Ratings death awaits new woke Family Guy

You read it here first. Walt predicts Family Guy will be cancelled at the end of the current season. Now I'll tell you why.

I watched the latest episode last night. The plot was this. Lois sees the Browns having a family fun day, and decides the Griffins need to do that. They try card games and a make-your-own-pizza party. No fun. So they decide to have a movie night, with videos from Blockbuster. But the last remaining Blockbuster in the USA is in Bend OR, so the family goes on a road trip. 

That, right there, is your cue to start the death watch for Family Guy. It's turned into a wholesome Norman Lear sitcom! No-one, with the possible exception of Blockbuster [Do they still exist? Ed.] could be offended. And no-one laughs either.   

Think about it, fans. It's 2022 in Brandon's America. Humor is forbidden. Nothing's funny anymore, because nothing is allowed to be funny. Consider this list of Family Guy characters we used to laugh at (or laugh with), who have disappeared or been reduced to minor roles, all in the name of political correctness.

Stewie Griffin - Once a precocious but malicious baby who was a central part of most shows, he has now become snarky but cute and loveable. He used to be best friends with Brian, the dog, the only one who understood him, and they had many excellent adventures together. Now Stewie only gets one or two one-liners per show, when he appears at all. 

Brian Griffin - Once so popular that an attempt to kill him off flopped, and he had to be brought back from the dead. Like Stewie, Brian is no longer a central character. Maybe it's because we don't make fun of alcoholics. More likely, it's because he was a parody of progressive pseudo-intellectuals, who are people we must now take seriously.

Brian has a cousin, Jasper, who we no longer see or hear about, because Jasper is as gay as 18 balloons. The choices people make as to their gender identity are not to be mocked any more.

Glenn Quagmire - A resolutely heterosexual sex fiend and chicken-hawk, who is not an appropriate role model for middle-aged men. No more "Giggidy giggidy goo!"

Joe Swanson - Also playing a much-reduced role. How could anyone stoop so low as to make fun of persons who are differently-abled?! For the same reason, we no longer see or hear Angela, Peter's deaf co-worker at the brewery. Ditto Opie, who is not deaf but... errr... [you can't use the R-word! Ed.]

Then there are the gay characters, who only make cameos now that it's normal to be gay, like Bruce Straight (pictured, since some of you may not recognize his name). Bruce is a caricature of the sad, middle-aged homo who should be loved, not shunned, for his contributions to the community. You may know someone like him in your community, perhaps a Boy Scout leader or a priest.

John Herbert is a 90-year-old pederast, profiled on WWW almost eight years ago.  He used to be the Griffins' neighbour. I never heard that he'd moved, but somehow we no longer see him. Perhaps that's because pedophilia isn't funny. Indeed, some progressive thinkers argue that there's nothing wrong with it.

Other faces on the cutting-room floor are those of the (((Goldmans))). Muriel, the wife of pharmacist Mort Goldman, died a couple of years back, but Mort still had his drugstore, and his son Neil, was still trying to get a date with Meg, or anybody at Adam West High School. But we must now recognize that anti-Semitism is a lingering and serious problem in our society, so Jewish stereotypes are no longer permissible.

Speaking of stereotypes, Walt wonders what became of Consuela, pictured at top. It was never clear whether or not Consuela was a legal immigrant or an "undocument migrant". Notice I didn't say "illegal alien", let alone "wetback". There are no such people any more, so we can't make fun of them.

Seth MacFarlane and his colleagues seem not to have figured out what to do with the Browns, who weren't quite a stereotypical African-American family, in that Cleveland Brown, the father was still present, working to support his wife and children. The Browns live in a neighbour hood which would apparently be all-white, except for them, so they're still regulars.

Jerome is another black stereotype, but a good one. The new owner of the Drunken Clam, he's the successful businessman that we know all black dudes could be if they weren't the victims of slavery, racism and injustice. Even so, we don't see much of him because he's a little too... errr... Black, as we learned in the episode where it was revealed that he once dated Lois.

I could go on [No, you can't. Ed.] OK, let me conclude by observing that with the cancellation of all these characters, what we're left with is the basic Griffin family -- stupid father, smarter mother, and two kids suffering from teenage angst. In other words, a typical American TV family in the Age of Woke. Hence my prediction. Lifetime pct .980.

