The Goode Family premieres tonight…

Updated on May 27, 2009 By Ken Begg 12 Comments

I’d like to think it will last, but ABC seems an odd fit for this, and the network poobahs must already be wincing about bad reviews from the Cultural Police, such as this pissy review at the New York Times. Wouldn’t want those cocktail party invitations to dry up.

The main problem, I guess, is that “the show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood.”   Yes, Mike Judge should study Seth McFarland to see how cutting edge comedy is done, like an episode of Family Guy I recently saw where Nazis (real ones from the ’30s) were wearing McCain/Palin buttons.  Get it?  Now that feels aggressively in sync with the current mood…especially if you are one the more than six hundred New York Times subscribers still extant.

Maybe ABC will cancel it and Fox will pick it up as a King of the Hill replacement…assuming they can get McFarland’s permission.

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  • andy80

    Thanks for the reminder, I’ll give it a shot. looks like Mr. Van Driesen from Beavis and Butthead spinoff, which should be a good thing.

  • roger h

    NPR knocked it as well.

    I took that as an endorsement.

  • GalaxyJane

    I’ve been seeing some stuff about this over on Big Hollywood. I can’t wait! As a (thankfully) temporary Texan I love Mike Judge’s worldview.

  • From the NY Times piece: “Fox canceled the animated series after 13 seasons, its ratings in decline, testament perhaps to a national exhaustion with values-bashing, even when the weaponry produced few scars and little bloodshed.”

    Wait … what values were being bashed here? The sentence makes no sense.

  • If the New York Times hates it, then it must be pretty good. They make an excellent reverse barometer.

  • SpideyTerry

    Greetings, all. First time poster here. I gotta say, while I always like Judge’s work, my interest in this show definitely piqued when the usual subjects started picking on it. Still, I wanted to be fair and watch the show for myself before forming an opinion. And here it is – it was freakin’ hilarious. Well done, Mike Judge, well done.

    “Yes, Mike Judge should study Seth McFarland to see how cutting edge comedy is done, like an episode of Family Guy I recently saw where Nazis (real ones from the ’30s) were wearing McCain/Palin buttons.”

    What?! They did that?! Oh, I knew McFarland was an overblown hack, but this goes beyond anything I thought about him. He should be taking lessons not only from Judge, but also Trey Parker and Matt Stone. (Say what you will about “South Park”, but at least they have the guts to make fun of everybody – not just the people they disagree with politically.)

  • Pip

    I don’t watch much TV, but if Yahoo! pans it, I’ll be on it like scales on fish.

  • Blackadder

    Seth McFarland does make fun of everybody. He’s just not very funny when he does it.

  • Petoht

    Seth thinks “cutting edge” is a 3 minute long clip of Conway Twitty.

    It’s getting to the point where removing all the filler and self-referential in-jokes, you’d have roughly 10 minutes of show. Family Guy really feels like him giving everyone the finger and seeing how offensive and lazy he can be and still not get canceled.

    I hope the Goode Family gets a chance to get viewers. It certainly sounds like something that’s been desperately needed.

  • If you miss them when they air, you can fortunately catch full episodes of The Goode Family on ABC.com. (The search & navigation on ABC’s site is abysmal. You can probably find episode links more easily through the much better search features at Fancast or Veoh.)

    I catch most of my programming on Hulu, but last I heard Hulu streams are not counted towards a show’s Nielsen ratings, while streams viewed from the networks’ own websites are. Maybe this will change if ABC gets off their asses & gets some content migrated to Hulu. CBS is still a wildcard in it all; ABC is buying in as a Hulu partner, leaving CBS as the sole outsider among the big four.

  • Not funny. Too soft on liberals and liberalism. Observe in the first episode, the only thing that really got treated viciously were Christian “Purity Balls”

    The Goode family are too nice and sincere to laugh at. Where is the liberal fascism and liberal totalitarianism? Observe that the kid gets away with defining his ethnicity as “African American” (he is white from South Africa, while in real life the guy who pulled that stunt got expelled from college.

    The only funny character is the dog, because he is rebelling against the family veganism by devouring ever neighborhood pet smaller than himself.

  • Blackadder

    “Family Guy really feels like him giving everyone the finger and seeing how offensive and lazy he can be and still not get canceled.”

    I guarantee this is correct, and McFarland would laugh and admit it if you called him on it. The only aspect you left out is him not giving a rat’s ass, which he would probably also admit.