!, she tries to have sex with Meg's boyfriend, despite him being a teenager. This trait is exaggerated to the nth degree in other episodes such as Lois Comes Out of Her Shell as well. The episode Switch the Flip was going well until it got hijacked by Lois in the second half, where she does turn into a horny monster, and doesn't give a crap when Peter (with Stewie in his body because this is a body swap episode) is clearly terrified by her. I could see some argument being made against this, but the ending of Connie's Celica does the exact same shit, as it's implied she rapes Peter by the end of the episode.

I know that Meg is a punching bag in later episodes, but it's not like the character is any better later on. In the same way her family's nasty to her, she's also just as nasty to her family. The episode Chris Cross has her blackmail Chris to the point where he runs away, and she still runs with the blackmail. Great, now I don't like any of these characters.

  Hell, I can say 5/6 in the family household are terrible just because of the existence of Better Off Meg. When Meg is presumed dead, literally no one cares, and we get some good character derailment of Chris since when he figures out Meg dead, he takes advantage of this opportunity by making himself popular at school, and when he finds out Meg isn't dead, he kidnaps her and places her in an isolated warehouse. The episode is the bottom of the barrel for Meg jokes in this entire series, as it takes a cruel approach to them. These jokes started appearing as far back as season 3, but at least back then, they were harmless since it was clear the family household still cared about her.

The only character that didn't get derailed is Stewie, his evil side does take a backseat and he's a lot more flamboyant, but I'm perfectly okay with this since he still feels like the same character to me, and we do see his evil side occasionally like in Pal Stewie. He's one of the only characters with a positive energy to him, and even episodes I find boring as sin like The Peanut Butter Kid are ones I can't be too hard on because Stewie's the star of the episode.

There's just one more character I want to mention before I'm done with this because this section has taken forever, but uh, what did they do to Quagmire? I'm not talking about the actual character (or maybe I am, we'll see), but for some reason, they made him and Brian rivals in later seasons. The first true instance of this would be in Jerome is the New Black, where Quagmire calls out Brian for doing things that... he's done himself. He's called Brian out for hitting on Lois, ditching his son, being a stereotypical liberal, haughty atheist, and a bore, paying for nothing, manipulating women for sex. Not everything here is something he's done, but he has hit on Lois NUMEROUS TIMES throughout the show, and he's admitted several times, past and present, that she's the true love of his life, he comes across numerous children of his throughout the series like in Tales of a Third Grade Nothing and No Giggity, No Doubt, and manipulating women is something that he always does. Always. This rivalry never made any sense to me because Brian and Quagmire used to be on good terms. They joked a little in The Thin White Line, and in the episode The Man With Two Brians, he offers Brian to stay at his place. Hell, he paid for Brian's teeth in Brian the Closer. I really wanna know what started this rivalry, because it leaves more of a mark on Quagmire's character than it does Brian's. The speech looks even worse when you consider the fact that in Con Heiress, both Quagmire and Brian were taking advantage of a rich old lady and were waiting for her to die.

I may have left some things out in ths sextion of the review, but what more do I need to say to demonstrate my point that this show later on became nothing more than a cesspool of bad jokes and unlikeable characters? Hell, I didn't even mention my least favorite episode of the show, Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q., and that's because that episode is its own beast. Let's just say that this episode has no understanding of domestic abuse at all and that, similar to the scene in Jerome is the New Black where Quagmire calls out Brian, there's one like that here, and it's even worse than that scene. Oh, and there's a plothole. Joe says he can't arrest Brenda unless she files a complaint, even though there are two instances where she's being abused right in front of him AND HAVE I EVEN MENTIONED JOE? I CAN' BELIEVE I FORGOT TO GIVE THIS GUY A PARAGRAPH, but let's just say he became a second Meg. He's a subhuman now because LOL HE'S CRIPPLED. Okay, now I'm done.

tl;dr version: Sorry if this section of the review came off as clunky, there was just too much to talk about. But to sum up, I love early FG a lot because it had a style of humor that appealed to me, it had so many huge song numbers that are some of the best songs I've ever heard, every character was at the very least likeable, the animation could be a bit sloppy but it was charming, and I could watch any episode from back then and laugh for the entire 22 minute runtime. I'm even willing to say that this momentum was kept up until S9, even though some issues started to crop up. S10 isn't a good season, but I also can forgive it for having some of the best of the best, and S11 can stay for the same reason too. Just read my conclusion below, it's going to be better than whatever this summary is.

CONCLUSION: I'd say my first 5 months of 2021 were well-spent, since watching this series might be the funnest thing to happen to me this year so far, but overall... you already know what I'm going to say...

  This series used to be incredible, among my favorite shows ever made, top 10 at worst. S1-5 were perfect TV because of how likeable and funny the characters were, the amount of care and effort that went into parodying many parts of pop culture (mainly the cutaways), occasionally the witty satire like in PTV, the musical sequences that will make you want to get up and dance, the fact that, in spite of having a widely different brand of humor from just about any other show, the early seasons slowly but masterfully acquainted you with the style of jokes... there was just so much to love and appreciate. S1-5 were flawless, sure, but I wouldn't mind extending that period up until S9... maybe even 10... or 11, because those seasons still had their gems in spite of S7-8 being of lesser quality, and S10-11 not being good seasons period. Either way, I would've been fine if FG ended at S9, S10, or hell, S11, because I'd still say it was a really great show.

  But... of course... the show went through a rot-- a terrible, terrible rot. S12+ would be my second least favorite show of all time. Hell, it could even be as bad as Star vs., but that show had season 4 so it's worse. By how much? Who knows? All I'm saying is that S12+ are so bad, that they completely invalidated any perfect track record that this series once had, and the overall quality of these seasons is abysmal. I can pick out a random episode from S1-11 and they'd likely be better than anything this series has produced since S11. Why? Because back then, the series actually tried. Starting from S11, there's a lot more gore and grossout, stiffer animation, absolutely despicable characters, and worst of all: an overreliance on cutaway gags, which have both become lazier and more commonplace, making episodes an absolute chore to watch. Here's a take that no one saw coming, but:

  The latest seasons, and I mean the 2019-2021 episodes, are the worst period of the show. They may have removed the obnoxious cutaways, but good Lord they're filled with bad meta-humor and constant joke-explaining-- having the characters explain jokes that weren't funny to begin with, or most episodes will be completely dead on substance. I swear, watching season 18 was one of the most miserable experiences I've had watching any cartoon season-- it was so. fucking. boring, and I barely ever laughed-- there weren't even any good episodes to be found. It's really telling that the sequel to Quagmire's Dad, which is my least favorite episode in S1-9, Bri-Da, is one of the better S18 episodes. Season 19 may have my favorite episode post-S11, but it doesn't detract from the fact this season feels tired and depressing beyond belief. Most episodes made me want to turn them off after 5 minutes because of how uncharacteristically cruel, boring, and unfunny they were-- the general episode quality was extremely low, and several episodes feel like they weren't even finished. Cutawayland barely did anything with its premise and ended on a dream twist, and Meg Goes to College ends with Meg... supposedly drowning? They legit forgot to have a conclusion for that episode. On top of that, both S18-19 are home to the worst of the worst episodes.11/20 of my bottom 20 comes from these seasons, and many S18-19 episodes are good contenders for a bottom 40. So yeah, the worst of this series is not S12-13, but S18-19, and if the show continues down this path, I fear it'll end up being worse than the current rating. At least S19 ended on a very good note.

