As the tide of The Simpsons was quickly showing its own decline, it irregularly promised that it still had a little life left in it. Take the joke in "The Italian Bob" episode from Season 17, as the Simpson family travel to Italy and run into Sideshow Bob.
As the Carabiniere spot the crazy-haired Bob and flick through their book of America's Most Wanted, they pass a picture of resident criminal Snake, then Mayor Quimby, before coming to a picture of one Peter Griffin with the attached crime reading simply, "plagiarismo." A quick and funny prod at derivative series from The Simpsons clan, but it comes from a place of much stronger resentment for the Seth MacFarlane-penned show.
And a show like The Simpsons stakes a fair claim to dislike Family Guy. In a case of "we did it first," the Griffin family is a beat for beat copy of The Simpsons; a middle class family with an oafish father, housewife, kids, young baby, etc. Family Guy just happened to have a dog too, only theirs had the ability of speech. And with Family Guy's general decline (and openness to homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and every other phobia that exists...) it became an easy target to hate.
In a conversation with Seth MacFarlane and Matt Groening for Entertainment Weekly in 2014, MacFarlane even said:
I’m the first person to say, stylistically, absolutely, we took 100 cues from The Simpsons. Look at when All in the Family came out. Suddenly it created a whole new style of doing things. The timing style of Family Guy was directly influenced by The Simpsons because it worked. They cracked that nut.
Why You Little...
Family Guy's main pull, its essential approach, focused on the cutaway gag — a character would mention something and the show would then teleport to that exact moment or scenario. It's been that way from the start of the series, and has continued ever since. It looks extremely lazy from a writing standpoint, considering The Simpsons was once written by mathematicians and future Late Night hosts, it was also packed full of actually well-written gags. Jokes, even.
Cutaways existed here and there within the wide and ever expanding world of The Simpsons, but weren't relied on, and in comparison Family Guy's work rate kind of came off as cheap. The Simpsons writers weren't the only ones; in the final episode of Clerks: The Animated Series, Kevin Smith includes a terrible comedy writer as a character, who studies a book titled How to Write Cartoons by Seth MacFarlane, and then comes up with a dumb, homophobic idea (Smith would state his hate on the DVD commentary). The creator of Ren & Stimpy (who certainly warrants some contempt of his own) has critiqued Family Guy, and the Futurama writers have done the same.
And like the worst kept secret, this would all come out on April 5th, 2006 following South Park's much praised (and naturally controversial, but also just generally excellent) "Cartoon Wars."
Cartoon Wars Are Hell
More than comfortable picking targets and taking aim, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Season 10 "Cartoon Wars" was an event in the world of animation, as all the heavy hitters of primetime adult-leaning cartoon comedies were featured in South Park's own scrappy scissor and paper art style. Bart Simpson himself played a vital role in the two-parter, and even the King of the Hill team feature. For fans of the 1990s animation boom, it was our own Avengers: Endgame, as the characters and personalities shared a screen, interacted and, aptly, clashed.
In the two-parter, South Park's Eric Cartman bids to get Family Guy cancelled with the announcement that they will be airing a new episode that will include the Prophet Mohammed. What is later revealed is that the Family Guy staff writers are no more than manatees that use a random sentence generator by selecting idea balls with certain words to create a joke that is then used in the show. It's just aquatic Mad Libs.
Even down to mocking the cartoon's very animation, South Park showed the Griffins as (ironically) drawn in basic terms in a bland and uninspired household. In terms of punching down, South Park was pummeling their rival cartoon with an Acme Corp. anvil.
We Just Don't Respect It
In the DVD commentary for the episode, Trey Parker summed up the laziness they felt Family Guy had.
[...] We totally understand that people love [Family Guy] and that's why we put it in the show. We understand it speaks to some people, and it can just be a simple laugh and that's great, and we certainly don't think it should be taken off the air or anything like that. We just don't respect it in terms of writing.
Following the first half of the "Cartoon Wars" airing, the creators were praised and even sent flowers and told they were doing "God's work" by The Simpsons and King of the Hill teams.
Within that two-parter, South Park and its creators announced war on the Family Guy team, and every other faction praised them for doing so. Thus, the world's worst kept secret, that South Park, King of the Hill, and The Simpsons actually kind of loathed everything about Family Guy was aired in the open.
The House of Mouse
Matt Stone and Trey Parker may dislike being compared to other adult-centric cartoons; Parker said: "That’s the frustration where that show came from. We kept running into people that are just like, 'Oh, you guys do South Park – I love that show, and Family Guy. That’s the best. You must love Family Guy.’ And we were like, 'No, we [really] hate Family Guy.'" But then again, they are all at least operating in the same sandbox at the end of the day.
Ultimately, the war is now over, the bodies have been counted, and any swiping can all be put down to mere posturing. There are obvious parallels, and crossovers to all the shows mentioned. And this supposed punching down and camaraderie comes from King of the Hill — a series that hasn't been on the air since 2009 — and The Simpsons — a series now on its zombified 34th season, and only alive in some kind of yellow-hued purgatory destined to never reclaim itself and become relevant again.
Both them and Family Guy are now even owned by Disney, the exact sort of corporation that just five years ago they would both mock similarly gratuitously, but from different angles. However, they're now under the same banner, and sharing a home in the same category on their streaming service.
Going one further, King of the Hill, The Cleveland Show, American Dad, and Bob's Burgers are also owned by Disney, showing they're all now essentially beholden to the same master (South Park aside), and any snipes at one another's content can, since the acquisition, only be put down to squabbling between siblings.
A long-awaited crossover of The Simpsons and Family Guy even hit us (and each other, repeatedly) in 2014, and while 10 years too late, it should have satisfied both sets of fans, and the inevitable Venn diagram of fans that still enjoy both series.
While still bitter, even Stone and Parker conceded in 2010, saying:
STONE: They completely ignore us, so it’s fine. It’s a one-way war. We don’t know anybody there, they don’t know us. I don’t think they’re much bothered by us.
PARKER: They’re making a lot more money than we are, so I don’t think they care very much.
If you're a Family Guy fan, then, don't be pissed about all the hate — they're doing just fine.