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Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show on Fox

Kudos to Microsoft for pulling its sponsorship of Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.  Upon viewing the live taping of the show prior to broadcast, Microsoft decided that MacFarlane’s brand of tasteless, raunchy humor didn’t fit with their corporate branding. Unfortunately, Warner Brothers did eventually step up to become the sole sponsor of the half-hour sleaze-fest and the show sadly did air without a hitch.  So what exactly did Warner Brothers pay for?  Disgusting sex jokes, crass Holocaust humor, cruel impersonations of deaf people, and loads of bleeped profanity.  Basically, Warner Brothers paid a pretty penny for the Worst TV Show of the Week.

Essentially, the special was a lame excuse to have Family Guy, American Dad and Cleveland Show creator Seth MacFarlane and voice-actress Alex Borstein (who plays Lois Griffin on Family Guy) sing show tunes, backed by a forty-piece orchestra, in front of a live audience.  In between their performances, pre-taped sketches were shown, including one where Peter presides over “family time” in the Griffin household.  Peter poses the question, “Okay, here's one, you guys.  You can have sex with one celebrity.  Who's it gonna be?” 

As each member of the family chooses the celebrity he or she would like to have sex with, Meg decides she’d sleep with Star Wars robot C-3PO, explaining, “Yeah, he seems like he'd be smart and kinda gentle.”

“Gentle?” Lois counters, “Meg, you sleep with him, he'd cut you open like a tin can.”

“Well, maybe that's what I like!  You guys don't know me!” Meg screams before she storms off.

After a beat, Peter randomly says, “So, we all go pleasure ourselves in separate rooms and come back in ten?”

“Sounds good to me,” Lois proclaims while Chris remains motionless at the foot of the couch, playing a handheld videogame.

“Hey, what about Chris?” Peter asks.

 Lois explains, “Oh, he already finished about 16 times today.”

Masturbating in separate rooms is what passes as family bonding in the Griffin household. 

If it wasn’t this truly disturbing scene that sent the Microsoft folks fleeing, perhaps it was Seth’s rendition of “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music.  In the middle of his performance Alex objects, stating that as a Jew whose mother and grandmother barely escaped the Nazis, she cannot in good conscience stand back and let Seth sing that song, given the Austrians’ terrible treatment of Jews during World War II.  Seth points out, “Had none of that ever happened, how many female Jewish comedians would you be competing with in Hollywood?  Right now it’s just you and Sarah Silverman.”  Alex subsequently breaks into the song’s familiar chorus.

Maybe the reps at Microsoft squirmed at the sight of Kermit the Frog auditioning for Tom Hanks’ role in Philadelphia.  The Muppet beloved by children everywhere is shown uttering the lines, “You're firing me?  It’s because I have AIDS, isn't it?  You're firing me because I'm a homosexual man with AIDS.”

Or maybe the people behind Windows 7 slammed the door in McFarlane’s face when Alex performed a truly cheap, tasteless impersonation of deaf actress Marlee Matlin singing Lady Gaga’s hit, “Pokerface.”  The sketch was only slightly salvaged by Matlin herself when she stepped on stage and cracked wise about Alex’s obesity.  But as Matlin flipped off Alex and shouted, “[bleeped “F***”] you!” before she stormed off-stage, one couldn’t help but feel sad over the fact that Matlin had stooped to MacFarlane’s level.

The night ended with a blatant ploy to promote MacFarlane’s toxic spin-off The Cleveland Show.  Whenever an expletive needed to be censored, an audio clip of Cleveland saying his own name replaced the familiar “bleep” sound.  What ensued was an incomprehensible string of “Cleveland”s.  Here’s a snippet of the transcript:

ALEX: “Okay, wait, so I can say also like if you were a South African hermaphrodite runner you very well could have a [Cleveland] and a [Cleveland]?” 

SETH:  “Ooo, exotic.  And if you were flexible, you could curl your [Cleveland] around your [Cleveland], wash it off and then start in on your [Cleveland] ‘til you [Cleveland], you got your two hands free to just [Cleveland, Cleveland] ‘til they  [Cleveland] on your [Cleveland].”

ALEX:  “Okay, are we done?  Because I'm about to [Cleveland] my [Cleveland].”

Given the final ratings, it appears the folks at Microsoft weren’t the only ones that thought the special wasn’t worth their time.  It roundly lost its timeslot to all the other major networks.  Perhaps in the future, when MacFarlane needs someone to subsidize his Broadway fantasies, more companies will know to stay well away.

For crass humor, sexually explicit dialogue, and vulgar profanity, Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show has been named Worst TV Show of the Week.