Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Sunday, February 13, 2005
00:57 - *This is Fox* doing this, right?**	(top)
Okay, so now I've seen American Dad. Bookended by breathless Adult Swim bumps that pumped it up as hard as they could. In the service of complete honesty, I haven't exactly been rooting for this show to succeed. But, well, I don't think there's much danger of that. And I'm not just saying that because of the naked political agenda with as much subtlety and nuance as an Earth Day booth at a Boston high school. The whole show is just plain yucky. I never thought this was possible, but American Dad's utter incoherence and lack of any possible character-based appeal actually makes me pine for the relative abundance of those things in Family Guy. The whole first ten minutes of the pilot just left me staring, open-mouthed, palms up, brow furrowed, wondering if the show was supposed to come with an explanatory brochure or something. The opening scene around the breakfast table, in which we're introduced to the exasperated hippie daughter, the nerdy son, the junk-food-grubbing alien, and the German goldfish in the ambulatory bowl, read like someone was doing a Family Guy parody. Like the writers were sitting around in a basement, passing around a bottle of scotch, guffawing ideas at each other: "Okay, okay�we need someone for the "baby" role. You know, like Stewie, only we can't do, you know, a baby again, they'll be on to us. How about... oh, I don't know, a goat in diapers? No! No! A dog, but he's�okay, no, the alien is our Brian, we can't do a dog. No, a dog's cool, but make him a horrible mutant wretch that gets killed in the first episode in a way that nauseates the whole audience. Okay, how about�how about a talking pull-string Bush doll? Yeah! I like where this is going! No! A TV that plays Howdy Doody all the time! Or a goldfish with the brain of an East German ski jumper! No! How about a Rubik's Cube that turns into a little floating magical gremlin when you get all the colors right? No? Okay, what about the goldfish idea? Oh man we are so wasted!" The character designs are, somehow, even less consistently designed or visually appealing than the ones from Family Guy; and while it does have (mercifully) less of the "interminable joke that just gets funnier the longer it goes" schtick from Family Guy, I can only imagine they'll have to rely on it again when they fish for ideas as they go. For example, I guess it's supposed to be part of the "joke" that the wife is cast as an utterly characterless paper doll in a house dress, but I'm having trouble even imagining a second episode involving her. There's not just no hint of a backstory yet, there's not really the possibility of a backstory. What would the third season of this show possibly look like? What would a flashback episode involve? Stan met her "in college", but what would the episode be about�how he took a once-vibrant and interesting woman and slowly but mercilessly converted her into a barefoot puppet? Peter Griffin's misogyny is "cute", but Stan's is just plain vile. This show doesn't appear to have been thought out very thoroughly, to be blunt, and seems to have been conceived primarily as a way for Seth McFarlane and his buddies to blow off steam about Republicans, rather than as a concept they have any plan for actually parlaying into a property with any staying power. You've got to bring audiences something more than acid reflux if you want them to keep watching, and even pandering to simmering Bush hatred isn't enough to keep someone who really appreciates quality comedy interested. And I suppose it must be noted, with much tiredness, that the show's premise and the politically-charged jokes it makes are so insipid as to insult even people on the side likely to appreciate the effort. The CIA randomly abducts celebrities (Hilary Duff isn't credited, which shouldn't be surprising, as her cameo consists of two lines: "Help me!" and "Aaaaahhhh!") for self-interested reasons; "gun control" would have prevented Stan from shooting the horrifying dog he buys his son; the color-coded terror alert system is designed to keep "the masses" confused and intimidated; George W. Bush talks on the phone to God (who misquotes him just like everybody else); and of course the theme song extols "the American race", a construct that ought to be used as a Rorschach's test�in that the only people who could even conceive such a grotesque turn of phrase are the ones who can look at how America responded to 9/11 and see nothing but racism, racism, racism. I mean, if American Dad had any serious plan for a long-term run, it would inevitably have to field an episode that actually dealt with terrorism, wouldn't it? Otherwise the whole thing exists in a vacuum, and all the politics in the show becomes a giant exercise in ignoring the big smelly elephant in the room. They've already done their puerile "rigging the school election, just like you know what" plotline; where else can it go? There's no "family" appeal here, just a bunch of caricatures, and so I just can't imagine them retreading a "Hayley gets sent to genius school" or "Stan and his wife get marriage counseling" story the way previous shows in the "family on the couch watching TV" mold have done. Instead they're going to have to do stuff like "Stan leads an invasion of the neighboring town to steal their sweet, sweet chocolate for the alien" and "Hayley has to write a term paper, but Stan has got the library all locked down so all the books are bugged and checking anything out gets you sent to Gitmo", and how long can they stretch something like that out? It's instructive to look back at the fact that compared to this ensemble, Family Guy actually has a whole lot more "heart"�character chemistry that can spawn new story ideas of its own accord as the characters themselves develop. And that's not saying much, considering how little "heart" I see in Family Guy. Compare this to any mid-run Simpsons episode whose primary plotline�not its secondary�was all about Homer or Lisa or Mr. Burns or Principal Skinner or Apu, and not about how they jumped and danced as stand-ins for some contemporary hot-button issue, but how they behaved as people. (See also: Mission Hill, Venture Brothers, Home Movies.) Whereas such an outing wears like an old and much-loved t-shirt, Family Guy is like an overstarched pair of underwear, and American Dad is like a cardboard box in the shape of a robot. I'm sure it'll play well north of the Tropic of Canada and across the pond, and I suppose it'll be sweet, sweet balm to people who think Seth McFarlane is some kind of comic god whose trivially recognizable voice brings a blessed fix after long months of enforced silence. But if Father of the Pride was destined only to last six episodes (did I call that or what?), American Dad is as likely as not to make less impact on the annals of animation history than Fish Police or Family Dog did, and much more deservedly so.