With all that being said, I think for now that I'm going to call Family Guy an overall GREAT show, albeit not as much, because 10/19 of the seasons are good, 3/19 range from alright to lame, and 2/19 suck, and 2/19 are complete filth. The funny thing though is that this conclusion paragraph is going to look so off-putting because I've warmed up to bits of later seasons... except S18-19, it's going to be hard for me not to hate them as much as I do. But hey, I hate South Park Season 20 is worse than every single season here besides those two, so there's something.

Here's to hoping Season 20 is a substantial improvement.

SEASON RANKINGS: 4 > 5 > 2 > 3 > 1 > 6 > 9 > 10 > 8 > 7 > 16 >> 15 > 11 > 12 >> 17 > 13 > 14 > 18 > 19

Here's a free top 50 too since I want to end on a positive note:

50. German Guy

49. I Dream of Jesus

48. Peter's Two Dads
47. Wasted Talent

46. The King is Dead

45. The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire

44. Saving Private Brian

43. Mother Tucker

42. Brian: Portrait of a Dog

41. Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story

40. Joe's Revenge

39. The Griffin Winter Games

38. Fore, Father

37. Big Man on Hippocampus

36. Business Guy

35. Road to Germany

34. Road to Rupert

33. Perfect Castaway
32. Tales of a Third Grade Nothing

31. Brian Goes Back to College
30. Chitty Chitty Death Bang

29. Stuck Together, Torn Apart
28. Lethal Weapons

27. Peter's Got Woods/Back to the Woods

26. E. Peterbus Unum
25. Brian Sings and Swings

24. The Splendid Source
23. Forget-Me-Not

22. He's Too Sexy for His Own Fat

21. Holy Crap

20. Hannah Banana

19. Da Boom

18. Petarded

17. Leggo My Meg-O

16. Peterotica
15. Road to the North Pole

14. North by North Quahog

13. Blue Harvest

12. The Fat Guy Strangler

11. Killer Queen

10. The Big Bang Theory

9. Lois Kills Stewie
8. Let's Go to the Hop

7. Meet the Quagmires

6. PTV
5. Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows

4. Patriot Games

3. And Then There Were Fewer
2. Back to the Pilot

1. Road to Rhode Island

Description
Boy this is worse than the time I was sus
Oh yeah it was definitely green, boy let me tell you he was in that drip the whole time... caught him in the act.

I chose brown because it's the color of poo.

  Guess who's been spending a third of 2021 watching this show? Me. This is a scorecard I never thought I'd be making anytime soon, but given that I've been running low on series that I'm actually interested in, it seemed like Family Guy was my next best bet. I wanted to watch something that would surprise me-- one that would defy any expectations, be it good or bad. Initially, I decided that I would watch Futurama, but because I already came off the hot heels of rewatching seasons 5-8 of The Simpsons along with checking out S9-12 in their entirety, I felt like I was going through the motions again instead of being surprised. Although I really liked what I saw of Futurama, I thought it was too soon to check it out since I already got my fix of Classic Simpsons... so I then randomly decided to drop that show in favor of this one. I think I made a good choice by doing that because my first semester at university (yes, I'm in university now) is going to be defined by this Family Guy watch of mine, and it was a fun ride all the way through. I started my binge on January 16th, 2021, and I couldn't have picked a better date since season 19 would finish exactly 4 months later. This is probably going to be my longest review to date because this show is packed with content, and I know I'm not going to cover everything I want to say since that'd take forever.

HISTORY: As I said above, Family Guy is a show I never thought I'd actually sit down and watch one day, but before I actually watched it from start to finish, I did catch several episodes throughout the years. I recall back in January 2016, I randomly decided to check out an episode and I vividly remember it being the first season 2 episode, Peter Peter, Cavier Eater, and I ended up loving it (I still do). From there, I would watch Family Guy episodes at random points, such as watching Road to the Multiverse only 2 months later, Encyclopedia Griffin in September 2016, and I swear I saw Back to the Pilot in 2016 but can't pinpont when exactly. And then I watched... nothing... until 2019. In 2019, Family Guy became a hot topic for my friend group, as many people in it love the show, and they gave me several episodes to check out: Life of Brian, Seahorse Seashell Party, Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q., Brian Griffin's House of Payne, Stewie is Enceinte, and The Simpsons Guy. I watched all of these between November-December 2019 along with Road to the North Pole and Peterotica on Christmas. Oh, and a month before I began my binge, I saw PTV, Petarded, and Patriot Games.

A trend I caught onto before marathoning the whole series is that, *pretends to be shocked*, the older episodes were the ones that I loved, and nearly everything that came from the HD Period was crap... minus Road to the North Pole and Back to the Pilot-- I loved those two from the moment I saw them. The question is... were these preconceived notions of mine correct? I'll answer that for myself by the end of this review, but if you look at the scorecard, the answer is more than clear.

ANIMATION: Describing the animation of this show would be a hard thing to generalize, so I'll try my best. Early on, Family Guy had some pretty decent animation-- it wasn't the best-looking around, but there was life to it, and whenever they'd parody pop-culture, the animation would be faithful to the original source material, like the Jetsons cutaway in Meet the Quagmires, or the throwback to the black-and-white cartoons cutaway in Brian: Portrait of a Dog. Likewise, the dance sequences had some very impressive and fluid animation, like the one in Patriot Games, or E Peterbus Unum, and the best one of all would be in Road to Rupert where they rotoscoped a sequence from the movie Anchors Aweigh perfectly. There was genuine effort in Family Guy's animation early on, and while it could be a bit sloppy, there was a charm to it. The only point of criticism I have for it is that the backgrounds would look flat, and this is especially evident when you take a look at how the clouds were drawn early on-- they were a solid block color that looked like a random insert instead of naturally being a part of the sky.

However, over the years, Family Guy's animation got progressively worse. The leap in animation quality between season 3 and season 4 is extremely noticeable, and I like to call season 4's animation the bridge between S1-3's animation and HD Family Guy's animation. A lot of the poses Family Guy became infamous for would start appearing in this season, but that sense of life that was present in S1-3 was still present here, so it wasn't that much of a hindrance. In fact, you can take what I said about the animation in S1-3 and apply it to season 4, but also add in the fact that the show's animation got stiffer. Simply put, season 4 is more restrained than S1-3, which I don't mind, since I still like the way this season looks and is animated, and I would have prefered if the show remained animated this way for the rest of its run, but that unfortunately didn't happen.

Season 5 was pretty much animated the same as season 4, but season 6-8 are a different story: They look and are animated nearly identically to the HD era, but there are certain moments that indicated the show hadn't transitioned to digital animation and still used traditional animation, mainly in the way the characters walk since it wasn't what I'd call robotic, but everything else is what I'd call proto-HD Family Guy... minus Road to the Multiverse. That episode has some of the best animation in this entire series, period. The only boost these seasons got had to be the backgrounds since they became less barren and had a sense of depth to them-- this also goes for the clouds as they look like they were plucked out of The Simpsons.

