Family Guy - Season 1 to 8 DVD Box Set

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Family Guy is Fox’s other wildly successful family-based cartoon with an oafish, educationally-challenged father figure and askance view of American life. However, whilst it will win no marks for originality of concept, and its brand of deliberately, how shall we put it, un-PC humour often risks being just plain offensive, it can be, and often is, very funny.

The premise, such that it is, is a family unit with the unbelievably obtuse Peter Griffin at the helm, sharing his home with his wife Louis. They have three children; the dumb-as-his-Dad-but-in-a-different-way Chris, the maligned Meg, and the precociously brilliant, matricide-obsessed, sociopathic and verbose infant Stewie. There is also a blasé talking dog called Brian. He turns out to be the most grounded member of the family. From the start it is easy to see that whilst the central idea is the same as The Simpsons, Family Guy is not trying to portray the studied milieu of real American family life in the way that show did in its infancy. All out surrealism and close-to-the-bone humour are the order of the day. 

Elements of the show are fantastic. Stewie is often brilliant when smothered by his mother who doesn’t seem to notice he is more akin to an English super-villain than a crying baby. His love-hate relationship with Brian, whose witty asides highlight the madness around him, is also very amusing. Some of the side characters are probably the best; the ridiculously sex-obsessed Quagmire provides the most belly laughs, and the old man down the street who has a rather unhealthy penchant for Chris is a great one for those who like their humour on the darker/very disturbing side.

However, there are flaws to this show. There is an episode of South Park that mercilessly mocks its ‘cut-away’ sequences, where a character will remark ‘Its like that time where…’ which queues a random surreal sequence with no relation to the plot. These are all well and good, but the relentless use of them can leave you feeling you’ve just spent an hour back at school with your ‘hilarious’ thirteen-year-old friends. The more controversial humour, dealing for example with race or disability, also often feels like its there just for the sake of it. Seth McFarlane, the creator, says the humour comes from how ignorant or bigoted Peter is about something, but it can leave you wondering whether you are just laughing (if you are) at stereotypes rather than post-ironic satire.

Of course fans of the show’s style won’t really care about such liberal misgivings, and for them and those who want to try the show for themselves this box-set contains all the episodes from seasons 1 to 8.

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