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"FAMILY GUY" LIVES!
April 29, 2005
A pretty interesting thing is happening on Fox this Sunday night. A new episode of the animated comedy "Family Guy" will air, more than three years after the last original episode was broadcast.
It was early 2002 when Fox execs, who always have itchy fingers on the show-canceling trigger, canned the cartoon, which had built up a cultish following but not huge ratings. Then a funny thing happened. First, reruns went to Cartoon Network, where "Family Guy" - which details the bizarre adventures of the Griffin family (including their nefarious, scheming toddler, Stewie) - pulled in respectable ratings during the network's "Adult Swim" programming block for grown-ups. Petitions calling for a "Family Guy" renewal were filled with scores of names. Then, DVD sets of the series flew off store shelves so quickly that Fox execs huddled in their evil underground lair and said, "Hmm … maybe we made a mistake here."
Lo and behold, despite the fact that "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane already had another series in development ("American Dad"--also on this Sunday), Fox decided to resume production on the show, thus making it the first time in history that a TV program was cancelled and then reinstated by the same network.
Someday, books will probably be written on this entire affair, as I can ramble on about several topics of interest here right off the top of my head. The easiest, of course, is to make fun of Fox, which is indecisive at best, shortsighted at least, and flat-out blind at worst. I'm actually not the world's biggest "Family Guy" fan (I much preferred Matt Groening's woefully underrated animated sci-fi/comedy masterpiece "Futurama"), but even I could see the show made a perfect fit with the network's Sunday-night animated comedy line-up, which also includes hall-of-famers "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill."
Is "Family Guy" anywhere near as good as those classics? No. MacFarlane's show is built on little more than pop-culture jokes with hit-and-miss punch lines. It can be good for a few laughs - sometimes a really big guffaw - but you'll rarely find anything as consistently incisive as what "The Simpsons" or "South Park" has to offer. Still, "Family Guy" is by no means god awful, and it's hard to dismiss a show when a sizable chunk of people feel that it stands side-by-side with those other series.
But, hey, at least Fox will make money by rectifying their own mistake this time. Remember, this is the same network that also cancelled Joss Whedon's sci-fi series, "Firefly," only to watch that DVD sell like crazy and the movie rights get picked up by Universal. (The big-screen version - "Serenity" - opens in September.)
In fact, the real story here is how much DVD sales have changed the way networks plan their programming. Thanks to "Family Guy" and "Firefly," shows actually do live and die by the amount of boxed sets sold. The reason is twofold: One, it's another line of revenue for whomever produces the show, giving networks a good reason to keep churning out episodes of a series that tends to sell well on DVD (usually serialized genre shows, such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Stargate SG-1"). And, two, it allows fans to vote with their wallets on what TV shows deserve attention, even if said fans aren't a "Nielsen family," the oft-mentioned but rarely-seen species that seems to come from the same fantasy world as Hobbits and leprechauns.
For these reasons, "Family Guy" has earned its place in TV history. It's a show that a network didn't support, but the fans did. And in the end, the fans won out. Regardless of how you feel about the show, the story detailing its rebirth has a happy ending that all TV fans should find easy to love.
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