Of all the shows on TV, the last one I ever expected to see reviewed in the pages of The New Yorker was Family Guy. Not that the show doesn't have any sophisticated humor; it's just that the sophistication is buried so deep under fart jokes and silly flashbacks that I figured it would never enter The New Yorker's radar screens. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my copy of the lastest issue this afternoon and saw this positive review by Nancy Franklin (the review also mentions American Dad, largely in negative terms. Franklin even manages to squeeze in a mention of Drawn Together, which she liked, sort of).

The review mostly summarizes what most Family Guy fans already know about the show: it's cancellation, it's popularity on DVD and Adult Swim, and the show's resurrection. But you have to remember that Franklin needs to go back over this well-tred ground so the readers -- who probably don't overlap too much with the show's fans -- have an idea of what the show's about. Most interesting is the lead paragraph, where Franklin takes a roundabout road to saying how mostly men make cartoons because we were never trained to be Nice and Proper like women were.

Also funny are the fluffy character descriptions, like when Franklin characterizes Stewie as "foppish and maniacal, and creepily pansexual." Really. I kinda had a feeling Stewie was foppish. But I never would have pegged him as pansexual. I think.