Beyond Family Guy

by Joakim Andersen

Joakim Andersen reflects on Family Guy as a Gen X cultural product, contrasting it with The Simpsons, and explores its dark humor, nihilism, and critique of post-bourgeois society, while examining how the show handled themes of gender, race, and class, ultimately leaving behind a lasting impact and unrealized potential.

More than twenty years ago, Family Guy premiered. In many ways, the series was Generation X’s answer to The Simpsons. Seth MacFarlane was born in 1973 and Matt Groening in 1954. In the early 2000s, I followed the escapades of the dysfunctional family man almost as regularly as I had followed the yellow family from Springfield during my childhood. There was a nihilistic quality to MacFarlane’s creation, a contempt for the post-bourgeois society and its spectacle, and it was often entertaining. The years went by, and the Griffin family and I drifted apart, but they remain part of the memories of the early 2000s for me and many others. Some quotes will follow us to the retirement home or the sacrificial cliff, exactly which we’ll leave unsaid (other than the words “a certain avian variety”).

Family Guy cannot be understood without Generation X and its upbringing. This becomes clear when compared to the Boomer creation The Simpsons. Both shows have elements of satire directed at American society, but it is darker and more extreme in Family Guy. Our generation was skinheads, gangsta rap, and black metal. One example of the difference: Krusty the Clown is greedy and smokes, while the Griffins’ neighbor is a creepy old man who has likely molested Peter’s father-in-law. Springfield belongs to the typically American cinematic and literary tradition of small towns, where residents act as a collective, immortalized in scenes where everyone runs around together. Quahog gave a more atomized impression. Put bluntly, The Simpsons may have offered a glimpse into the Boomer generation’s self-image and their view of people in general. Family Guy, on the other hand, showed how they were viewed by younger people (compare Houellebecq). And naturally, it also portrayed these younger people’s own self-image, where most would likely have identified with the outsider status of Stewie and Brian. Summed up in the words “I’ve seen through everyone,” it implies a potential dead end as well. Even the sun has spots, and that includes Gen X.

Family Guy’s contempt for the post-bourgeois society, twenty years later, reminds us of the value of distinctions. At the time, I didn’t have access to the term “post-bourgeois.” Samuel Francis was an acquaintance yet to come. The distinction between contempt for the spectacle and contempt for society wasn’t particularly clear, nor was the difference between contempt for specific social types and contempt for people in general. Family Guy leaned toward the latter, which, alongside the mindset of “I’ve seen through everyone,” was not particularly constructive (compare Mishima’s words about those who despise heroes: “Cynicism is always connected to weak muscles or excess fat, while heroism and a powerful nihilism are tied to well-trained muscles”). It also echoes a mistaken conclusion often drawn about many of our generational peers. Their revolt against “everything” often turned out to be primarily aimed at ordinary people, which explains how former anarchists today can work for the state. But let’s leave bioleninism aside and return to the fat family man.

One striking thing when watching old episodes of Family Guy is how “woke” the series was. American society was portrayed as steeped in white racism. It was presented with a touch of cynicism, but also as a fact. Once the laughter died down, or testosterone levels dropped, it meant that the step toward a woke worldview and sensibility wasn’t far off. Perhaps it could be called “pre-woke.” Regardless, it wasn’t something I noted at the time. That could, of course, be because it was just one element among many, several of them timeless humor. The suburban idyll was portrayed in Family Guy as something from Freud’s nightmares, where polymorphous perversity thrived beneath the orderly surface. This was generally more prominent than in The Simpsons, despite Homer’s description of the TV as his “secret lover” and his relationship with a tame pig. Gen X nihilism had several components. In retrospect, one can distinguish which were damaging and which had potential. The latter discreetly disappeared from pop culture after the cultural interregnum that the 1990s and early 2000s partly represented. The former portrayed “White America” in a rather bad light and had a corrosive effect. To return to Éric Zemmour’s process of Derision, Deconstruction, and Destruction, mockery is the first weapon against that which is to be abolished.

Family Guy also had a complex but interesting gender aspect. Like Al Bundy, Homer Simpson, Earl Sneed Sinclair, and many others, Peter Griffin is a rather diminished man, in many ways a man-child. Homer and Peter are even more fragmented mentally than their predecessors. Their infantile impulses follow one another and regularly cause problems for their families. The patriarchy is undermined when there are no men left. Hans Blüher noted in his time that “it is not surprising that in our time, when the royal and masculine will to power has been displaced by the bourgeois type, women strive for equality.” Peter Griffin represents a fall even from the bourgeois level. At the same time, in these families, it is the infantile men who drive the action. It is Peter and Homer who have agency. In Peter’s case, even with a circle of men around him, something that seemed more important to many Gen Xers than to many Boomers. Also interesting is Stewie’s hateful relationship with his mother Lois, with clear matricidal ambitions. Ambitions that were continually thwarted, thus reaffirming the matriarchy. The eager can also conduct a class analysis of the fat family man and his relationship with his father-in-law, Carter Pewterschmidt. Like Homer and Hank Hill, Peter is working class.

The show was thoroughly postmodern through its constant references to pop culture and the present, with various celebrities and others often portrayed negatively. It could bring to mind the old situationists’ concept of “decomposition,” where the sheer abundance of goods, idols, TV series, and more makes the realization of their actual meaninglessness and deceitful superficiality always dangerously close. That was a potential I overestimated at the time. It is entirely possible to laugh at Family Guy and then continue to uncritically consume the spectacle. Something confirmed by the fact that the series never ended. New seasons are continuously being produced and have become part of the same spectacle they sporadically mock. Today, there is an entire genre of similar humor. Compare Rick and Morty.

Finally, one can state that Family Guy had many funny elements, such as the angry monkey and the extended scene where Brian owed Stewie money. “Toast House.” Brian and Stewie were the real main characters. Their relationship and alienation in a world of idiots gave the show some depth. However, even those elements would of course become tainted. One may wonder in which direction the series could have developed if the dead end of pure episode inflation could have been avoided. Two possible paths might have been MDE¹ and Kafka. The former is truly offensive humor with a clearer tendency. The latter is a journey into the realm of magical realism with longer episodes and insights behind the spectacle.

(translated from the original Swedish article)

Buy Joakim Andersen’s Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century.

1. Editor’s note: Sam Hyde’s Million Dollar Extreme.