Season 9 is when the animation fully transformed into what it is today, minus And Then There Were Fewer, which is oddly animated closer to that of season 4 than S6-8. I will say that I very much like how HD Family Guy looks, the colors pop more than they ever had (the early seasons looked a tad pale), and there's shading on all of the characters now, but when we talk about the actual animation... uh.... look, I get why the animation became as stiff as it is: It's because Family Guy is a primetime show that needs to be produced as quickly as possible, and this is the same fate that Regular Show's animation faced after early season 1, but I can't get over how robotic and near lifeless the animation is. Yes, there still are moments where there's a sense of fluidity, mainly in the fight scenes.
  I've been meaning to find an opportunity to bring this up, but the fight scenes in Family Guy are among the best ones in any media. They're all chaotic, the movements are quick and pack a punch, the scope of them is always grandiose, and the choreography of them is satisfying to watch. Plus, all of the fights, especially the chicken fight ones, are instant classics... minus the one in Trump Guy, that one felt underwhelming because not much actually goes on in it. Nonetheless, I can't say many positive things about HD Family Guy's animation other than the fact that the fight scenes keep up the momentum and that the overall aesthetic is pleasing.

Nowadays though, it seems like the animation is at least trying to go back to the way it used to be in season 4. The S19 premiere, Stewie's First Word, had two scenes in particular that managed to raise an eyebrow: The scene where Peter hangs out with Caillou's dad, in which they mimicked the artstyle of Caillou perfectly, and the scene where Lois finds out she's a swearer, but that scene still had a sense of awkwardness to it since it's clear the animation was still restricted. When season 4 had moments like these, at least they let loose completely, but in this one, it's clear that they're bound by limitations. In a sense, I don't get why this is the case since in the episode And Then There's Fraud, there's a scene where Stewie's face droops and it does it so smoothly, realistically, and grotesquely. It's almost as if they blow the budget in HD Family Guy on grossing the audience out cough Herpe, The Love Sore and A Fistful of Megcough.

Oh yeah I really don't like how much more grotesque and gory the later seasons become. A simple punch in the face can equal a fountain of blood in later seasons, meanwhile smashing furniture on each other like in the ending of Lethal Weapons, back in season 3, constitutes nothing more than a scratch. Not only that, but there's a lot more... grotesque imagery to be found in later seasons. I would use Herpe, the Love Sore as an example since that episode had the gall to show several closeups of herpes ON TOP OF A LIVE-ACTION IMAGE OF ONE, but I'd rather go for something else. Do you remember the episode He's Too Sexy for His Own Fat when Peter became skinny? The reveal of him becoming skinny is a scene that always manages to slay me, it's one of my favorite scenes in the entire show, and this episode is also one of my favorites. Compare how Skinny Peter looks in this clip (www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j3Tso… ) to how he looks in the season 15 episode, Family Guy Lite, right here (youtu.be/0KGRdvPLdLk?t=135 ). The difference is night and day, isn't it? One is far more appealing than the other, and is thus funnier to look at. The way they animate his flabby skin isn't funny either, it mimicks that of real life flab, which actually makes it look grosser and more uncomfortable. It's really disappointing how the show only goes all-out with its animation when it does stuff like... this.

tl;dr version: This show had some pretty good animation early on, it moved decently enough and had life to it, in spite of some caveats like a general feeling of sloppiness and flat background designs, but the former of these two had a charm to it just like how Regular Show season 1 had one. Over the years though, the animation would continue to be degraded and then reach an apex in the HD era, where you are guaranteed to find the same robotic movements and poses a million times, in spite of the backgrounds and lighting being improved. The only consistently good thing about FG's animation throughout the years would be the fight scenes, but even those have been become less frequent in the later seasons, and the only times the show goes all-out with the animation later on is when they want to gross the audience out.

CHARACTERS: Family Guy has quite the vast number of characters, and nearly all of them are instantly memorable, even the one-offs, but like the animation, talking about the characters as a whole would be difficult because they're... inconsistent, ESPECIALLY later on.

In the earlier seasons, I'd have to say that my favorite character is... well... I don't know. Every one of the characters was instantly lovable to me, but if I were to be held at gunpoint, I'd say Peter is my favorite. He's like an edgier and more off-the-wall version of Homer Simpson, and I find him just as lovable as Homer because of that, and he does share a lot of similarities with Homer. For starters, he is a man who puts his family first above all else, the first episode demonstrates this part of his character bright and clearly. He can be a trouble-maker, but it's often innocent fun that doesn't hurt anybody, and that's why episodes like I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar, E. Peterbus Unum, Mother Tucker, and so on worked as well as they did, and when Peter takes things too far, he comes to his senses and shows some remorse-- it's why I was perfectly okay with Peter's behavior in Petarded, he apologizes to Lois for putting her in a hospital and states in court that his family means everything to him. Peter was a fun, lovable oaf that put his family first in the earlier seasons, and that was more than enough to make him my favorite.

Other characters like Stewie and Brian were equally memorable and likeable. My favorite thing about Stewie is how much of a diabolical genius he was early on, his verbose was amusing, and a lot of his schemes led to both huge laughs and grand adventures. What capped off this hilarity is that he's a baby, and in spite of being a genius, the most mundane situations would always get in his way, like in Love Thy Trophy where he falls in love with pancakes, completely detracting from his plan to kill the owner. Speaking of which, back then, he had an obsession with threatening to kill people, but because everyone views him as a typical baby, any plans of his would be seen as "cute"... or they'd be imaginary, such as when he dreamed of killing Mr. Rogers in the episode Brian in Love, and things like these only added an extra layer of irony. I also like the moments when this show realizes for a second that Stewie is a baby, like the opening in A Hero Sits Next Door when he suddenly becomes dazzled by the Teletubbies, or the fact he has a profoundly strong bond with his stuffed bear, Rupert. However, Stewie wasn't inherently evil all the time early on, as episodes such as From Method to Madness and Road to Rhode Island showed a different side to him, a softer and more flamboyant one, and this counterpart of Stewie was equally enticing. Eventually, this flamboyant side took over, with only a few episodes here and there having him be evil like Mr. and Mrs. Stewie, but I didn't mind this shift in his character at all since he was still recognizable and likeable.

Brian would probably be my second favorite character early on because there was so much to him. He was the straightman, Peter's best friend, and he had a dry sense of humor, all of these made him a funny and lovable character, but the most underrated part of his character is when the show realizes for a second that he's a dog, and then he acts like one. Some of my favorite moments from the show happen when Brian acts like a dog, like the dog whistle scene in When You Wish Upon a Weinstein, the ending of Love Thy Trophy, Brian being afraid of the vacuum cleaner in Brian Goes Back to College, and I could list several more but I'll leave it at that. What also added to Brian's character was that he clearly had mental issues, indicated by the fact he's an alcoholic-- the episode Road to Rhode Island did a number for his character, that scene in the beginning where he was taken away from his mom and became traumatized as a result... that's something I truly felt for. That's not even mentioning the scene where he realizes his mother is dead and wants to give her a proper burial... seriously, Brian early on was such a sympathetic, funny, and charming character. One last thing I loved about Brian early on was how outspoken he was, he used to be vocal about his viewpoints, but never to the degree where he came off as pretentious-- he was a genuinely smart dog, and it's why Brian: Portrait of a Dog is one of my favorites. In that episode, despite all odds being against Brian to get the respect that he believes he deserves since he feels he's a second-class citizen (cuz y'know, he's a dog), he stood by his values and persisted throughout, landing him in a place of victory by the end of it. Unfortunately, this character would slowly but surely go off the deep end as the series went along, but I'll come back to that later.

