It being a Sunday night here at the Shannon house, everyone else in the house was watching Family Guy a short time ago. I had a Red Wings game, but even if I hadn't, I guess I haven't really latched onto Family Guy the same way everyone else in the house has. It's not that I don't like the show; I think it can be quite funny at times, but at the same time it just doesn't really feel to me like the kind of show that I absolutely have to catch. (I haven't asked my comp students if they're big Family Guy fans; if they are, then I might catch the show just to be conversant with them about it.) I certainly like the show much more than The Simpsons and South Park, although Drawn Together remains my favourite animated show currently in regular airing. (Of course, that's the show that's most likely to bite the dust soon, but I've pretty much come to expect that from the shows I like.)
Although I don't make a point of catching Family Guy on a regular basis, I do read news stories about the show on a regular basis just because I think it's kind of funny just how many people are objecting to their content being parodied and satirized on the show. In both of the recent cases I can think of -- Carol Burnett and the writer of "When You Wish Upon a Star" -- I've certainly sided with Family Guy, even though I've never seen the bits at the hearts of the two lawsuits. In both cases, the entities bringing the suits are fairly iconic, and I'm sure that their material has been similarly parodied dozens of times before. Perhaps Family Guy's popularity is what is inspiring the lawsuits, but it seems to me that it's more likely that the entities are objecting to the more "adult" treatment that the writers of Family Guy give to their bits.
This makes me consider the notion of whether or not the owners of certain bits should be able to selectively decide who can and cannot parody/satirize their work based on the nature of the bit. On the one hand, if you do even a small bit of digging on the Internet, it's easy to find the work of some really sick people whose mission in life seems to be to profane and ruin pretty much anything that anyone else considers sacred, adding blood and gore and sex and stuff to any topic you can think of, and my gut reaction when I see such material is to puke. However, I'm just too big of a First Amendment advocate to even consider advocating that the makers of this material should be prosecuted for it. Even though I haven't watched that much Family Guy, I get the general impression that the writers have a fair amount of respect for the cultural tidbits that they skewer (the lack of which in South Park makes that show quite difficult for me to watch), and even if that might not show through so easily when they do deliberately adult stuff, I think that compared to how other shows out there might skewer their stuff, the people who get parodied/satirized in Family Guy get off relatively easy.