Ranting On...Family Guy

(Spoilers Ahead for people who are not caught up on the TV shows Family Guy, Friends, Lost, Glee, The Simpsons, and Desperate Housewives) I’m not sure if it’s required to shove a spoiler alert in front of something that happened over a week ago, but in case you missed it, it’s there.  For those that have been under a rock, Family Guy scribes decided to make a major change in the formula of the show by having one of the pivotal members of the Griffin clan, Brian, die from a car crash.

This was met with the usual parade of comments on the internet, and since I’ve never really addressed a “character death” scene, I figured I’d recap a bit of what happens.  Twitter always erupts with a cacophony of “I am quitting the show,” “jumping the shark,” “they should have just cancelled the show-it’s not as good as it used to be,” and “that’s still on?”  It’s sadly predictable, and something that every show-runner has to encounter whenever they decide to change the format of a show-if you ever read the Entertainment Weekly boards (I don’t because they are awful, except perhaps to remind Grady Smith how dreamy he is, but the Box Office forums aren’t as bad as television), you know that literally every television recap has people complaining and threatening to quit a show.

Personally, I am not onboard with Family Guy killing off the Brian character, even if I’ve never been a fan of the character (I agree with Quagmire’s assessment).  While I’ve written about my complicated relationship with Seth MacFarlane in the past, I do watch this show religiously and have since I was in college (for the record, the show started years before I was in college, for those of you playing “guess John’s age”).  It’s not as revolutionary as The Simpsons or as clever as South Park and doesn’t even feature the best character in MacFarlane’s cavalcade (that would be Roger the Alien from American Dad, one of my favorite reasons to turn on a television), but it has become part of my weekly routine, and despite what people say, has enjoyed some unusually strong episodes late in its run.  People readily dismiss long-running shows, much to my pet peeved chagrin, and that’s foolish, as something like “Road to Multiverse” and ‘And Then There Were Fewer,” both made after Family Guy’s “renaissance” are better than almost any of the earlier episodes.  This is true of almost every show, though, despite the protestations of longtime fans (Desperate Housewives hit a first-season quality level in the final two seasons of its show, for example, but no one noticed).

Anyway, let’s get back to topic-Brian’s death seems bad because it throws off the strongest dynamic on the show.  The title of the show may be Family Guy, but unlike The Simpsons, which smartly shifted focus from Bart to Homer early on in the series’ run, Peter is only titularly the main character-the show has always relied most heavily off of Stewie.  He’s the Joker to Griffin’s Batman-you can tell everyone who the hero is, but they’re paying to see the other guy.  And since the show relies off of Stewie, it seems foolhardy to get rid of his principle foil, his best friend, and his most frequent scene-partner.

That being said, this could be a part of a larger plot for the show to have Stewie learn a little bit more about himself on a quest to bring Brian back.  Thanks to The Simpsons so rarely relying on recurring plots, we’ve become accustomed to animated shows using stand-alone episodes (it certainly helps with syndication), but MacFarlane has never 100% played by this rule with his television series.  American Dad in particular has had two-parters throughout its run, and has had multiple-episode stories, such as when Haley ran off with Jeff to get married, or currently how Jeff is attempting to come back to Haley.  The show isn’t as popular as MacFalrlane’s breadwinner, but perhaps Family Guy is trying to emulate its narrative structure.  If this is the case, I applaud the writers for taking a creative risk while not messing with the show’s formula too much.

If this is a permanent death, though, it seems to abandon too much of the center of the show.  Television deaths are very hit-and-miss in whether a show can recover, and you cannot always tell whether or not the show can make it to the next stage.  Lost, for example, regularly killed off its main characters, most obviously with John Locke (though they cheated on that one) and Charlie (they didn’t cheat on this one).  The show elicits visceral fan reaction, but I’ve always been 100% a fan (yes, even of the final season, because I understood that the mysteries needed to remain unsolved in some cases), but it’s hard to believe that they killed off with such regularity major characters on the show without ever sacrificing quality.  Desperate Housewives made the best decision in the show’s run when they suddenly forced Bree into widowhood, but none of the later stunt deaths had an impact, particularly Edie’s electrocution and Mike’s quick death just a few episodes before the finale.

Comedies don’t go into death for the characters as often, primarily because death isn’t naturally funny.  Most shows that go for it do it with ancillary characters (Friends’ Mr. Heckles) or when there’s no other choice due to real-life events (Glee’s Finn Hudson), so if Brian dies it will have a major impact on the show.  When The Simpsons killed off Maude Flanders, a character that wouldn’t have made the Top 50 most important citizens of Springfield list, even at the time, it still had a larger impact on the overall show.  The Simpsons has been forced into a real-life quandary similar to Glee’s with Marcia Wallace’s death (she voiced Edna Krabappel, who is going to be retired as a result of Wallace’s demise), but as a whole, there are few deaths on comedy shows that genuinely helped the show.  Dramas can thrive off of this change, but comedies suffer.

Those are my thoughts, at least, but I’d love to know yours.  Some of you have likely moved on, but for those of us still in shock, what do you think of Brian’s quick death on the series?  Do you like this change (or the new character)?  Do you think this is a permanent decision?  Share in the comments!