Watching Wednesday #7 – Weak Watching
YouTube Live: Live, Die, Replay
The short of it: It’s the fast food of media consumption: easy, quick, and someone else does it all for you.
Alright, this is gonna be a weird one. Well, maybe not weird, but unorthodox. It’s not nearly as weird as my lame clause comma statement format, but still.
So I’ve become a huge fan of this whole creepily-automatic, “24/7 LIVESTREAM TV SHOW PLAY NOW” that pops up on YouTube Live. It’s everything from Fox News to Animal Fights to Family Guy. And it’s that last one that’s been occupying my free time.
It’s a bit of a twofold guilty pleasure. For one, it’s all pretty much garbage in terms of content (at least, for me, there’s like Nat Geo and fancy learnin’ stuff I ain’t clicking on). And it’s like lazy pirating, where I don’t like the content enough to seek it out on my own.
Look, I love Family Guy. Season one is absurdly good for a pilot season, and season two continues that trend. Although season three reveals that petering off into absurdity (c wut I did thur) that derails the next decade, it’s still a fantastic collection of humor and character.
Then it got worse.
But somehow, it got better. Despite a lack of a showrunner or truly funny character, the show reclaimed itself as a staple of network humor with its grasp of absurd and classic humor. Something as simple as one character greeting a background character is complimented by an extended meta-humor joke, resulting in a show that manages to both laugh with and at itself.
The end result is some random YouTube channel under an obnoxious name, either John Smith or PETER GRIFFIN LOL LIKE FAMILY GUY, streaming the latest episodes of the show. Despite being a chronological deposition of Family Guy’s humor, these channels end up being the most enjoyable background noise available. It’s like white guy white noise– there’s a cutaway you can chuckle at before the show cuts back to some trite “Character X discovers they can do Y” plot.
Basically, this is the best way to enjoy a show that started as both a copy of and modernized rival of The Simpsons.
Watch season one of Family Guy. But also watch the latest as a testament to how unimportant thinking is between laughing.
Matis&More. 