I think that 'Family Guy' and 'The Critic' come from some of the same kind of seed. I don't know what it is.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
'Family Guy' is relentlessly excellent.
It's amazing that people love 'Family Guy' as much as they do. It's great.
'Family Guy' has this weird thing of attracting people. People either hate it or can't get enough of it. There's really no one in between.
At the end of the day, it seems like there's a critic archetype for food movies, like with 'Ratatouille' or anything. You know, if you were doing a puppet show about chefs, one puppet would be the chef, one would be the critic.
When 'Family Guy' started, we wanted to make it more like a sitcom. And there was very little music.
I think 'Teenage Wasteland' was one of those cult hits like 'My So-Called Life', something that came along and got a lot of viewers and then somehow fell into a bad timeslot that nobody ever watched, and then the network pulled the plug prematurely.
Whether it's a popcorn movie or some really intellectual sociopolitical movie, I think to some degree they're all influenced by the social climate that we're living in.
In TV, you can carve out a beautiful little niche like 'Breaking Bad' did. Like 'The Wire' did. Like 'Homeland' did.
It goes without saying that 'Buncha Losers' comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us 'Taxi,' 'Cheers' and the genre-defining 'Night Court,' a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
I think 'Family Guy' and 'American Dad' have definitely staked out their own style and territory, and now the accusations are coming that 'The Simpsons' is taking jokes from 'Family Guy.' And I can tell you, that ain't the case.