Sometime soon I'd like to do a post on the genius of early Simpsons (particularly ~ seasons 3 - 10) and its eventual decline, but for now let's talk about this guy called Seth McFarlane.
Seth McFarlane saw the Simpsons and thought they weren't wacky enough. So he made his own version of them after being fired by Matt Groening for taking too long with his coffee.
Thankfully, our good friend McFarlane managed to successfully raid the bins in the Writers' Room before being ejected from the studio. He took with him the comedy gold that was simply too off-the-wall for the Simpsons. He also took with him many of the precious first-drafts of such episodes, allowing him to make several suspiciously familiar plots that may remind us of the Simpsons, except these versions are untouched by snarling, uncreative executives and therefore funnier.
Somewhere down the line, Seth decided one episode of Family Guy where Peter Griffin starts off hating illegal immigrants and ends up accepting them upon seeing their culture just wasn't enough. He had to make another series so he could use that golden script twice, before it lost its flavour.
Quite possibly the wackiest white nuclear family to hit American screens since the Simpsons, or dare I say, the Griffins themselves, the Smiths (how original! McFarlane must have poured through the phonebooks for that one) are not just your average animated TV family. They're, um... American. Very American indeed.
Seeing as how he is a boundary pusher of the most dynamic variety, Seth McFarlane realised he needed something new. A whole new show to capture the hearts of viewers worldwide. It had to be something different; a new concept, new issues, a totally new platform for dealing with them.
And so he made history with quite possibly the bravest move in Animation History.
This time they're black. Whoah, there!!
