In Defense of the “Family Guy” Emmy Nomination

There has been some griping about Family Guy’s nomination for an Emmy for Best Comedy Series.  True: it is the first cartoon series to be nominated for the Best ComedyEmmy since 1961 (Flintstones yeah!).  True, The Simpsons never got that and yes, perhaps it should have.

But I like Family Guy and, quite frankly, I don’t think there are six shows on television right now that are better comedies than it.  I think it is at least the sixth-best comedy on TV right now, in other words, and there are six nominees in the category.  Here’s why Family Guy deserves its nomination:  

1) Look at the other nominees for best comedy: Entourage, Family Guy, Flight of the Conchords, How I Met Your Mother, The Office, 30 Rock, Weeds.

Well, Flight of the Conchords is funny, but much of its humor hews to the show’s plot maypoles: the guys are poor, and the guys are awkward.  I’d put the show on par with Family Guy, though each is capable of having a better episode than the other.  Entourage is just not as good.  Try watching an episode of it more than once.  I’ve never seen, or desired to see, How I Met Your Mother and I don’t know much about Weeds.  The Office: more often than not better than Family Guy.  30 Rock: best show on TV.  In other words, I think FG is right in the same orbit as most of the other nominees.

2) It has been said that the internet is the ideal medium of Family Guy, because while there’s a narrative apparatus to each episode, the genius of the show is spliced into 30-second sketches, YouTube-like.  YouTube, I don’t think, is quite the comparison.  Family Guy is more like Wikipedia, like opening up two tabs on Wikipedia, hitting “random page” on each, and smashing them together.  Jesus Christ and Rush Hour 2?  Transformers and disabled people?  Saudi Arabia and vaudeville?  (Really, anything and vaudeville.)  Watching an episode really does feel like getting lost in a Wikipedia – or at least IMDB – procrastination sesh for half an hour.

That Family Guy anticipated a hyper-referential, hyperlinked style of associative comedy in 1999, before anyone was particularly excited about the internet, is impressive.  It anticipated how we think now, online: culturally broad, analytically shallow, chronically unfocused, endlessly allusive.  (Eminem is also often given credit for foreseeing the same type of comedy.)

3) Even at the character level, FG humor is a fine exercise in incongruity, if a little familiar (a sophisticated dog and mean baby are pretty New Yorker cartoon-ish, but watching Brian protest that Lois can’t distract him from a major matter just by throwing a ball and then getting carried away running after it is a pretty well-tuned sequence).

This kind of humor – purely or largely derived from incongruity – is not done well almost anywhere else.  Every other nominee this year is either a sitcom (How I Met Your Mother), a satire/observation of the way social and societal gears turn (The Office, 30 Rock, Flight of the Conchords), or just a good TV show that’s not really a drama (Entourage, Weeds).  Some credit is due for the fact that, though the framework of Family Guy rips off The Simpsons, the sketches resurrect an old style of comedy that is mostly ignored or botched on TV today.

4) Two more things: speaking of old, Family Guy isn’t afraid to go old, as the lavish inclusion of Sinatra-style singing numbers attests to, and it isn’t afraid to go obscure either.

And finally, maybe we ought to laud the academy or whatever for nominating FG not in spite of The Simpsons’ Emmy dry spell but because of it.  A barrier is sort of being broken here, with the nomination of a cartoon, and this may the Emmy folks’ way of acknowledging that some of the most trenchant and applauded comedies of the last 15 years have been drawn instead of acted.  Belatedly, the awards people may be signaling that they are ready to recognize when this is the case.

Uh… thoughts?