The rest of the household was also likeable, but I don't have much to say about them, particularly Lois. She never stood out to be in any of the episodes I saw minus a few exceptions like Lethal Weapons, but I did like how she acted as a mediator early on and genuinely cared about her family. Meg also falls into this camp, but I did like how early on, she was a teenager traversing the awkward parts of high school, but sometimes with a twist, like the fact she unknowingly joined a suicide cult in Chitty Chitty Death Bang, or how kissing Neil Goldman goes all over the news in The Kiss Seen Around the World, there's also her affair with Mayor Adam West. One thing that the show lost after season 3 though would be Meg being Peter's little girl, since early on they bonded way more than I expected them to, in episodes like I Never Met the Dead Man and Let's Go to the Hop, and this says more about Peter than it does about Meg, but the fact that Peter went out of his way to create a fake persona to make Meg popular, really says a lot about how well-written and sweet Peter was early on.

I liked Chris, as he was essentially a teenage Peter and he could spout funny lines from time to time, but the show never gave him much attention. I do like how he was an artist back in season 1, and how in the season 2 episode Fore, Father, he was looking for a role model to follow, and somehow found one in Quagmire. The most interesting thing to happen with Chris though is the evil monkey running gag that the series has. Throughout S1-8, Chris was fearful of a monkey in his closet that was out to get him, but by the episode Hannah Banana, they both actually manage to have an understanding of one another, and even bond, it was a somehow sweet conclusion to what was a silly (and funny) running gag the series has, and it's why I like that episode as much as I do. I feel like episodes such as Hannah Banana and Fore, Father, show that there is a lot more that the series could do with Chris, but he's unfortunately cast to the side most of the time, which is sad because the moments he does get a prominent role, somehow manage to be both funny and interesting.

As for the side characters, well, I'd say they're all just as memorable and personality-filled as characters like Brian, Stewie, and Peter. Characters like Seamus, Joe, Quagmire, Cleveland, Mort Goldman, Neil Goldman, Tom Tucker, Jerome, Herbert, Dr. Hartman, and even Ernie the Giant Chicken are all super memorable for their quirky personalities, unique designs, and funny voices. (Maybe I'll talk more about them in a later paragraph)

Of these characters though, my favorites are obviously Joe and Quagmire, Peter's two best friends. When it comes to Quagmire, you'd think that the only thing he'd do throughout this show is hump any sentient being, but there's actually a lot more to him than that. When he's not screwing some broad, he's actually a really humble and nice guy that's supportive of his two friends, and he has a job that he's extremely passionate about. He feels like a character that could exist in the real world, as he is sex-crazy, but that's only a small part of a grander life that he has.

From the moment Joe debuted, I knew he would be one of the show's shining stars. The biggest standout about his character is obviously that he's crippled, but they actually manage to make him a badass regardless. There are a lot of chase sequences involving Joe where they show off his atheltic abilities like Ready, Willing, and Disabled, and, like Quagmire, I like how much of a humble guy he is on the surface, but can randomly explode with anger at random moments. Patrick Warburton puts so much energy into Joe's voice to the point where anything he says, even the most mundane things, are hilarious to me, and it only adds to why I like this character as much as I do.

Cleveland is the most quiet and reserved of the group, but that doesn't stop me from liking him a lot. I like how he's the counterbalance to Peter, Quagmire, and Joe's antics, and can go just as crazy as them when he feels like it. Just like Joe, the voice work done by his VA, Mike Henry, makes most lines that he says get a smirk or laugh out of me, like his iconic line "Ohhh that's naassttyyy". My favorite performance of Cleveland has to be in the episode The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire, not only was that episode probably the best "character learns not to be a pushover" plot I've seen, but it showed how pure Cleveland is. Even when he realized his wife, Loretta, cheated on him, he couldn't get angry at her at all, and seeing him try to be angry and tough was funny to see.

Oh wait, my actual favorite of the side characters has to be Mayor Adam West. One thing that every character in this show has in common is that the voicework done by their VAs makes it sound like they're having a blast, and it reflects on the characters too. Adam West has to be the best of them though because this character is so quirky and weird and funny. Instead of being a cliche incompetent town mayor, Adam West is instead a strange person. So many moments with him will have you both weirded out and laughing, like the fact that he's apparently 95% helium according to Road to the Multiverse. Every single time he's on-screen, he's guaranteed to get a big laugh, and I'd explain how, but that's involve explaining jokes in which he appears in, and I'd rather not do that.

tl;dr version: I like how diverse, likeable, and energetic this cast is. Many of them do appear one dimensional on the surface, like Quagmire, but have a lot more to them early on in terms of their personality and daily lives. I also like how several characters like Brian and Peter, despite being comedic characters, have a sympathetic layer added to them because they really are earnest people at their core. In fact, the whole Griffin household was a constant joke machine back then, Stewie would be diabolical, but could also have fun roadtrips with Brian, Brian would be the straightman, Peter would be the troublemaker who always put his family first, that kind of stuff. Peter's friends, Quagmire and Joe, were also fun to hang around since they could provide over-the-top adventures or be badass, and the rest of the side characters have memorable, unique designs, and funny moments, with several shining appearances (which I'll tackle in my next section of the review). yeah this section was kinda clunky but wtf do you want me to say

GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE SHOW: When I first sat down and watched the first episode of Family Guy, I was completely surprised by what I was witnessing. For years, people have been memeing and criticizing this show for its nonsensical writing, cutaways, and unlikeable characters, but watching Death Has a Shadow, and the rest of season 1 (I watched all of season 1 in 3 hours)... it gave me Simpsons vibes more than anything else. In fact, I'd call early Family Guy an edgier Simpsons, period, and just like the early days of The Simpsons, early Family Guy was both consistent and top quality. Of the first 5 seasons, I dislike absolutely no episodes, and every single one of them are episodes I love, minus A Picture's Worthy a 1000 Bucks, but even that episode had its funny moments. Seriously, I can't overstate how much I love Family Guy at its prime.

There's no single way that I could use to describe this show early on, but I can say that watching S1-5 made me feel all sorts of joy. If I was ever in a sour mood, I could put on any episode from this era and laugh a lot. The brand of humor that early Family Guy had was immaculate-- so many different kinds of humor that somehow blended together, and even the kinds of style of comedy you'd expect to fail, ended up succeeding perfectly. I was never a fan of anti-humor or dragged out moments, but scenes like Peter hitting his knee in Wasted Talent, and some of the jokes in PTV, are how you do those kinds of jokes correctly.

Surprisingly though, the stories early on were really strong too, and some could be heartfelt. I loved the adventurous feeling episodes like Meet the Quagmires and Let's Go to the Hop had, those two episodes are somehow really sweet, funny, and in a way, heartwarming. I'd also like to give a mention to Holy Crap (honorable #21) since it was an episode that explored Peter's relationship with his overly religious father, and it was nice trying to see him reconcile. A lot of early Family Guy provided fun adventures that'll have you hooked for 22 minutes because so much stuff was going on. As of writing this review, I randomly watched the episode Lethal Weapons, and although this episode didn't have the greatest story, the comedy was absolutely brilliant. Jokes are being fired from all sides, and even if one or two miss, ten others are guaranteed to land. But, if you wanted the complete package of what made Family Guy such an iconic show, look no further than Road to Rhode Island.

