It's nice to see people share a similar opinion as me. During the first three seasons, it's "cheeky" humour and offbeat pop culture references seemed to have some intelligence behind them and were actually quite funny.
Since the film, when they suddenly discovered a certain word beginning with F, the cutaways are just thrown in at random, like that time I rubbed Jay Leno with a pound of lard while singing I Kissed A Girl.
Oh... my mistake, I thought we were gonna have a clip there.
Yeah, but it's gone from being a little bit on the wild side and intelligent, to just plain offensive for laughs. Or episode plots are just straight parodies of films, usually with very little humour (Petergeist comes to mind). I gave up somewhere at the start of the fifth season and haven't really gone back - not even to the early seasons.
Unfortunately, I was really enjoying American Dad until they did an episode which pretty much summed up what's wrong with Family Guy. The Saudi two-parter came close, but the one that finished me off was the episode where Francine befriends George Clooney to take revenge on him and the B plot sees Hayley battling cancer - apparently that's funny... I must've lost my sense of humour.
The region 2 DVDs of both series have uncensored coarse swearing, with no warning - it's even got a 12 certificate in one instance. Usually use of the F word gives it an instant 15 certificate. Apparently the Region 1 DVDs allow you to sensor the language, but we're not given that privilege for some reason. I usually wouldn't mind, but I found out it was different to the broadcast version when watching it with my family, cos I told them it was "funny" (oops!
)
I'm just another disillusioned ex-believer in the McFarlane, so it's good to know I'm not alone
