American Dad! - Season 6

This is the first FOX show I'm talking about since FX finished burning off the four unaired Running Wilde episodes, so I'm going to write a sentence about them. Those episodes were okay.

Anyway, American Dad. It's back as the best Seth MacFarlane-produced show they have. It's hard to say what makes it better than Family Guy, other than just the writing is better. In some ways it's much more of a typical, run-of-the-mill sitcom, at least structurally. The plots of most episodes can be traced back for years or even decades to plenty of other shows that have done similar things. But while Family Guy is screwing around with reenactments and parodies and anti-humor and inserting entire embarrassing music videos into episodes, American Dad just makes sure that the jokes are funny and that the formulaic storylines manage to surprise you at least once. It's a more typical show, but it's also just a much more consistently entertaining one to watch.

There isn't much particular to note about this season, except for what they've done with Haley. There was a story arc (atypical for this show) at the beginning of the season where she married her boyfriend, and it's resulted in her having a diminished role in the series. Not that I generally mind, because Haley and Stan butting heads over social issues was always far from my favorite part of the show. But when practically every episode boils down to Stan pairing off with Francine, Roger, or Steve, it makes me wish for a little more fluidity in those roles sometimes, and the way Haley is usually wasted could have been avoided to help out there. Still, with the formula is pretty rigid, it works, and the show has yet to use up all the potential it has for this family. It's probably the only animated show I'm watching that doesn't premiere on Adult Swim that I look forward to, and I could see it holding steady for a few more years.

American Dad! - Season 5

Apparently American Dad!'s fifth season ended abruptly a few weeks ago without anyone telling me, but it was a solid 13 episode run, I guess. I'd much rather have a full 20+ episodes of this than The Cleveland Show, but what can you do. To be honest, Family Guy has recently retaken the title of my favorite running Seth MacFarlane show with its constantly escalating absurdity and Dad! losing its unique spark a little bit, although it's still got some life left in it. By the way, do you know how many times Seth has actually written a script for one of his shows besides a pilot? Twice, both on Family Guy, and one of them was a single segment of the viewer mail anthology. He's a funny guy, but his primary strengths are definitely his voice and his existence now as a brand. Anyway, there was some fun stuff this season, like the crazy extent of the Vietnam reenactment on a golf course in the premiere and the totally nuts episode where the rapture occurs and Stan and Francine are stuck in a post apocalyptic earth, with an ending that would put the reality of the rest of the series in question if it wasn't for a small detail. To be honest, I'm sort of getting tired of the constant cycle of Stan being the worst husband in the world, learning an important lesson, and then forgetting it by the beginning of the next episode, but it's still entertaining and manages to separate itself from Family Guy enough to be its own show.

American Dad! - Season 4

The fourth year of American Dad! didn't seem as cuttingly clever as the third, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's sort of like Family Guy for people who don't like Family Guy. It has a similar wacky sense of humor in the character interactions, but it doesn't use random cutaways for laughs and it usually takes the time to actually develop the different personalities as a thrust to the plot. They're all still pretty static. Stan is a bad father and husband, Steve is a ween, Hayley is a rebellious liberal, and Roger likes to dress up in elaborate costumes and pretend to be human. Francine is probably actually the most dynamic one, as a dutiful housewife who still manages to come off as a strong woman. Klaus is a German fish!

This is the part where I normally might point out some particularly strong episodes or moments, but this is the kind of show where totally great episodes are rare, but poor ones are too. It's a consistently pretty decent comedy. The second episodes where Roger has to figure out who used his credit card all mystery-movie style was good. The finale where things go horribly wrong when Stan decides to have a guy's night out with some CIA buddies was a lot of fun too, like an abbreviated Very Bad Things if it was funny. I really have no idea which show MacFarlane has more input on, but this one is a bit more respectable at this point. You know what looks terrible though? The Cleveland Show, if the previews so far have been accurate. Like, really bad. Does he really need an hour and a half every week? Not even Matt Groening got that in his prime.

American Dad! - Season 3

It sometimes gets a little iffy figuring out seasons for animated shows with the fact that production, televised, and DVD "seasons" can all be different, so this is the third televised "season", from last September's "The Vacation Goo" to late this May's "Spring Breakup".

American Dad first premiered under the shadow of the return of Family Guy, creator Seth McFarlane's other, much more popular show. In the beginning, it didn't seem that great, just a retread with similar characters and some political jokes instead of pop culture tangents. It did grow a bit during the first season, and had some good moments. For whatever reason, I stopped watching and didn't pick it back up until newer ones came on Adult Swim. I completely missed the second season, but that doesn't really matter in a show where continuity is scarce. By now, it's come into its own as a show, only similar to Family Guy in appearance and some similar sensibilities, not in nearly every aspect. Usually the topic of each episode comes from a hot political issue, but the desire to make fun of the government doesn't take over or get in the way of them making an entertaining program.

To be honest, at this point I like American Dad a bit better than Family Guy. It makes me actually laugh more often. It's usually more artistically creative, with unique perspectives or tones that Family Guy would never tackle. A lot of the funnier jokes are pokes at themselves or the sillier contrivances of television, which is fine by me. You can't always pull excellence out of every subject so you get humor where you can find it. There's a point to be made that none of the characters are really that good but the parents and Roger are funny enough and Steve is like the boy version of Meg except he keeps getting screwed over as part of the episode's plot and not just in throwaway gags. Not many secondary characters have really jumped out, but the CIA angle makes more interesting situations a lot. It's a very watchable show.