Stewie Griffin - greatest TV character of all time?! (Family Guy)

Member Name: candyfloss89

Product:	Family Guy
Date:	12/07/09 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: hilarious, great characters, not perdictable

Disadvantages: can be offensive, later series appear to have "jumped the shark", jokes can go on too long

Ok, I admit, before I watched Family Guy I had an irrational hatred of it. Everybody at uni was literally obsessed with it and I thought I was being cool and different by not watching it. I was actually being an idiot. One night out of sheer boredom and the lack of decent TV on at 1am in the morning, I stumbled upon a Family Guy marathon on FX. I've been hooked ever since!

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?
Family Guy follows the life of an American family living in the fictional town of Quahog, Rhode Island. However, the Griffin family aren't exactly your average American family! Peter Griffin is a bumbling, overweight idiot whose parenting style leaves a lot to be desired! Lois Griffin is his long suffering but feisty wife, a stay home mum who looks after the couple's baby son Stewie. Unfortunately for Lois, Stewie isn't as innocent as he looks and spends his days planning world domination and masterminding plots to murder his mother. The Griffins' children Meg and Chris are very different but ultimately are both losers, particular Meg whose unpopularity and unattractiveness make her the butt of not just her classmates, but her family's too! Finally, there's the Griffins Pet dog Brian. Who's a perfectly normal pet apart from the fact that he just happens to be a talking dog. Who takes drugs. Smokes, and hits on Lois!

ADVANTAGES
Stewie Griffin is one of the greatest characters ever created. Why? Because he says things like this:

Stewie: Hello, mother. I come bearing a gift. I'll give you a hint. It's in my diaper and it's not a toaster.

And this:

Lois: Stewie, why don't you play in the other room?
Stewie: Why don't you burn in hell?

I love the fact that not only is he an evil genius at such a young age, but he also has an ambiguous sexuality, flamboyant nature and an upper class English accent! He's just hilarious, inappropriate, and rude, basically everything a baby shouldn't be! And then there are the times where his immaturity shows, like his inability to live without his teddy bear Rupert and his tears when his new bike is stolen. I find the contrast between his evil genius ways and his immature baby characteristics to be a hilarious balance.

Ironically, Stewie and Brian the dog are actually the cleverest members of the Griffin finally and have a wonderful love/hate relationship that I find more enjoyable than other character partnerships in the show. The fact that it's often strongly hinted that Stewie fancies Brian should show you how insane this show is and leads to some very funny exchanges between the pair, one of my personal favourites being the "you're drunk", "your sexy" exchange which had me in stitches. This is not to say that other characters are not strong. Stewie is still my favourite closely followed by Brian but Peter is also hilarious and the main cast are supported by a bizarre mix of background characters such as Herbert the pervert whose a creepy old man who fancies Chris, sex obsessed Quagmire and the Griffin's next door neighbour Joe, who's wheelchair makes him an easy target for everybody's jokes!

Family Guy is not afraid to tackle any subject or offend anyone. It can be said that sometimes it's jokes are just so offensive that they overstep the mark but personally I think it's one of Family Guy's biggest advantages because it goes where many comedies are afraid to go. It also means that Family Guy is never predictable or stale.

DISADVANTAGES
Because I'm not American, I find some of the jokes about American celebrities go over my head because I don't know who they are! These jokes are frequent throughout an episode and I find it hard to laugh at the joke if it's funny because without knowing the celebrity, I don't know the relevance of the jokes. Like I said, these are frequent in every episode so it becomes an annoyance.

Some jokes go on for far too long. One joke where Peter falls over and hurts his knee goes on for ages and I can't understand why because it isn't particularly funny. Even if it had been funny in the first place, because the joke is dragged out so long it soon loses its humour and becomes annoying. The annoying thing is that these jokes seem to reoccur in later episodes of the series, like the excessively long gag where Peter fights with a man in a chicken suite. Bizarrely, some of the funniest jokes are actually really short so I find that Family Guy get the balance wrong sometimes. Often I watch family Guy online just so I can move the programme along by about a minute if there are tediously long jokes in that episode!

In America, many people say that Family Guy has "jumped the shark" which is a phrase used by TV critics and fans to denote the point in a TV shows or history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out of the ordinary characterisations. The later series of Family Guys are often deemed to have "jumped the shark" because they just aren't as good as the first few series. I personally feel that the characterisation of Stewie is very off in the later series. He starts off as an evil genius hell bent on murdering his mother and yet in later episodes the writers usually ignore that aspect of his personality, instead focusing on a more flamboyant character. Now I'm all for character development but Stewie is absolutely brilliant as he is in earlier series. He doesn't need changing or developing. If anyone's character needs development it's Chris who I find particularly pointless. In fact, I hate the way it's Meg who is deemed the unattractive one when I actually think Chris is far more unattractive.

WHO WOULD I RECOMMEND IT TO?
I would recomend it to anybody who isn't easily offended and is bored of the same old, safe, politically correct comedies typical of the BBC! If you're going to watch Family Guy, I recommend watching more than one episode as they can be very hit and miss. I also recommend watching the earlier series which are far funnier. If you do watch the later series "Family Gay" and "I dream of Jesus" would be my recommendations.
Here's a link to a website which lets you watch Family Guy online:
http://www.watch-family-guy-online.com/
Alternatively, you can watch it on BBC Three and FX.

Summary: Funnier than The Simpsons