Road to Rhode Island can stand toe-to-toe with the best of the best of Classic Simpsons. It's a Brian and Stewie episode, for starters, and these two are always a joy to watch. Something I never brought up in my review is how these two have a weird relationship, as they can either be nemeses or friends-- they're frenemies. If Patriot Games was Brian and Stewie's nemesis at its peak, then Road to Rhode Island is their friendship at their peak. We see them traverse several different locations: the airport, a motel, the back of a truck, and a train. It really does feel like a long journey home. The true star of this episode though, would be Brian. I thought that the first minute of this episode was sad, but the scene where Brian wanted to reconcile with his mom, only to figure out she's dead... that hit even harder than I thought. For once, we see a different and vulnerable side to Brian, and it sheds a new light on his character for why he isn't mentally well. A lot of people say the subplot is inferior, but I honestly liked it since it was, in my eyes, one of Lois' shining appearances. The fact she was able to understand why Peter got addicted to those "tapes" and entice him instead of devolving into a cliche marriage crisis plot. In fact, it's the opposite: We get to see Peter and Lois' relationship spiced up, so this subplot still has value. Oh, and this episode's song... it's brilliant. It might be the best song FG has ever done, and I'll explain why below.

It seems that every time I say a show has the best music I've ever heard, the next one I watch always proves me wrong. Initially, I thought SpongeBob had the best music, then Simpsons, then South Park (I think Steven Universe's music is good but it never stood out to me as one of the best of the best, minus the movie.), but I think the clear winner between all of these is Family Guy. What made Family Guy's songs distinct from every other show is that the orchestration of its tracks would be grand and epic, like a theatrical film... at least, that what Seth McFarlane, the creator of this show, wanted, and I'd say it shows. The music in this series is incredible, every single song in this show is always done in a big broadway style, just listen to the songs You've Got a Lot to See (Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows), Road to Rhode Island (lol), Bag of Weed (420), The FCC Song (PTV), the song in Road to Rupert, Christmas Time is Killing Us (Road to the North Pole), Mr. Booze (Friends of Peter G.), Shipoopi (Patriot Games), and every song in Brian Sings and Swings. This show's soundtrack is an absolute bop, and I feel as though most of these songs are interjected because Seth McFarlane has a really talented and good singing voice.

This show could also parody and satirize pop-culture really well, and there are too many good examples of where to even begin. How about the Star Wars specials? They're all awesome, though Blue Harvest ranks the best of the three. I haven't seen a single Star Wars movie, but the roles that the main characters and side characters got is perfectly fitting and hilarious-- Cleveland being R2D2 and Stewie being Darth Vader are things that crack me up thinking about them. I mentioned this earlier in my animation section, but the dance scene in Road to Rupert was rotoscoped from the movie Anchors Aweigh, and to perfection. North by North Quahog is even better than SP's take on Mel Gibson (The Passion of the Jew), and the whole episode is pretty much one giant showdown against him, and like that South Park episode, this one demonstrated how insane Gibson is in an over-the-top way. There's also PTV, the episode that's a master of anti-humor, and humor period. Every single second of this episode was sheer brilliance, and I love how the episode used its comedy to convey how pointless censorship is. Those last two examples are exactly why I consider season 4 of Family Guy to be the peak of the series, as the season was the perfect representation of what I love about this series. Every single episode is filled with laughs and classic moments, and although the season is more comedy-driven than S1-3, the comedy was superior to the previous seasons. I can pick out a random season 4 episode and laugh hard at it for the entire 22 minute runtime, the season is just THAT good. Ditto for season 5.

That's... all I really had to say. Those are all my notes I had for the first 5 seasons of Family Guy. Even I was expecting to have more to say, but I do not. I mean... it wasn't that long of a run anyways. 99 episodes, and every single one of them was incredible minus one episode (I still like it tho). I dunno, it's just that early FG really hit home with me in terms of its style of humor and storytelling. It wasn't AS groundbreaking as Simpsons or South Park, but this show does have its place in cartoon history as an amazing series with an off-the-wall comedy style and memorable, iconic characters.

Okay, maybe it'll make a lot more sense as to why I like early FG as much as I do once we cover... something else I've been trying to ignore. Christ, it's like with every long-running series, there has to be a paragraph like this....

WHAT IN THE LIVING HELL HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW AFTER SEASON 10?: I saw it coming, you saw it coming, everyone saw it coming. To absolutely no one's surprise, Family Guy had a... huge decline in quality. Actually, huge wouldn't begin to describe what happened to this show after Season 10-- catastrophic is. The later seasons of Family Guy are so bad, that any clean track record this show once had became invalidated by the existence of this series past S10.

NOTE: A lot of what I have to say below is outdated since the more I watch from later Family Guy, the more I realize it isn't the worst thing ever like one of my later sections makes it out to be. I still have so many problems with the later seasons, but one day I'm going to revamp what I have to say below since it isn't as black-and-white as I thought.

There's something else I need to clear up: I never brought up S6-10 (yes, I'm throwing in S10) of Family Guy much in my review praising the prime era of this show, but I want to make it clear that I do think that S6-10 can line up with the show's golden age. Yes, they do have more stinkers, with season 6 being home to the first bad episode of the series, but the good ones carry all the good qualities of earlier episodes and can line up with them easily. Nothing is perfect, after all. Plus, episodes Blue Harvest, Lois Kills Stewie, I Dream of Jesus, Road to Germany, And Then There Were Fewer, The Big Bang Theory, and others, more than justify these seasons' existence. Hell, I can justify S10 existing since its high points line up with earlier seasons, and S11 spat out the last true gems, and the last third of this season was incredible, so it can stay too.

But when we talk about S12-onwards... oh God. I think the first place to begin here would for me to say that, when watching this show past S10, I was SO CLOSE to dropping the series. Season 11 bored me out of my mind most of the time and it struggled to keep my attention, but as I said, the good episodes were good enough to justify its existence, though it did present a problem that plagues every season afterwards, and I'll get to what it is.

Wanna know what's my biggest issue with this series in S12-onwards? The cutaways. Most episodes are filled with these things, and when earlier seasons did them, they were spare, and y'know, actually FUNNY. But the cutaways in later FG are just... inescapable, they're more frequent and hell, they're lazier than they used to be since most of them don't even have a proper punchline. I can't even consider them anti-humor since anti-humor has an underlying punchline somewhere, but the cutaways in later FG come off as filler more than anything else. In fact, it's not only the cutaways that got neutered, but the comedy as a whole just... died. I guarantee you that in every single episode past S12, you're going to find a joke akin to that of Peter hitting his knee in the episode Wasted Talent. These jokes started to become more frequent by S7, but they still had the same edge Peter hitting his knee did. The moment that these kinds of dragged out jokes died was the Dad noises joke in Seahorse Seashell Party, where we just listen to Peter make noises for at least 30 seconds, and it's as annoying as a real person doing this.
But if you thought that was bad, how about the joke in Quagmire's Mom where a cutaway involved Peter waiting for a song to start for a FULL MINUTE while there's minimal animation? There's also the whale scene in Peter Problems, the spinach joke which goes on for 45 seconds in Herpe, The Love Sore, and hell, THE LATEST EPISODE, Tales of Former Sports Glory, HAD A JOKE LIKE THIS WITH QUAGMIRE DRIBBLING A BALL 40 TIMES, AND THEY DID THIS JOKE TWICE. I could list so. many. more. moments. like this, but even thinking about these jokes makes just the slightest bit annoyed, since they're an insult to the concept of comedy. They drag out jokes that were never even funny to begin with, anada they do this OVER, AND OVER AGAIN, and it makes me worried about how the older episodes with jokes like these will hold up.

