Cough X 100, but I've heard it ever since Guy came on.

quote:

Originally posted by Bobthespirit:
Here's my thoughts on Simpsons vs Family Guy.

Simpsons seasons 1-6

is much better than

Family Guy

is much, much, MUCH better than

Simpsons since.

I'd agree with most of that ranking. I'm not a big fan of Season 1 and parts of Season 2, and I think the Simpsons hit a real stride in season 4-8. It's been slipping some since then, more in the last three years. But I'll still take bad Simpsons over 99% of what else is on TV, although, if I have to pick, I'd take Arrested Development over the Simpsons these days.

Has anyone heard whether or not Arrested Development has been cancelled or not? That is by far the best show on tv, and the only show I genuinely get excited to watch.

It was renewed (but moved to Mondays)! Story here:

http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,16592,00.html

quote:

Originally posted by mark f:
Cough X 100, but I've heard it ever since Guy came on.

I agree about season 1, but I think season 2 is the meat of what Simpsons should be. More satire on lower middle class American suburban life, than slapstick comedy. I have the season 2-5 DVDs, and I was surpised to see quality start to dip in seasons 4-5, earlier than I remembered. The characters became caricatures of themselves and you stopped seeing great satire like in the 'homer gets hair' episode and the 'essay contest' episode.

But..I think, especially when it got to season 9, the show became cheesy and predictable and half the jokes were about Homer falling down or just being generally stupid. I mean...we already know Homer's stupid and clumsy. That's been established. Let's find more interesting plots instead of just telling us how stupid and clumsy Homer is over and over. I stopped watching around season 11, but the episodes I've seen this season are...not as bad as seasons 9-11.

What I like about the run of season 4-8 is the development of characters OTHER than the family. Ralph, Moe, and others begin to get more play, and some of my favorite lines on the show come out of the mouth of ol' Ralphie.

Well, my #1 criticism of newer Simpsons is that characters who originally had depth and subtlety became nothing more than a discrete set of catch phrases or caricatures of themselves.

Take Homer. I think what he was at the beginning, a below average, dumb, easy-to-anger, clumsy lower middle class worker. But he had some mundane amount of common sense about him that made him indentifiable and human. Lately...they just have him go way off the deep end with any dumb thing they can think of, make a huge mess of it, and fall down a whole lot. All the humanity the character once posessed has been drained.

I do agree it was a good thing to expand the secondary cast, but my issue is when they go in the opposite direction and the once human character's personality recedes into a few predictable gimmicks. But that didn't really start to happen until the late stage of that period, 7-8 or so.

quote:

Originally posted by Bobthespirit:
Well, my #1 criticism of newer Simpsons is that characters who originally had depth and subtlety became nothing more than a discrete set of catch phrases or caricatures of themselves.

That's probably the reason why I've come to enjoy King of the Hill so much. It's probably my favorite of the animated shows. There's a richness (and development) to the characters that makes them seem, well, not like cartoons. They seem real. The traits and catchphrases that COULD be gimmicks fade out (Hank stopped saying "the boy ain't right") and the characters adapt and change. Sure, Boomhauer is still hard to understand and Dale's a chain-smoking conspiracy theorist, but they've got the kind of depth that you don't normally see in cartoon characters. Brilliant. Of course, it may be hard to keep that up for 16 seasons...so I'll cut the Simpsons a little slack.

King of the Hill rules.

And, except for a short run of some of the best episodes of the series in early season 2, I think the new ones are just as good as the old ones. Which is amazing in the 9th season.

(I might as well also mention that Family Guy is matching Simpsons in ratings, so it might stay around for a while!)

What is it that you find likable about King of the Hill???????????????????????????? I have tried watching episodes and I have never laughed. It tries to be funny but fails terribly. I really would like to know...

Well, King of the Hill is a different kind of humor than you'd expect from Fox. It's character driven humor...it creates a cast of characters who posess unique idiosyncracies, but through those idiosyncracies makes them likeable and sympathetic.

It's not like Family Guy which does something outrageous every thirty seconds with physical humor, over the top mannerisms, and sensational non-sequiturs. It's more the kind of humor that's subtle and requires some kind of attention span. I would say that you have to know the characters, though, before you start finding it funny. I was ready to stop watching pretty early in the run, then came the tornado episode and the first Halloween episode with 'Juny Harper', and it suddenly clicked with me and I started getting it.

