[wideawake]

Parker and Stone famously pointed out that, unlike South Park, The Family Guy requires zero effort to write.

The main characters are blatantly cribbed from the Simpsons and the cutaway gags that the show is famous for have absolutely no context - they can be used interchangeably in any episode.

Each episode consists of about 3 minutes of plot and 19 minutes of filler: almost anything the writers scribble down goes straight to air and 80-90% of it misses. If they have too many cutaway gags to fit into the allotted time, they just cut-and-paste them into the next episode because they have no specific narrative value.

Parker and Stone are, of course, not offended by any of MacFarland's content. Their beef is that his show exhibits total laziness, no craftsmanship and no regard for the audience - they're offended as writers and as consumers.

[Borges]

To compare the sublime to the ridiculous, it's the difference between Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The former organizes the parts into a coherent whole which cannot be excerpted because it is so well integrated (SP jokes rarely sound funny if you describe them out of context). Whereas the latter is accused of stringing melodies together that have no relation to each other or to an over-arcing design.

P.S. Tchaikovsky is a lot better than Family Guy.