Media Criticism

My husband and I constantly speak of life in terms of “when things settle down” or “when things get back to normal” and as you can probably guess, calm and settled are not adjectives frequently used when describing a family with small children.

So, tonight as I received a photo of a picture I had requested Nino paint for me, I became giddy.  One look at and I was in love (and not just because she made my arse look saller than Jupiter, but hey, it didn’t hurt) with this painting.  This is one of the most beautiful drawings, paintings, etc that anyone has everyone done for me.

I showed Boy Genius the picture and he insinuated that he did indeed like the photo as well.  But, he left it at that.  A few minutes later he walks back by my chair and asks to see the photo again….then he says, “I have a new blog tagline for you….” 

Naturally I knew I was about to get non-sense but this time…he made more sense than every….His thoughts one our tagline and our photo..

“Constantly re-inventing normalcy”

He added, just look how normal you three look,,,,weird how Nino was able to leave the chaos out of the drawing. Ha Ha!  Without further rambling, I give you, “constantly re-inventing normalcy”

One of the great success stories in television over the last decade has been Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy. I was an enormous fan of the show during its initial run on Fox in 2000 and was sad to see it go away in favor of the crappy sitcoms that Fox seems to favor. Family Guy has helped spawn a movement within the diehard TV community to protest the early cancellation of favorite shows. The success of the DVD sets of the first few Family Guy seasons helped bring the show back from the depths of television’s garbage pit.

The reason I bring up these points is that Fox’s recent announcement that they will produce new episodes of Family Guy without the input of executive producer/creator MacFarlane is a slap in the face to fans as well as writers. The final new episode of the acerbic series ran this past Sunday and the Writers’ Guild strike has now shut down material for new episodes. MacFarlane has criticized this move by Fox and has a long history of criticizing network television for its various faults.

I don’t understand why Fox is even bothering to try and create new episodes of the show without MacFarlane. After all, it seems that Fox should have a stash of great reality shows like Syphilis Island, Ted Danson’s Journey across America, and What is That? that do not require any creativity or structure. If Rupert Murdoch is so concerned about keeping Family Guy on the air, they should band with other studio executives to resolve the writer’s strike. I would say that Fox is trying to insult the intelligence of the average TV viewer but they already do this by putting shows like Back to You on the air.

I think that this move by Fox signifies a long strike ahead for writers, studios and TV fans. Family Guy may seem like a disorganized mess that relies on pop culture references to function but you need writers and producers to weave these elements together. Fox’s cartoon lineup requires animators and other creative types to make some of their most popular shows function. A Fox-created version of Family Guy will sound like the “wrong sounding�? Muppets that were made a subject of a joke on the legitimate version of Family Guy.