TV families in the Age of Woke

I don't watch TV much any more, except for news and politics, and (of course) hockey [and sometimes Judge Judy! Ed.]. I avoid dramas, soap operas and sitcoms like the plague, because I'm sick of the constant propagandizing for the liberal agenda, besides which the sitcoms just aren't funny any more. So also sketch comedy, like SNL, which I guess is funny if you're a Dumbocrat.

Although I restrict my TV diet, I can't escape commercials, which appear at intervals of 40 seconds or so during the hockey games and fake news broadcasts. Some of them are entertaining, and every now and then we at WWW give the good ones the coveted Wally award for creativity. But I've noticed lately a trend in the portrayal, in TV ads, of American families. That's our topic for today.

Here's the kind of American family we saw on the toob in TV's so-called "golden years".

Yes, folks, it's the Andersons, of Father Knows Best. They're often held up as examples of the happy, well-adjusted, fully functioning family who should be role models for those of us who aren't so happy, well-adjusted, etc. Of course they're white folks. But there were happy, well-adjusted black families too, like the Huxtables.

You remember the Huxtables, don't you? Wow, they were even better than the Andersons because both parents were hard-working professional people. No stay-at-homee mom there! Some people complained that the Huxtables were "too white" in their speech and lifestyle -- "Oreo cookies" or, dare we say it, "black Republicans". But there were other black families, such as the Evans Family, from Good Times.

More down-to-earth than the Huxtables, eh? Climbing back up the social ladder, we find the Banks family, of Bel Air, who were always coping with their home boy relative, the Fresh Prince.

Elsewhere in America, we were invited to laugh along with the Keatons of Family Ties, as Alex faced the challenge of being a Republican in a family of Democrats.

All of these families are uniracial -- white or black, period. SJWs have been complaining for years that blacks have been under-represented on American TV. When challenged to square that assertion with the existence of shows like Good Times, Fresh Prince and the Cosby Show, they say that those shows were "blacksploitation" or (more recently) failed "to accurately portray the Black lived experience". 

The result is this year's remake of The Wonder Years, which featured the all-white Arnold family, to portray the all-black Williams family. Is that better? Apparently not. In response to the "wokeness" fad, Corporate America and the MadMen have decreed an end to segregation. What we need to see... must see... now are biracial families, like this one.

Ah, there you are! A happy biracial family -- black father, white mother, two adorable mulatto children, apparently one each of the two leading genders. I haven't seen a family like that in a sitcom yet, but there are lots of them in commercials for "woke" corporations. That's the way America is spozed to be, in the Age of Woke.

If you want to know how it really is, look no further than the evening newscasts of the latest episodes of black crime in your community [especially Lori Lightfoot's Chicago. Ed.]. Both victims and perps will be described as "a future basketball star", "an aspiring rap artist", and/or "a good boy who was trying to turn his life around." 

That desccription will come from the boy's mother. There will be no father in sight, or anywhere around.  That's how it is, even in the many cases where the mother is white. For the sad fact is that there are 1000s of plain-looking, fat white women who will do anything, anything to  get a black guy to show them a little love. And that includes being a baby mama. 

It is a statistical fact -- evident from the welfare rolls, if nothing else -- that black and biracial families are more likely than white families to be broken -- headed by women whose partners have deserted them. The happy biracial family we see in TV ads is largely mythical, the creation of propagandists pushing the liberal, BLM agenda as a matter of "social justice" to make reparations for the second-class status to which black people have been supposedly consigned.

The funny thing is that black people no longer buy into the concepts of integration and multiculturalism. Just last week, two white Arizona State University students were harassed at the school's "multicultural center" over their race and their support for police. Video of the incident shows black students attempting to force two white male students to leave the area, claiming they were making the space "uncomfortable" with their whiteness and a pro-police sticker. 

That's  how things are, really, not in TVland but in America, in the Age of Woke.

SCTV is (back) on the air!

Let's face it. Canadian sitcoms stink. Remember King of Kensington? And how about the execrable Little Mosque on the Prairie?

