Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story

Few animated sitcoms are as divisive as Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy." Some hail it as brilliantly funny, on par with "The Simpsons" and "Futurama"; others pan it as a pale "Simpsons" knock-off with none of that show's wit or elegance. The show has always walked a razor's edge, cracking jokes so offensive that they seem designed not merely to walk the line of good taste, but to annihilate it. If they work, they're transcendent. If they fail, they're putrid. Fans maintain that the ratio is highly stacked toward the former; detractors maintain the opposite.

The argument about the show's overall quality doesn't break down along classic highbrow/lowbrow lines — "Family Guy" boosters and detractors both frequent the hallways of Harvard, the TGI Fridays of middle America and just about every patch of cultural terrain in between.

After its untimely cancellation by FOX, fans rallied to the show's DVD sets. Intense sales, combined with incredible "Family Guy" rerun ratings on the Cartoon Network provoked the show's Lazarus-like return to the airwaves.

All this hype, and the release of MacFarlane's second animated sitcom ("American Dad"), created intense commercial pressure to shit out a new and potentially lucrative "Family Guy" product on DVD.

And shit one out the show's creators most certainly did.

For serious fans of "Family Guy," "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" is about as disappointing as could be imagined. Years of goodwill built up by daring, blockbuster comedy and lively musical numbers are spent in an 88-minute orgy of sloppy, legitimately offensive jokes, poor pacing, and obviously padded scenes.

The DVD's few cheap laughs come at a dear price, as characters who have been carefully nurtured and developed are handled with shark-like violence.

The conceit of "Stewie Griffin" is relatively simple. Stewie, the effete, wisecracking evil-genius baby of the family, finds the grown-up version of himself, on vacation from the future. Baby Stewie follows adult Stewie back to the future, where everything has gone terribly wrong: His adult incarnation is a middle-aged virgin who reads Parade magazine and works at a Circuit City knock-off; his brother Chris has become a police officer and married a horrible, greedy, white-trashy woman; and his sister Meg has changed gender and become a man named "Ron."

Even for a show that trades in preposterous developments, the "horrible future" scenario doesn't make a lick of sense. Stewie is fully developed as a brilliant, ruthless, brutal, totally gayed-out badass in the regular series; the idea that a chance accident would completely reverse his personality is not merely unconvincing; much more critically, it's uncompelling, out of step with the show's spirit, and consequently not much fun.

Meg's no transsexual, either — she's always been portrayed as a very vulnerable, ordinary, conformist teenage girl, and the idea of making her into a gender-bending, boundary-breaking "man" isn't funny — it's merely out-of-character.

Likewise, when "Asian Reporter" Tricia Takanawa reverts into a disgusting "me so horny" Thai bar girl stereotype, it's not amusing and/or avant-garde; it's just a legitimately offensive non sequitur.

This only scratches the surface of this DVD's problems. Its writers, apparently forced to fill 88 minutes under horrific deadline pressure, shamelessly cannibalize many of the show's best moments, trotting out a conga line of recycled cameos (the greased-up deaf guy, Stewie's "sexy parties," the evil monkey in the closet, etc.) to fill time and stir up cheap "oh, that was a great episode!" laughs.

With enlightened editing, "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" could have been a top-flight 22-minute regular episode of "Family Guy." As it is, it's a bloated mess, studded with a handful of truly funny gems buried in billowing mountains of crap.

Flak interviewed Seth MacFarlane and found his talent and classy sense of comedic excellence to be self-evident. There's no way he would have greenlighted a project so totally flawed had he not been drowning under the production demands of the resurrected "Family Guy" and heavily flawed "American Dad."

It seems to be time for MacFarlane pull a Chapelle and drain the newly brimming swamp of low-quality bilge that threatens to attach itself forever to his reputation.

Bad episodes of "Family Guy" come and go. But bad DVDs are forever.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)