How the Terrible "Dads" Makes Us Appreciate "Family Guy" More Than Ever

Ladies and gentlemen, the first disaster of the fall 2013 TV season has officially arrived. With a massive thud.

Lazily titled Dads, the painfully inept new sitcom premiered on FOX last night, undeservedly sharing Monday night primetime space with the superior returnees New Girl and The Mindy Project, as well as the much better freshman show Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Without a single laugh, Dads insulted everyone who watched it. The surface-level plot involves two video game developers, Warner (Giovanni Ribisi) and Eli (Seth Green), and the mishaps that occur once their unbearable fathers, Crawford (Martin Mull) and David (Peter Reigert), respectively, crash-land in their sons' once-pleasant lives. But Dads doesn't exist to service character or story—if last night's pilot is any indication, it's just an excuse for talented actors who should know better to slum it with a ghoulish barrage of embarrassing racial humor, immature sight gags, and an intrusive, clearly put-on laugh track.

In any other case, a pilot as awful as Dads would be easy to dismiss and completely forget, but this isn't your basic misfire by some unqualified and anonymous TV hacks. No, Dads comes from co-creators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild and producer Seth MacFarlane, a proven trifecta responsible for the winning animated programs Family Guy and American Dad and last year's hilarious box office smash Ted.

Dads, their first foray into live-action TV, is the trio's creative nadir. Sadly, it's also fuel for Family Guy's passionate haters, of which there are many, to further devalue MacFarlane's hit-or-miss but more often than laugh-out-loud silly series. As in, "Look, we've always said MacFarlane's brand of comedy is bad—Dads proves it."

The similarities are hard to ignore. Like Family Guy, Dads deploys random pop culture references (i.e., a quote from The Untouchables), and the majority of its "comedy" comes at the expense of every ethnic group imaginable. But Family Guy exaggerates the absurdities, tucking the potentially offensive content into cutaways that are hysterically realistic, or spoofs of fictional properties (TV shows, movies, etc.). Plus, by segmenting most of the jokes into these disconnected vignettes, Family Guy allows you to take it or leave it. On Dads, however, there's no separation. Actual human actors are saying these things, and actress Brenda Song is demeaning herself by dressing as a "sexy Asian schoolgirl," in a realistic setting predicated on one stereotype after another. The slights against Puerto Ricans, Muslims, and Spanish women are meant to be as commonplace as "Good morning" and "What's for dinner?"

Before MacFarlane's critical enemies go all Frankenstein's angry mob on everything he's ever worked on, we feel the need to defend Family Guy in the wake of the Dads folly. As you'll see here, the first Dads episode ripped off familiar elements from Family Guy while simultaneously depleting all of the necessary brains and laughs. Thanks to these side-by-side comparisons, Peter Griffin has never looked so esteemed.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Dads: Since, you know, all suburban housemaids have to be middle-aged Spanish-speaking women, the lady responsible for cleaning Warner's home is, you guessed it, a portly Latina woman. Thankfully, there aren't any jokes made at her expense in the pilot, though she's only there to set up a later dig at Warner's Latina wife, Camilla (Vanessa Lachey). While visiting Warner's house, David mistakes Camilla for Warner's maid. Because, that's right, of her race.

Family Guy, "And I'm Joyce Kinney" (Season 8, Episode 9): One of the show's fan-favorite recurring characters is Consuela, the maid who drags every conversation out with her misinterpretations, predilection to respond to any comment with "no, no, no," and general apathy. Wisely, MacFarlane and the Family Guy team haven't worn out Consuela's welcome, using her sparingly and always to good effect. As in the time when Peter calls Consuela to give her his cell phone number, for her to ring him if an important package arrives. Unfortunately, she's terrible with numbers.

Advantage: Family Guy

Dads: Because all of Crawford's dialogue is of the racially insensitive variety, since he's an out-of-touch but friendly racist, of course, he engages in some small talk with David that revolves around dissing Muslims: "And it would have been a billion-dollar deal if somebody had told me the correct pronunciation is 'shee-ite Muslim.'" Get it…shit Muslim? And you thought the Miss America controversy brought out the worst in bigotry.

Family Guy, "Turban Cowboy" (Season 11, Episode 15): Frequent targets for Peter Griffin and the whole Quahog gang, Muslim people are often the recipients of the show's weaker gags, like this bit in which a hospitalized Peter befriends a fellow patient who also happens to be Muslim. The roommate's favorite cartoon: Muslim Looney Tunes, with its variation of Porky Pig that introduces episodes with, "As a pig, I am very dirty and should not be touched by humans." It's not exactly South Park-caliber humor, but at least it's not a lazy play on the word "shit."

Advantage: Again, Family Guy.

