American Dad!: The Reanimated Corpse of Satire
Well constructed TV risen from the ashes of Bush-era political comedy.
I lied in my last post.
My favorite bottle episode in media isn’t The Twilight Zone’s “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”. It’s not Waiting for Godot. And despite my almost theater degree, it was never Six Characters in Search of an Author. Two years ago, American Dad! made “Gold Top Nuts”.
I dare to call it a triumph of storytelling. The episode develops the existential metanarrative with a history going back over 400 years into a digestible, hilarious, and fun story about a vacation gone wrong.
When the family lands on an island full of magnetic mind-numbing rocks, their only connection to society is an 80’s era commercial for an American snack food product. The Smiths construct out of this a version of humanity they are both gentle and reverent for. This erases their grudges from their minds brought on by offscreen travel-related drama, setup in the cold open.
Once they attempt escape from the island, they find themselves immediately back in Langley Falls. They were immediately offshore. “Tiffany’s boyfriend, this is so embarrassing.”
And this is where the magic happens. The family is then thrust into the spotlight as a viral laughingstock. Returning to their lives, they’re forced to make sense of the dumbfounding experience. After meeting in the supermarket snack isle, Francine alludes to the piece of media that was once their whole life.
“I’ll put out the good nuts for you.”
“If we can’t fully forgive, and we can’t fully forget, then all we can do is offer each other more kindness. We have to offer each other…the best.”
How Did This Happen?
American Dad!’s been doing this for a decade now: weaving classic sitcom scenarios, such as being forced to go to a concert with your nerdy little brother, into Doctor Strange and Rick and Morty multiverse time travel. The show’s All in the Family roots have blended into the metanarrative quality of shows like Community and Gareth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
But it’s easy to write off as just another Seth McFarlane sitcom. Family Guy has been a cultural touchstone for over 25 years. I’ve killed Peter Griffin in Fortnite. The Cleveland Show, Orville and Ted movies have had their time in the spotlight. And yet Stan Smith, his family, Klaus, and Roger’s antics are still airing and seemingly less known.
They deserve to be with the rest of the adult animated comedy greats! The level of parody and pastiche on display is evident in any episode after season 12, when TBS took over. They’ve done westerns, mockumentaries, and real estate reality TV. They did I Saw the TV Glow five years early. There’s a Fallout episode. The CIA founds an Overwatch eSports team.
It seems hile people have been enjoying the mostly live-action Golden Age of Television, TBS was churning out hot bangers like “The Two Hundred” and “Wondercabinet”. I think a lot of the credit can go to the flexibility of the character of Roger, but a more interesting aspect is the show’s metamorphosis from its juvenile premise: What if Family Guy was about George W. Bush?
The Fermenation Process
American Dad! premiered during the height of the war on terror, during a trend of politically timely sitcoms such as That’s my Bush!, Lil’ Bush, and The Colbert Report. The perennial nimated sitcoms took pot shots as well. But the formula didn’t last, and the creators know it. Here’s a cutaway gag from last season’s “Multiverse of American Dadness”.
In hindsight it’s clearer why it failed. There’s a resentment for the characters depicted that creators McFarlane and Weitzman acknowledge in this interview. In the year 2000, comedy might have felt like a cathartic experience, and perhaps even a solution to political turmoil. In 2024 it’s clear that’s never the case.
And while the show’s latter half is fantastic, the first half is markedly less so. Some of these earlier episodes are offensive and unfunny. Racist, sexist, homophobic, you name it. One of the more interesting examples is the season 9 premiere, “Steve and Snot’s Test-Tubular Adventure”. Stan and his best friend do an ill-conceived Weird Science to make prom dates, only for the experiment to accidentally produce two hyper-accelerated-aging babies. The two teens then take it upon themselves to raise their prom dates, whom they also plan to lose their virginities to.
And it gets worse. There’s this horchata joke. Season two features a log-cabin Republican episode that is particularly anachronistic that you’ll honestly have to see for yourself. They have value as cultural artifacts, but nothing else.
Something happened with the show’s transition to TBS, and the evidence is in the text. This Reddit write-up of the perplexing “American Fung” episode nails it on the head. The classic man-despises-wife formula is used as a metaphor for the creative clash between executives and writers, resulting in the departure of Mike Barker.
Either way, it’s airing now, so if you have cable, check it out on TBS or YouTube. The season premiere is great.