You probably haven't seen or heard of either of those, even if you live north of the border. King was created by a Canadian Norman Lear wannabe. It tried to be sensitive and funny at the same time and succeeded at neither. As for Little Mosque, it starts with a ridiculous premise -- the title says it all -- and goes downhill from there.

It's not that Canadians have no sense of humour. There's a lot more good-natured irreverence in Canada than in the counterpart society to the south. Unlike their American cousins, Canadians know theirs is a nitwit country, and they're not afraid to laugh at themselves. Who do you think writes all those Canadian (and other) gags for The Simpsons and South Park?

Walt thinks the problem is that most Canadian sitcoms are commissioned by and for the deadly dull Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a public (i.e. government-owned) broadcaster so politically correct that it's impossible to poke fun at any identifiable group except maybe the Church.

Yet making fun of racial, ethnic and religious characteristics of one group or another is the essence of most of the jokes you'll hear around the water cooler or at the watering hole. Sketch comedy, fortunately, is another matter. Some would say that sketches are a lower art form, but in reality they require better writing and better, funnier ideas than sitcoms. There's a lot more to creating a funny TV sketch than dressing some actors up in funny clothes and makeup (e.g. Coneheads) and letting them do slapstick for a couple of minutes.

Canadians do sketch comedy superbly. And one of the best Canadian sketch comedy shows, SCTV, is back on the air. Incredibly, SCTV (Second City Television) was originally broadcast on the CBC from 1976 through 1984.

That network's insistence on political correctness led to the creation of the famous "Great White North" sketches, featuring Bob and Doug Mackenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis), which begat a movie, Strange Brew.

Even Americans found the Mackenzie Brothers hilarious. Thomas and Moranis said in an interview that they didn't think Americans realized the characters were Canadian, "only a couple of dumb guys". Here's a sample.



Check the cable and satellite listings for the comedy channels and you'll likely find SCTV somewhere. It's still funny, a quarter of a century later.

Postscript: These days the CBC would never allow the "Great White North" segment. God forbid that Canadians should ever say that theirs was a white society. That would imply that people of non-whitish hues don't belong. We couldn't have that...eh...

Is nothing sacred to the gay lobby?

A reader has taken issue with Walt's use of the term "gay lobby". Do I really believe, (s)he asks, that there's a homosexual conspiracy to infiltrate positions of power and influence? Well, just as there are some who believe that Jews control banking and finance, so there are some who believe that homosexuals run the worlds of fashion and entertainment.

Have a look at Fashion TV and tell me that those clothes aren't designed by people who hate women. Or want women to look like 13-year-old boys!

As for entertainment, one has only to note the number of openly gay characters who appear in American TV sitcoms and soap operas. Four characters in the Simpsons appear to be, or have declared themselves, part of "the LGBT community". So what? It's all part of an orchestrated campaign (if not a conspiracy) to make being queer seem "normal". That's what!

And of course there was Brokeback Mountain. Hey, there's two nice guys who just happen to love each other and like to spend time doing things together...manly things like riding and camping...so there's nothing wrong with them, right? They don't have those little toothbrush mustaches and do disgusting things in bath-houses, do they?

(Mrs. Walt, having led a sheltered life, asked me what they do do. If she'd gone to school in a place where they have modern sex education she wouldn't have had to ask!)

And then there's comic books. Are you ready for this? Remember Archie? Well, in No. 202 of Archie Comics, coming to your newsstand in September, a new character moves to Riverdale. His name is Kevin Keller and he's a hunk! And guess what, girls? He's gay!

Says Jon Goldwater, CEO of Archie Comics Publications, "We want to make Archie Comics move forward and make it fun and inclusive." Ah yes, good normal fun. "He’ll definitely be part of the gang," he said. And at some point, he added, Kevin will "probably" have a "romance". Progressive parents will doubtless want to snap up that issue so they can show it to their kids!

“We pride ourselves on being a mirror to society, especially youth," Goldwater continued. "The kids in our book are in high school and we want to reflect everything that’s going on in their world from social interaction, to fashion, to friends." Fashion...social interaction...homosexuality... if you're not into all that, hey, you're just not cool...like Archie and his friends.

Footnote: If you can't remember which Simpsons character came out of the closet, e-mail walt.whiteman@yahoo.com and I'll tell you.