Let’s be real: Family Guy hasn’t been funny in damn near a decade. And when you’re not funny, you run the risk of offending people. The latest Family Guy episode features a story of Peter Griffin starting a Neighborhood Watch program, gets a gun and eventually shoots his friend’s Black son in the middle of the night. The story parallels the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman story and it has huge racial overtones. Unfortunately, the episode didn’t handle the topic with any sort of intelligence or cleverness. Instead, it focused on Peter Griffin and how shooting a Black kid affected him.
In the end, Cleveland actually takes the damn blame for the shooting of his own son and it leads to nobody paying attention because “the media doesn’t care about Black-on-Black crime.” The insinuation here is that the media sensationalizes White-on-Black crime because it’s a catchy story, which is a cop-out and lets the White killers off the hook. And the idea of the Black man actually taking the blame for it and sacrificing himself for the White guy isn’t lost on us, either. Look, we know it’s Family Guy and “it’s not that serious” but they didn’t even try to make a good point or even present anything remotely comical or satirical. It was just another example of a dying, lame unfunny show grasping at straws. Usually when that happens, Black pain is the target. We would say “don’t watch Family Guy anymore” but let’s be real: we didn’t even realize this show was still on the air.
