Canon Fodder

From A Film Canon, a website that deals with films, novels, music and TV:

A sustained eulogy for the 80s, Family Guy dovetails the Reagan-era sitcom with the rise of a fully professionalised middle class, imbuing the splendid domestic isolation of the former with the deadening management-speak of the latter, and producing the domestic-professional banality that remains series creator Seth McFarlane's most enduring comic signature. At its strongest, this banality suffuses every object of ostensibly polite conversation with the jargon and register of the quaternary sector, as if to evoke an educational as well as an institutional crisis, in which the canon of middle-class cultural aspiration has been jettisoned by a series of professional skills and attributes, and left to founder in some ghostly ether; a collection of empty referents, analogous to the comic cutaways that rhythm each episode, and wryly speak to the professionalised functionality of the comic industry itself. At the same time, this banal register partakes of a resolutely anticlimactic queerness, containing and anaesthetising any possibility of difference or resistance, and looking forward - or, rather, backward - to the 80s as the utopian horizon that is both responsible for, and the only means of redeeming, this malaise. Hence the series' most traumatic, hauntological object - Michael J. Fox - the very epitome of lost or unreachable futures; or, alternatively, its black, incessant attempt to come to terms with what happened when the MTV generation caught up with the futures of Back To The Future.

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