   But hey, if frequently unfunny and drawn-out cutaways aren't your style of humor, then later FG has two other options for you: bad fourth wall jokes and meta-humor, or bad shock value jokes. If you recall what I said in my animation section, I said the show became more gory in later seasons. I can't pinpoint when exactly, but I can say that the episode A Fistful of Meg is the start of this series treading into full-blown grossout territory, as the episode's subplot has Peter be naked throughout all of it, and eventually Brian too (dear Lord his shaved design is disgusting), and the main-plot has Meg defeat her bully with spewing pus and showing off her gross body. S12-onwards is filled with so much puss, gore, and other bodily fluids.. and do I even need to mention Herpe, the Love Sore again? That episode had the audacity to show detailed herpes, and a live-action image of them. Yeah, that's how low the style of comedy has sunk, and it's not the only episode with crass jokes like this. The episode Fresh Heir is one incest joke on loop, and then there's other shit in there like Peter cutting off a deaf kid's head off-screen, carrying castrated testicles, and shooting his "hairless twin". I don't know how anyone can find... any of this stuff funny, and for the record, the grossout still persists to this day. The episode And Then There's Fraud has such a disgusting side-plot with Stewie getting plastic surgery, and his final design is just horrendous to look at, especially when his face drooped-- that genuinely terrified me on first viewing. There's also the scene in Short Cuts where Brian gets nearly castrated, only to be saved by Stewie last minute, and while he's giving some boring ass monologue, we see some blood dripping from his slightly cut penis. The fact I even had to say that makes me want to castrate myself on the spot, but I'm not kidding when I say that most of the humor in later FG is basically this, and when it's not...

...then it's bad meta-humor. Some people have told me that Family Guy changed up its style of humor in S16, the supposed "experimental" season. Guess what? Season 16 is... fine, as it may have gotten rid of the grossout, but it replaced it with a style of comedy that I find... once again fine. I've rewatched a majority of this season, and it has been a pleasant surprise how it's nowhere as bad as I initially thought, but at the end of the day, it's nothing impressive. The only actual notes I have for this season is that I've come to love the three-parter stretching from The D in Apartment 23 - Crimes and Meg's Demeanor since they actually pulled off this kind of story arc that we have not seen since... what? The first two season 3 episodes? I've especially come to love The D in Apartment 23 because of how it shows what cancel culture does to people. Brian is an awful character at the start of it, and the first third is him being a dumbass hitting on girls for the millionth time, but the rest of the episode throws this out and replaces him with an attitude that reminds me of Brian: Portrait of a Dog, it was a really solid and somewhat funny episode with a great story to back it up. [I'll finish up my season 16 reevaluation later]
The point where style of meta-humor got on my nerves was in like... season 18? You get trash like Disney's the Reboot, since just about every line of dialogue is explaining what the punchline of jokes are, or whatever they're parodying/appealing to. I also recall a joke in Throw it Away where Chris states he's "1930s Work Whistle Angry" and then he turns into a 1930 Work Whistle, the joke doesn't work because you fucking pointed out the punchline before it even arrived, and it pains me this joke had to be in what otherwise was a great episode. It's not even the worst example of these kinds of jokes being done, there are so many moments where a character, primarily Peter, looks into the camera and points out the punchline of a joke before it even happens. There's that scene where he points out cries like Snoopy, there's a scene he points out his mood changes depending what song is playing on the radio, there's that scene in Who's Brian Now? where he points out he's doing a 'Roadhouse' callback. Does this show think its audience is too stupid to figure out what jokes they're trying to tell? Because that's exactly the feeling I get when I watch most later episodes, and it's not like there's much else redeeming in the episodes.

   The comedy wasn't the only thing that jumped into a volcano by S12, but the characters... oh good Lord the characters. I thought Steven Universe did a number on its main characters, but no, I was dead wrong. I hate nearly every single character in this series starting by S12, and where else to begin than with Brian? [INCOMING GARGANTUAN ESSAY]

I hate Brian, I hate him so fucking much in later episodes. I have no idea why we went from an intelligent character who was outspoken with a dry sense of humor, and suffered feelings of isolation, to a dumbass stereotypical liberal who wants to stick his dick in anything sentient. Brian's character started to become a lot more inconsistent around season 7, with episodes like Love, Blacktually turning him into a sore loser. He literally falls for a girl just because she's an atheist (Not All Dogs to Heaven was probably the first red flag for this character as this episode is Brian spouting atheist beliefs for 22 minutes)-- that's it, his relationships were THAT shallow. Remember in Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows when he slowly fell in love with a grumpy old lady named Pearl and made it clear he wished he could've spent the rest of his life with her before it was tragically cut? Well screw that, here's a million episodes of Brian falling for a random bitch and then either treating them like garbage or cheating on them, and most of Brian's plots later on devolve into this. I can say whatever about his character in S7-9, but at least we got episodes like The Man With Two Brians and Excellence in Broadcasting, two episodes that portray him in a respectable light because he had that old characterization of his. If they really wanted to turn Brian into a full-blown liberal, then the least they could do is have his characterization in the latter camp because he actually knew what he was saying, but no, instead we need to turn Brian into an actual idiot-- most of the time, he has no idea what he's saying, and he himself acknowledges this, only to continue to have an arrogant attitude towards everyone and everything.
  I'd bring up the episode Brian Writes a Bestseller as an example, but in that episode, his arrogant attitude felt forced and cliche-- of fucking course the person who gets famous will have become an arrogant ass, I've seen this plot type done in every other cartoon ever, so instead I'll bring up Dog Bites Bear. People like this episode, for some reason, but Brian's portrayal in this episode is absolutely despicable. He admits that he tore up Stewie's stuffed bear, Rupert, because he was jealous of him, and even when Stewie shows just the slightest bit of grief, Brian brushes it off with "it's just a toy". Where do I even begin with how wrong this is? First of all, really? We're gonna destroy this character even more by having him get jealous of a stuffed bear? What an absolute degenerate, and even in the scenes where Brian and Stewie talk things out, there's this nasty ungenuine feeling from Brian that ruins any kind of "emotion" the episode goes for. It makes shit like the ending feel manipulative more than anything else, since it's clear that the actual Rupert is gone and Brian just got a look-alike replacement.
That isn't even the worst Brian has done. Remember the episode The Former Life of Brian when Brian spends time with his son and by the end of the episode says he'll always be there for him? You know where I'm going with this, but the follow-up to this episode, Brian's a Bad Father, completely shits on anything that that episode had. Here, he wants nothing to do with his son, and only shows interest in him when he says he's working on a Disney sitcom and they need writers. Shit like this only validates my point on how much of a manipulative scumbag Brian is in later seasons, and the worst part is that this episode EXPECTS ME TO FEEL SORRY FOR BRIAN. But I don't, he ditched his son, and proceeded to "care" about him when he heard about his show. Just so you know, this episode came AFTER the episode Life of Brian, when Brian was supposedly going to be killed off for good. I completely ignored talking about both this episode and Christmas Guy because I don't even want to dignify them, but it's undeniable that this character became a monster once those two episodes were over, and he was already showing signs of deterioration before that, like in Be Careful What You Fish For, where Brian dates Stewie's preschool teacher while Stewie's preschool has become a prison zone, and doesn't lay an eye on it until he knows Stewie's teacher is cheating on him.
Actually no, none of this is the worst thing Brian has done. The worst he's ever done is date a cancer patient named Jess in the episodes Married With Cancer and Dead Dog Walking and was upset at the fact that his girlfriend would survive her cancer. Even worse is that there's a scene where Jess is choking to death, while Brian does nothing, and then she actually does die, but when it's revealed she's alive, Brian cries about it. He was literally hoping that a cancer patient that he willingly wanted to date would DIE, that's evil on every level of the imagination.
I could make an entire list of every horrendous act that this character has done: he's given HERPES to Stewie in Herpe, the Love Sore, along with Chris. Why? Because he's ashamed to tell anyone that he has herpes. So now we've gone from this character being a loser, to being a COWARD and a liar, he took advantage of his son so he could get a writing gig, he tore up his supposed best friend's stuffed toy because he felt jealous, he's cheated on numerous women throughout various episodes and has taken advantage of them like when he dated a blind girl in The Blind Side, he's cowared when everyone got angry over a stupid tweet of his instead of standing his ground, and there's this one thing he did in the episode Boy (Dog) Meets Girl (Dog) that pisses me off. In the episode, Brian: Portrait of a Dog, Brian says that dog shows are humiliating and that he never wanted to partake in one, but because early Brian and current Brian aren't the same character, in this episode, he's WILLING to join a dog show, just so he can fuck some dog. Sorry, but this was already done way back in S3's Screwed the Pooch, a far superior episode at that. He's also tried to hit on Patty, a TEENAGER in the episode Scammed Yankees, he's kissed Bonnie in the episode The Heartbreak Dog, even though he knows she's married to Joe.

