Family Guy to jump shark after Simpsons crossover

Many years ago, Seth Macfarlane joked about Family Guy lasting twenty seasons, getting to a point the writers are so bereft of ideas they decide to do an entire episode about Greg the Weather-Mime. That doesn't sound as awful as the crap that's on the horizon for the show's thirteenth season.

The show's producers have released a 5-minute clip of the upcoming season premiere, which is a crossover with The Simpsons. That clip is actually pretty funny, in my opinion, and bodes very well for the show if it is indicative of the quality of the rest of the episode.

What the writers have planned after that episode is what makes me wonder if the show will become so pathetically lame that I stop watching it. There's apparently going to be an episode in which Stewie becomes pregnant with Brian's baby. Yeah, yeah, I accept the idea of a talking dog. I even accept the idea of Brian having a human son by a human woman. But a human baby boy becoming pregnant with a dog's baby? That sounds just way too idiotic to me.

Back to the pilot

When I read the entry for last night's episode of Family Guy in TV Guide, I thought "Oh brother, they're really running out of ideas." But the Good Wife was about a death penalty case, so I decided to give the Family Guy episode a chance. It was... alright.

Brian pretends to want to travel back in time to retrieve a tennis ball he buried back in 1999, but his real reason is to tell his former self about 9/11 so he can become a hero by preventing it. Naturally, this has unforeseen bad consequences. Next thing you know, there are dozens of Brians and Stewies on the Griffin lawn trying to untangle the Gordian knot of causes and effects all their time traveling has caused.

Any time travel story is bound to have some confusing aspects. One of the Stewies acknowledges this, admitting to being confused. But some other questions naturally arise: why is Stewie still a baby? It has been fairly clearly established that Brian is now 8-years-old, and he was 7 when the show started. But now this episode cements the notion that time on the show is concurrent with real-life time: since Stewie's first birthday, Bush the Lesser has served two terms as President of the United States.

Also, what would be the true, unintended consequences of preventing 9/11? Wouldn't George W. Bush simply have asked his good buddy Osama bin Laden for another attack?

Brian the conservative

Stewie is not the only Family Guy character getting dumbed down. Brian is becoming quite the moron as well. I have a hard time believing that the Brian from Season 2 is a character who could be brainwashed into blindly and idiotically accepting Republican rhetoric after reading Rush Limbaugh's book. From this episode, we're to accept that Brian's liberalism was so shallow it could be easily transmuted and restored. This is perhaps an even sadder transgression against this character than having him eat Stewie's crap.

Punchingbaggis personae

Since very early on in Family Guy, Meg Griffin (Mila Kunis) has been a punching bag. But this tendency, which was latent from close to the beginning, became excessively pronounced when the show returned after being canceled.

Now it seems that every single character on the show will become a punching bag. The next one to receive this treatment, of a character beating as relentless as it is predictable, is Brian. The pre-cancelation episode "Brian Does Hollywood" planted the seed for this new attitude to Brian: instead of a straight man foil to Peter's lunacy, now Brian is continuously hounded for his mediocre writing and general pretentiousness.

In "Jerome is the New Black," aired a couple of Sundays ago, we find Brian inexplicably concerned that Quagmire doesn't like him. The episode culminates in an unfunnily long speech from Quagmire listing all of Brian's faults, which of course includes a dig at Brian's pretense of being a great writer. Brian comes home devastated, and Stewie soon comes to regret asking Brian to sleep in his room. Then, in "Dog Gone," as if it wasn't bad enough that Brian's novel Faster Than the Speed of Love supposedly didn't sell a single copy even with the endorsement of Oprah's Book Club, we now find that a book club for retards actually loves the book.

I can only speculate which character will be the next target of the punching treatment. But I predict that it will not be funny or at least entertaining.