‘Family Guy’s Attacks on ‘The Simpsons’ Were So Much Worse Than the Other Way Around
Ever since Family Guy showed up to blow up The Simpsons’ spot on New Year’s Eve 1999, Matt Groening’s show has been throwing lighthearted jabs from across the Fox schedule at their rival series every few years. But, just like everything The Simpsons has ever done, Seth MacFarlane copied them — just in a grosser, more drawn-out, less funny way.
The “friendly” rivalry between Family Guy and The Simpsons is drastically different from the acrimony between Family Guy and other shows such as South Park. While Trey Parker and Matt Stone set out to explain to their viewers exactly why Family Guy was bottom-tier comedy in the classic two-part episode “Cartoon Wars” in 2006, the writers of The Simpsons decided to take a lighter touch as they satirized the bizarro-copy of their series with background gags and throwaway lines that did little more than acknowledge the “inspiration” behind Family Guy’s entire premise.
If your only exposure to the Simpsons/Family Guy feud was from people on Simpsons Twitter sharing screenshot showing the visual gags referencing MacFarlane projects, you’d assume that the entire relationship between The Simpsons and its painfully derivative imposter was a big brother/little brother situation.
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Well, that’s kind of true in a Cain and Abel sense — or it would be if Abel was a sexual predator as well as a murderer.
The 75-second rape joke with no punchline that’s featured above comes from the Season Six Family Guy episode “Movin’ Out (Brian’s Song),” and Fox cut it from airing on multiple occasions to the protestations of MacFarlane. Fox executives found the “joke” to be too “personal” of an attack on The Simpsons, but MacFarlane argued that, since The Simpsons dared to put Peter Griffin on the screen for half a second in a “Treehouse of Horror” episode, it was his right to make Quagmire rape Marge and murder her family for almost a minute and a half on broadcast television.
In the DVD commentary for Family Guy Season Six, MacFarlane recalls how he told Fox executives who fought the rape joke, “You are afraid of James L. Brooks. … And that’s why we can’t do it.” And, upon hearing about the extended murder and sex crime sequence that MacFarlane thought was a funny bit, Brooks and his fellow Simpsons writer and producer Al Jean were understandably upset, leading to Fox banning the two shows from taking any more shots at each other.
Sadly, the fact that MacFarlane crossed the line so bad that the network had to step in means that Family Guy got the last “laugh” in its feud with The Simpsons, doubly so when you consider that the cringeworthy 2014 crossover between the two shows was technically a Family Guy episode instead of a Simpsons one.
God forbid some other sitcom makes a joke about his Ted series, or we might get an entire season of sex crimes without a single laugh in sight.