  Oh, and need I mention the episode Brian's the Closer? Quagmire pays for Brian to get a new set of teeth, and the rest of the episode is about Brian trying to scam Quagmire. Seriously, this character is just so nasty and heartless in later episodes... or a dumbass. The episode "Who's Brian Now?" has Brian be a full-blown dumbass because we're talking about a stereotypical liberal (Brian) living in a house with relatively intelligent people.

Brian's not the only character who's gotten massacred, just about everyone else did too. Peter got hit nearly as bad-- he went from being a good-natured guy who put his family first to... a stereotypical dumb cartoon dad, with a nature that could only be described as psychotic. There's a line where regular stupidity crosses into psychopathy, and episodes such as Peter Problems and the sideplot in Brian's a Bad Father have Peter be an actual psychopath. Compare this joke from Padre da Familia (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixr5ZE… ) to the whale scene from Peter Problems. I understand why some people may not like the former joke, but I think it works because Peter reacts in a way that you'd expect early Peter to react, and you can see him panicking trying to fix what he's caused, only to fail. In the whale scene, he just has a blank expression on his face the whole way through, which isn't what Peter was in early seasons-- he was an expressive person. Oh, and the sideplot in Brian's a Bad Father had him repeatedly shoot Quagmire in the arm... for no good reason, it's not even a funny joke either because you can see the punchline from a mile away. He similarly shot Joe in the eye in the episode "Lottery Fever" because he refused to do a dance for him-- this isn't something Peter would normally do.
  In the episode Connie's Celica, he randomly rips people's faces off for no good reason. In Herpe the Love Sore, he whips his family for no reason. In Shanksgiving, he intentionally gets arrested to avoid spending Thanksgiving with his family. Every single one of these actions is completely contradictory to anything Peter did in earlier seasons. I remember in Peter Peter Cavier Eater when he told Lois that he'd give up living in the mansion if meant she was happy, but in the episode Boopa-Dee Bappa-Dee LOL NOPE, he wants to stay in Italy even though Lois told him she's not happy there. You thought Brian the Closer only hurt Brian? Well, just about everyone in this episode is horrible, including Peter. He's such an asshole to Brian in the first third and causes his teeth to get knocked out just because he selfishly wanted Brian's rope, and then because this show doesn't know how to do comedy, Peter no longer wants the rope and tells Brian he can't pay for his teeth. Just like Brian, the carnage on Peter's character is immeasurable.

Good thing they also took down Lois and Meg with him. Lois was never one of my favorites, but she went from being a caring mother and a mediator to a sex-crazed woman later on, and this derailment happened even before S10 hit. In the episode Go, Stewie, Go!, she tries to have sex with Meg's boyfriend, despite him being a teenager. This trait is exaggerated to the nth degree in other episodes such as Lois Comes Out of Her Shell as well. The episode Switch the Flip was going well until it got hijacked by Lois in the second half, where she does turn into a horny monster, and doesn't give a crap when Peter (with Stewie in his body because this is a body swap episode) is clearly terrified by her. I could see some argument being made against this, but the ending of Connie's Celica does the exact same shit, as it's implied she rapes Peter by the end of the episode.

I know that Meg is a punching bag in later episodes, but it's not like the character is any better later on. In the same way her family's nasty to her, she's also just as nasty to her family. The episode Chris Cross has her blackmail Chris to the point where he runs away, and she still runs with the blackmail. Great, now I don't like any of these characters.

  Hell, I can say 5/6 in the family household are terrible just because of the existence of Better Off Meg. When Meg is presumed dead, literally no one cares, and we get some good character derailment of Chris since when he figures out Meg dead, he takes advantage of this opportunity by making himself popular at school, and when he finds out Meg isn't dead, he kidnaps her and places her in an isolated warehouse. The episode is the bottom of the barrel for Meg jokes in this entire series, as it takes a cruel approach to them. These jokes started appearing as far back as season 3, but at least back then, they were harmless since it was clear the family household still cared about her.

The only character that didn't get derailed is Stewie, his evil side does take a backseat and he's a lot more flamboyant, but I'm perfectly okay with this since he still feels like the same character to me, and we do see his evil side occasionally like in Pal Stewie. He's one of the only characters with a positive energy to him, and even episodes I find boring as sin like The Peanut Butter Kid are ones I can't be too hard on because Stewie's the star of the episode.

There's just one more character I want to mention before I'm done with this because this section has taken forever, but uh, what did they do to Quagmire? I'm not talking about the actual character (or maybe I am, we'll see), but for some reason, they made him and Brian rivals in later seasons. The first true instance of this would be in Jerome is the New Black, where Quagmire calls out Brian for doing things that... he's done himself. He's called Brian out for hitting on Lois, ditching his son, being a stereotypical liberal, haughty atheist, and a bore, paying for nothing, manipulating women for sex. Not everything here is something he's done, but he has hit on Lois NUMEROUS TIMES throughout the show, and he's admitted several times, past and present, that she's the true love of his life, he comes across numerous children of his throughout the series like in Tales of a Third Grade Nothing and No Giggity, No Doubt, and manipulating women is something that he always does. Always. This rivalry never made any sense to me because Brian and Quagmire used to be on good terms. They joked a little in The Thin White Line, and in the episode The Man With Two Brians, he offers Brian to stay at his place. Hell, he paid for Brian's teeth in Brian the Closer. I really wanna know what started this rivalry, because it leaves more of a mark on Quagmire's character than it does Brian's. The speech looks even worse when you consider the fact that in Con Heiress, both Quagmire and Brian were taking advantage of a rich old lady and were waiting for her to die.

