Click Culture: The Perils and Possibilities of Family Guy and Convergence-Era Television

Abstract

Recent media scholarship has devoted considerable attention to the progressive role that controversial, satirical humor can play in American public discourse. Programs such as South Park, The Simpsons, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have been the subjects of numerous academic studies and have received considerable popular acclaim. This article considers the case of Family Guy, a show often discursively associated with the pro-social satire of the aforementioned programs but rarely the subject of close critical consideration. Through a combination of textual and industrial analyses, the article contextualizes Family Guy's use of highly fractured narratives and remarkably incendiary representations of marginalized identity groups in its comedy. These tendencies combine, we argue, to limit Family Guy's potential for productive satire while attempting to maximize its appeal to commercially desirable young male viewers. Conceptualizing the impact of the American television industry's efforts to reassert the medium's centrality in the contemporary era of media convergence, we offer the descriptor “click culture” as a means of understanding the aesthetic and industrial discourses of Family Guy, as well as those of similarly structured programs.