The Evolution of American Dad! vs Family Guy

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The first time I watched Family Guy I nearly peed myself from laughing too hard. For most young adolescents like me, the show seemed fresh and unlike anything else on television. And it wasn’t just the tongue-in-cheek vulgarity that propagated hours of laughter -- it was the randomness. Anyone who has watched Family Guy knows that the show is basically a bunch of cutaway gags, a plethora of specific yet seemingly random jokes that have absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Those cutaway gags, and I mean the ones mainly from seasons one through five, still make me laugh, but it’s more of an expected laugh as the humor wears off. I can only watch Peter Griffin forget how to sit so many times before I start to feel a little less intelligent.

Unfortunately, those gag jokes have become Family Guy’s own demise. Year after year it seems the writers for the show have a tougher time creating relevant cutaway jokes, and at this point audiences expect them. The shock factor from the first few seasons has worn off, and the writers haven’t made many, if any, character or plot developments. Instead, we witness Stewie and Brian timetravelling for the upteenth time.

Maybe Family Guy creator Seth Macfarlane saw the writing on the wall before anyone else did. I mean, the show did get cancelled two separate times in the early 2000s, and that was when the show was in its prime. It was during one of these cancelled seasons of Family Guy that Macfarlane came out with his other show, American Dad!

When the show came out (and still to this day) people unfamiliar with the show assumed it was just a Family Guy rip-off -- another attempt at success for Macfarlane. This assumption made sense too, as the animation style of the two shows are identical, and both feature a semi-dysfunctional family with a talking pet. These similarities, coupled with the fact that Family Guy did eventually get back on the air and was also on Fox, made the first couple of seasons pretty rocky for American Dad! At the time I remember feeling no urge in the slightest to watch the show, especially when I found out that there were no cutaway gag jokes.

Years have gone by and my tastes have changed, but Family Guy has stayed stagnant. American Dad! on the other hand has evolved into one of the best animated shows on cable, silently creeping up on its 16th season and brimmed with development-driven inside jokes more akin to those throughout Arrested Development rather than Family Guy. Roger, the show’s flamboyant and deviant alien, has steadily become one of the funniest animated characters around thanks to the development of his character, who lives freely in the Smith household but needs to wear a costume whenever he’s in public to avoid being captured by the CIA. The personas Roger has undertaken are almost equal to the amount of total episodes the show has, and is made all the more funny when viewers realize that the Smith’s willingly go along with these personas.

American Dad! really began to hit its stride around season 6, and that’s when the edgy randomness of the show really takes off. There’s a kill counter in one episode when Roger pledges that 100 people will die throughout, only to feature a hilarious tour bus crash that kills 98 out of the 100. In later seasons, there are random references to ‘The Great Bus Crash of 2010,” and a memorial statue visible in the town portraying the crash. There’s a scene in a later season when the Smith’s talking goldfish, Klaus, is put in his fishbowl outside only to fight for survival against swarms of birds, cats and lizards teaming up to eat him. In American Dad!, these random jokes aren’t meant to stand on their own like in Family Guy, and over time they have actually started to make more sense and become funnier. It is possible that’s what we want these days -- for things and life to make sense, even in the midst of chaos and randomness.