I'd say it's something for a show that requires an attention span to find funny to survive in today's popular culture, on Fox of all places.

Bob's points are all points I have to echo. KOTH isn't outrageous cartoon comedy...it's character driven comedy. It's like a sitcom, with cartoon characters. A FUNNY sitcom.

I'm not sure what else I could tell someone who didn't find it funny. The "Juny Harper" episode with Heaven House, as Bob points out, is brilliant, subversive humor. For something a little more lowbrow, though, there's the classic "Bobby Goes Nuts" where Bobby takes a women's self-defense course and picks fights with other boys, which he finishes by kicking them in the family jewels while screaming "that's my purse, I don't know you!!!" Makes me laugh everytime.

Personally, I'll take King of the Hill over Family Guy. That show is a little too sporadic for me. The best comparison I have for it is the Simpsons on crack, only take away most of the cultural satire that you would get in the Simpsons. I guess the Family guy has cultural references, but most of them are far too strong and less observational (<--is that a word?).

Yeah, that's true. Family Guy is just like "Bush bad. Republicans bad. The south bad." It's cultural observations seem to be surface-oriented.

But, I don't think Simpsons *Recently* has been that truly satirical. Occasionally they manage to do so, but they've lost the subtlety they posessed at the start.

King of the Hill...Family Guy makes me laugh more, but I actually care about the KOTH characters. So it's hard to say which one I like better. It's like comparing rap to jazz.

Although..I think Bill's character is too over the top. I find myself wishing really hard that some of his character development would stick...that maybe he'd finally *get over* Lenore and have a functional relationship that lasts more than one episode.

That's the one criticism I would make about King of the Hill. I keep wishing, when they do character development, that maybe the characters would actually *develop*. Occasionally they actually do make some of the development permanent, like with Joseph going through puberty and Dale/Nancy/John Redcorn, and Louanne moving out. But more often than not there's a blank slate once the episode ends. With all Bill's been through, he's still just as pathetic as he was in the first episode.

Dale's craziness and conspiracy theories get a little grating, at times. Would a square like Hank REALLY be friends with Dale, after all the crazy crap he's pulled? Maybe it's a loyalty thing, part of Hank's personality that he's so loyal that he puts up with him.

But even with failures to maintain the development of characters, they're far more realistic than those on sitcoms ("Joey" or the cartoon filmed with real actors, "Malcolm in the Middle")

This show is great, if not for its actualy comedic touch, but for its ability and willingness to just cross the line and make jokes that "go there".

The new Family Guy episodes have not been thrilling me. They seem to have sacrificed plot for crazyness and offensiveness. Their "offensive" jokes have always seemed lame to me, usually the crux of the joke is ignorant, unlike say Southpark who always have a point to their crudeness.
However, I did watch a bootleg copy of The Family Guy Movie-Stewie Griffin:The Untold Story the other night, and I must say I found it a return to form from the earliest episodes. I think the show works best when it sticks within it's plot confines, and does the zany bits as small interludes from the story. The movie accomplished this very well I thought, and I imagine will make quite a bit of dough when released on DVD.

What I found very entertaining from this season was Stewie insulting Family Guy's entire fanbase:

quote:

Now go back to the quad and resume your hackey sac tourney! I'm not gonna lay down for some frat boy bastard with his damn teether sandals and his Skoal Bandits and his Abercrombie and Fitch long sleeved, open stitched, crew neck Henley smoking his sticky buds out of a soda can while watching his favorite downloaded Simpsons episodes every night! Yes, we all love Mr. Plow! Oh, you've got the song memorized, do you? SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE! That is exactly the kind of idiot you see at Taco Bell at 1 in the morning! The guy who just whiffed his way down the bar skank ladder!

I think Family Guy is the newest comedy to succumb to the "New season not as good as the old seasons" disease. The newer seasons have some funny moments, but on the whole, they are definitely inferior to the first too seasons.

I personally thought even in the end of season two it started to go downhill. For me 80% of the best episodes are on discs 1-3 of the Volume One DVD.

The running jokes in the new episodes I haven't been liking. For instance, I wish they'd lay off on the 'Everybody hates Meg' jokes. Meg's mediocrity was funnier when the rest of the family tried to make her feel good about herself.

But, a lot of the individual jokes I've thought were funny. It's not as good as early Family Guy, but I still enjoy it enough to watch it.