Treatises On Television

Just so you get a broader idea of my taste in television, I think this show was lightyears ahead of its time.

As a kid, I watched a lot of TV, because at the time the Internet wasn’t quite as big a deal, and also my parents had the good sense to hide it from me with the same tenacity that some families shelter their children from sex or violence*. The fact that most of my free time is tied up in the Internet today is one reason I don’t watch much TV anymore, and the other reason is that most TV since they axed Mystery Science Theater 3000 has had all the culture and nuance of a 5th grade sex ed class right after somebody farts.

*Which were never big “no nos” during my formative years, might I add. I’d seen most of the James Bond movies before I was in middle school, and I watched Die Hard with my Dad when I was 11. My parents would usually make crude sex jokes at the dinner table, too, and as I recall our 2000 New Year’s Eve party involved a set of big plastic boobs that could be affixed to one’s upper torso by way of an elastic strap. And by “one’s”, I mean “my mother’s”, and I think we should all take a moment to marvel at how few emotional problems I have right now given the environment I grew up in. Incidentally, I still have the pink plastic boobs, which are a great source of amusement on lonely nights.

Sure, there’s a few shows that I love, and before you ask I’m just going to tell you that Family Guy isn’t one of them. Yes, I agree, a racist alcoholic dog and an evil sociopathic baby are funny; the show is incredibly quotable, provided that you’re not quoting near black or Jewish people. The problem I have with it is that all the solid punchlines come in those damned cutaways that have abso-freakin’-lutely nothing to do with the plot. That’s why I say the show is funny, but not well written. Any idiot can come up with a few funny one liners; for example, I’ve got a crackerjack line about autoerotic asphyxiation in my Idea Vault, but the opportunity to write a blog entirely about autoerotic asphyxiation has yet to come up. That’s fine, I can wait – if the Republican Party is still up to its old tricks, I’m sure a hardline “family values” obsessed senator is going to get caught in a compromising situation involving a noose and his wiener, and then I can make my joke – but I’m certainly not going to have a completely random section in my blog constructed entirely around making said joke, perhaps prompted by the line, “El Paso is almost as bad as that time British MP Stephen Milligan died in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident!”

Half the art of comedy is finding ways to weave the jokes into the flow of your piece; if you just chuck ‘em in there like so many razor blades in a Chinese confectionary factory you may as well go home at noon! That’s the thing about Family Guy - they’ve got a writing staff of half a dozen or more people, all of whom have proven themselves perfectly capable of thinking up one liners that are deliciously politically incorrect on a daily basis, but they’re not working for their paychecks, they’re just throwing the jokes in raw, without marinating them in the olive oil of story or the greasy lard of character development. You’re probably calling me stuck up or overly picky right now, and as soon as you show me the English Department Award that your high school gave you, we can sit down and have a lovely chat about the quality of Family Guy’s writing.

Now, I’m not saying that Family Guy is bad, I’m saying that it’s sloppily written. Hold it up against a show like, say, South Park, and you’ll notice that South Park can be just as, if not more funny and offensive while actually maintaining a cohesive plot, and yes Dad, I know I was all for hating South Park during high school, but it’s actually a pretty sophisticated show once you get past all the diarrhea jokes. The gold standard for bad animated television is Speed Racer (or the infinitely more hilarious Mahha GoGoGo! in Japanese), which combines the tried and true hammyness of 1960s American voiceover with every element of Japanese culture that I hate, otherwise known as anime. Some TV historians call Speed Racer “distinctive”, but I’ve come to believe that “distinctive” is really just a nice way of saying “bad” – Q.E.D. “Vice President Cheney has a distinctive odor.” The animation was clunky, the characters talked about as fast as the cars they drove (not that there’s anything wrong with talking fast) and I’m pretty sure they just recycled the same five scripts over and over again. Honestly, how often can you weave conspiracy and intrigue into a bunch of people driving racecars? Pretty much every episode used the same plot device, wherein Speed’s little brother and that monkey hide in the back of his car, which creates hijinx in one form or another. C’mon, Japan – you had a monkey as a regular character. The world was your oyster, and you squandered it on the same damn trunk gag, over and over again.

I bring this up, of course, because of the impending Speed Racer movie, which I predict will at best be one of the most terrible movies of 2008, and at worst will give moviegoers explosive kidney stones. Now, I’m being too hard on the Speed Racer show, of course, because it was written in a very different time for a very different audience (perhaps an audience of crackheads, but, hey, that’s cool), but aside from laughing at it’s campyness or enjoying it for nostalgia’s sake, there’s not much point in revisiting it. But that’s what they’ve done, only now there’s the illusion of actual drama in a movie based on a cartoon about racecars and stowaway primates. Why would we go back to a burned out, cornball idea like this and make a movie out of it? Because of lazy, sloppy writing. It happens every day, and it’s almost as bad as that time British MP Stephen Milligan died in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident.

Truman Capps is all too proud of his high school English Department Award, which, ironically enough, he capitalizes even though it's not a proper noun.