Dads: Remember how Martin Mull's Crawford character is a one-dimensional bigot? Well, true to form, the pilot concludes with a scene where Crawford shows David their sons' office. "And this is their ethnically and sexually diverse workplace," he says, before redirecting his attention to Warner. "Where's your gay guy. Show him your gay guy." And, that's right, there's a gay guy sitting right behind them. His slow, embarrassed wave and sideways grin—which imply, "Please, just leave me alone"—represent the Dads pilot's lone moment of earnestness. You just now the actor playing the "gay guy" wishes he were somewhere else.

Family Guy, "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Fonz" (Season 4, Episode 18): It's a random cutaway that will never get old. Just for the fuck of it, Peter Griffin is watching the (fictional) movie Jaws V: Fire Island, leading to a clip featuring an effeminate Great White Shark taunting a couple of gay male swimmers from beneath their dangling feet. Ridiculous? Yes, and that's the point. Like all of Family Guy's best gags, it's also ridiculously juvenile and, concurrently, endearing in its playfulness. Jaws' monologue includes, "I can see right up them shorts… Oh, wait a minute, I did have a chubby kid on a raft earlier today. It's OK, I've been swimming a lot lately." It's a silly, silly moment with a cartoon shark that speaks to the difference between what you can get away with in animation and what changes when you have human actors.

Advantage: Another one for Family Guy.

Dads: Poor Martin Mull. Once a respectable comedic actor, the veteran's career has been reduced to serving as Dads' resident spewer of all things racist. Like the scene in the pilot where he's matter-of-factly insulting Chinese men, women, and children while ruining his son's chances of landing investment money from some Chinese businessmen: "The Chinese are a lovely and wonderful people, but you can't trust them! There's a reason shanghai's a verb!"

Family Guy, "Tiegs for Two" (Season 9, Episode 14): Known for its clever and inventive fight scenes (Peter versus the man-sized chicken, for the win), Family Guy merged hilarious fisticuffs with brilliant nostalgia-baiting when Peter comes to blows with the local laundromat owner, Mr. Washee Washee. Rather than go with a lazy kung-fu movie approach, MacFarlane and company opted to make all video game lovers swoon—Peter and Washee Washee throw down Street Fighter style in an authentically rendered nod to the classic game in its 16-bit days. Again, silliness and layers make Family Guy the more successful provocateur.

Advantage: Family Guy, by a landslide.

Dads: Unfortunately for Brenda Song, Veronica isn't only turned into a fetishistic and awful visual punch line in that "sexy schoolgirl" outfit. She's also given this two-for-one line of stereotypical idiocy: "You're lucky your dads are American. My dad beat me with a math book until I was 16." You see, because Asian fathers are mean-spirited abusers and Asian kids are good at mathematics. FOH.

Family Guy, "Petarded" (Season 4, Episode 6); "Family Gay" (Season 7, Episode 8): In relation to Asian parents, one of Chris Griffin's cutaways triggers a brief scene where a 12-year-old kid is doing homework alone in his bedroom. His father walks in and asks, "You doctor yet? Talk to me when you doctor!" Equally reductive, yes, but at least it's devoid of any domestic violence.

As for the math angle, who can forget the time when, in the middle of taking the SATs, Peter pulls out his "calculator" that's actually an Asian kid. Prodding the boy with his pencil, Peter pleads, "Come on, do math."

Advantage: This one's close, but, yes, it's Family Guy. Making light of parents hitting their kids will never win anything around here.

Dads: If you've ever enjoyed Martin Mull's work before Dads, the show's producers seem hellbent on making you despise the guy. In an episode full of egregious one-liners from his character, this one's the absolute pits. The scene begins with Crawford walking in on Warner playing a video game. For no logical reason, and with zero prior set-up or context, Crawford asks, "What cha playing? Punch the Puerto Rican?" If not for the sake of putting this piece together, we would have told everyone involved with Dads to "fuck off" in our minds, changed the channel, and called it quits at that moment.

Family Guy: There's no need to cite any like-minded Family Guy clips here. Even at its worst, Family Guy pads its insensitive jokes with (random) set-ups that at least try to justify the payoffs. "Punch the Puerto Rican" lacks wit, intelligence, and any kind of connection to anything that happens in the Dads pilot. It's nothing more than a cruel line penned by a shameful screenwriter in his lowest moment of comedic laziness. How the smart and usually clever Seth MacFarlane could ever let that pass on one his properties is anyone's guess. Ours: He doesn't give a you-know-what about Dads beyond its bottom line.

Advantage: Hell, even the worst half-hour of the altogether lame The Cleveland Show is superior to Dads. If FOX knows what's good for them, they'll cancel this debacle before people really get angry.