Father doesn't know best

Those overseas cartoon cloning factories are working overtime these days, sending us new adult animation shows like 24-frame-a-second suicide battalions. Fast upon the surreally bizarre Dilbert on UPN comes Family Guy, premiering on Fox on April 11 in the coveted 8:30 p.m. time slot -- after The Simpsons -- that was the producers' first choice.

The show is a hoot. Created as an outgrowth of a short animation Seth McFarlane did at Rhode Island School of Design when he studied there, it's kind of The Honeymooners meet The Brady Bunch as played by the Munsons. But in its oblique cultural commentary and willingness -- eagerness? -- to offend, it owes a lot to The Simpsons, the show it will be incessantly compared to by critics and viewers alike.

You might have caught a preview episode on Super Bowl Sunday. It's instructive to compare the version that aired with both the rough cut distributed for review and another show Fox sent to reviewers. (The latter was scheduled to be the April 11 premiere, but the network decided to use one in which baby Stewie recalls his life in utero.)

The Griffins are your typical working-class, white-bread family, except for the exotic characterizational touch that they live in Rhode Island, in the town of Quahog. Peter works at the Happy Go Lucky Toy Co., and presumably we're not supposed to think Mattel. Wife Lois is a calm and stable presence, but not without a sense of humor. ("A hangover," she says, "is nature's way of telling you I'm right.") Teenage son Chris sounds like Bobcat Goldthwait and sis Meg is dying for collagen injections for her lips.

The most interesting characters, however, are the dog and the baby. Pooch Brian is the most sane and debonair of the lot, frequently giving Peter sound advice. At one point that includes whacking him with a newspaper and firmly saying, "No! No!"

It is toddler Stewie, however, who is going to take over the show. With his haughty British accent (it's not likely anyone hears him, though), he plots vengeance on his mother and vents seething frustrations: "Damn you, vile woman -- you've impeded my work since the day I escaped from your wretched womb, that cursed ovarian Bastille!" (Stewie is prolix as well as malevolent.) He spends the first show trying to kill his Mom, via bow and arrow, gun, etc.

Plot one consists of Peter being fired for sleeping on the job while deathly defective toys pass by on a conveyor belt. When his unemployment checks are mistakenly issued with extra zeros, he spends the money on things like a moat around the house. Peter ends up giving it back to the taxpayers by dumping money from a blimp over the Super Bowl.

To McFarlane's credit, he gave Fox some outrageous footage to cut out before the preview show could be broadcast. The most over-the-top moment was in a stag film Peter rents, Assablanca: Bogart opens his raincoat and says to Bergman, "Ilsa, if I take this out now and you're not on it, you'll regret it," and continues with more familiar dialogue. Close behind, when they are thrown in jail, Brian is reading a magazine, Barely Legal Bitches, which was replaced by an untitled book in the version that aired.

Kept in both is Peter's remark that "America's great. Except for the South." In the toy company's "GI Jew" line, the soldier doll with thick glasses still said, "You call these bagels?" And under the credits, "Aunt Jemimah Witnesses," looking fresh off pancake boxes, still come to the Griffins' door.

The advance review episode is tamer but doesn't neglect the show's sassy strengths. The story revolves around Meg's ill-fated driving lessons from Peter, who crashes into a satellite dish and wipes out the town's TV reception. Stewie fumes at being condescended to by Sesame Street. "Can I count to three? Heavens, I'm already shooting at a fifth-grade level." Despising broccoli, he nearly succeeds in destroying the world's weather pattern so that vegetables won't grow. Brian the dog still has style, as in "Hey, barkeep -- whose leg do I have to hump to get a dry martini around here?"

NYPD Blue's gratuitous nudity gets a zing, as Sipowitz tortures a guy by mooning him. Even the Fox network gets poked for its "reality" shows, as we see a scene from its latest: Fast Animals, Slow Children.

That's the ticket. If bad TV becomes the main source for Family Guy, the show could last forever.

-- B.R.

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Dan Tobin can be reached at dtobin[a]phx.com.