Worst TV Show of the Week Brought to you by the Parents Television Council WARNING: Graphic Content!!! Do NOT push play if you don't want to see the explicit video!!!

Family Guy on Fox

The Fox network is hardly known for its classy and family-friendly programming; but the lowlights of Fox’s week are the raunchy and offensive cartoons Family Guy and American Dad. Showcasing bloody violence and “humorous” references to rape, child molestation and other sexual perversions, on Sunday May 10^th Fox once again fouled the  9:00 p.m. ET hour with a Family Guy satirizing three stories by horror author Stephen King. For bloodshed and sexual references Family Guy has been named Worst TV Show of the Week.

The episode opens with Peter introducing three parodies of Stephen King stories. In the first, a parody of Stand By Me, a group of boys gather in a treehouse, swilling beer and looking at Playboy magazines, as Peter’s voice-over states,“ Quag Chambers.  He was the leader of our gang.  He had sex when he was five and committed his first rape when he was ten.  Rape of course being legal in the ‘50s.” Barely a minute into the show, and viewers are subjected to a joke combining child sex and rape – scarcely ideal programming for a program that airs at 8:00 p.m. in the Central and Mountain time zones.

But MacFarlane and crew are just getting started. When the African-American Cleveland enters the clubhouse, the gang orders him to re-enter in a more stereotyped manner: “Lawd-a-mighty, ah done seen me a deeead body down by de lake. Sho’ ‘nuff, ah thought ah’d go deef and dumb when ah saw me dat dead body,” Cleveland obediently responds. Of course, decades ago this kind racist of humor was common; but after the sacrifices and hard-won gains of the Civil Rights movement, it fell out of favor. Now, however, Family Guy is exposing an entire new generation to stereotyped racist “humor.”

Family Guy also treats viewers to his typical doses of bloody violence in its parody of Misery, with Stewie firing a shotgun, blowing off both of Joe’s legs. Joe sits on the floor in a huge puddle of blood, the stumps of his legs jutting out as the severed leg portions lie on the floor before him. “Now I'm gonna have to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair,” Joe moans. “No, you're not” replies Baby Stewie, as he fires a shotgun at Joe's head. Blood vividly splatters Stewie's face.

The final segment satirizes The Shawshank Redemption. Replete with multiple references to excrement and rape, the low point of this segment shows the prison warden throwing a rock at a poster of David Cassidy (who is positioned so that his posterior looms large at the viewer). The rock cuts a small hole on the picture’s rear where Cassidy’s anus would be. The warden pokes his finger in and out of the hole, then sticks his arm further in.

For its violence, sexual references and contribution to the coarsening of contemporary culture, Family Guy has earned the title of Worst TV Show of the Week.