I may have left some things out in ths sextion of the review, but what more do I need to say to demonstrate my point that this show later on became nothing more than a cesspool of bad jokes and unlikeable characters? Hell, I didn't even mention my least favorite episode of the show, Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q., and that's because that episode is its own beast. Let's just say that this episode has no understanding of domestic abuse at all and that, similar to the scene in Jerome is the New Black where Quagmire calls out Brian, there's one like that here, and it's even worse than that scene. Oh, and there's a plothole. Joe says he can't arrest Brenda unless she files a complaint, even though there are two instances where she's being abused right in front of him AND HAVE I EVEN MENTIONED JOE? I CAN' BELIEVE I FORGOT TO GIVE THIS GUY A PARAGRAPH, but let's just say he became a second Meg. He's a subhuman now because LOL HE'S CRIPPLED. Okay, now I'm done.

tl;dr version: Sorry if this section of the review came off as clunky, there was just too much to talk about. But to sum up, I love early FG a lot because it had a style of humor that appealed to me, it had so many huge song numbers that are some of the best songs I've ever heard, every character was at the very least likeable, the animation could be a bit sloppy but it was charming, and I could watch any episode from back then and laugh for the entire 22 minute runtime. I'm even willing to say that this momentum was kept up until S9, even though some issues started to crop up. S10 isn't a good season, but I also can forgive it for having some of the best of the best, and S11 can stay for the same reason too. Just read my conclusion below, it's going to be better than whatever this summary is.

CONCLUSION: I'd say my first 5 months of 2021 were well-spent, since watching this series might be the funnest thing to happen to me this year so far, but overall... you already know what I'm going to say...

  This series used to be incredible, among my favorite shows ever made, top 10 at worst. S1-5 were perfect TV because of how likeable and funny the characters were, the amount of care and effort that went into parodying many parts of pop culture (mainly the cutaways), occasionally the witty satire like in PTV, the musical sequences that will make you want to get up and dance, the fact that, in spite of having a widely different brand of humor from just about any other show, the early seasons slowly but masterfully acquainted you with the style of jokes... there was just so much to love and appreciate. S1-5 were flawless, sure, but I wouldn't mind extending that period up until S9... maybe even 10... or 11, because those seasons still had their gems in spite of S7-8 being of lesser quality, and S10-11 not being good seasons period. Either way, I would've been fine if FG ended at S9, S10, or hell, S11, because I'd still say it was a really great show.

  But... of course... the show went through a rot-- a terrible, terrible rot. S12+ would be my second least favorite show of all time. Hell, it could even be as bad as Star vs., but that show had season 4 so it's worse. By how much? Who knows? All I'm saying is that S12+ are so bad, that they completely invalidated any perfect track record that this series once had, and the overall quality of these seasons is abysmal. I can pick out a random episode from S1-11 and they'd likely be better than anything this series has produced since S11. Why? Because back then, the series actually tried. Starting from S11, there's a lot more gore and grossout, stiffer animation, absolutely despicable characters, and worst of all: an overreliance on cutaway gags, which have both become lazier and more commonplace, making episodes an absolute chore to watch. Here's a take that no one saw coming, but:

  The latest seasons, and I mean the 2019-2021 episodes, are the worst period of the show. They may have removed the obnoxious cutaways, but good Lord they're filled with bad meta-humor and constant joke-explaining-- having the characters explain jokes that weren't funny to begin with, or most episodes will be completely dead on substance. I swear, watching season 18 was one of the most miserable experiences I've had watching any cartoon season-- it was so. fucking. boring, and I barely ever laughed-- there weren't even any good episodes to be found. It's really telling that the sequel to Quagmire's Dad, which is my least favorite episode in S1-9, Bri-Da, is one of the better S18 episodes. Season 19 may have my favorite episode post-S11, but it doesn't detract from the fact this season feels tired and depressing beyond belief. Most episodes made me want to turn them off after 5 minutes because of how uncharacteristically cruel, boring, and unfunny they were-- the general episode quality was extremely low, and several episodes feel like they weren't even finished. Cutawayland barely did anything with its premise and ended on a dream twist, and Meg Goes to College ends with Meg... supposedly drowning? They legit forgot to have a conclusion for that episode. On top of that, both S18-19 are home to the worst of the worst episodes.11/20 of my bottom 20 comes from these seasons, and many S18-19 episodes are good contenders for a bottom 40. So yeah, the worst of this series is not S12-13, but S18-19, and if the show continues down this path, I fear it'll end up being worse than the current rating. At least S19 ended on a very good note.

With all that being said, I think for now that I'm going to call Family Guy an overall GREAT show, albeit not as much, because 10/19 of the seasons are good, 3/19 range from alright to lame, and 2/19 suck, and 2/19 are complete filth. The funny thing though is that this conclusion paragraph is going to look so off-putting because I've warmed up to bits of later seasons... except S18-19, it's going to be hard for me not to hate them as much as I do. But hey, I hate South Park Season 20 is worse than every single season here besides those two, so there's something.

Here's to hoping Season 20 is a substantial improvement.

SEASON RANKINGS: 4 > 5 > 2 > 3 > 1 > 6 > 9 > 10 > 8 > 7 > 16 >> 15 > 11 > 12 >> 17 > 13 > 14 > 18 > 19

Here's a free top 50 too since I want to end on a positive note:

50. German Guy

49. I Dream of Jesus

48. Peter's Two Dads
47. Wasted Talent

46. The King is Dead

45. The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire

44. Saving Private Brian

43. Mother Tucker

42. Brian: Portrait of a Dog

41. Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story

40. Joe's Revenge

39. The Griffin Winter Games

38. Fore, Father

37. Big Man on Hippocampus

36. Business Guy

35. Road to Germany

34. Road to Rupert

33. Perfect Castaway
32. Tales of a Third Grade Nothing

31. Brian Goes Back to College
30. Chitty Chitty Death Bang

29. Stuck Together, Torn Apart
28. Lethal Weapons

27. Peter's Got Woods/Back to the Woods

26. E. Peterbus Unum
25. Brian Sings and Swings

24. The Splendid Source
23. Forget-Me-Not

22. He's Too Sexy for His Own Fat

21. Holy Crap

20. Hannah Banana

19. Da Boom

18. Petarded

17. Leggo My Meg-O

16. Peterotica
15. Road to the North Pole

14. North by North Quahog

13. Blue Harvest

12. The Fat Guy Strangler

11. Killer Queen

10. The Big Bang Theory

9. Lois Kills Stewie
8. Let's Go to the Hop

7. Meet the Quagmires

6. PTV
5. Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows

4. Patriot Games

3. And Then There Were Fewer
2. Back to the Pilot

1. Road to Rhode Island