Dear MR,
Why is it that I can’t stop thinking about the television show American Dad!, and how often it resorts to the dramatic convention of Deus ex Machina? Is anyone in the world interested in this topic? I have to record my thoughts. The absurdity of the idea is matched by the absurdity of the show; subject and commentary are united.
There is a lineage of “prime time” cartoons, intended for adults, that stretches back to 1960’s The Flintstones (into cartoon prehistory, one might say). Fred and Wilma, plus two children (male and female) and a pet dinosaur. The Jetsons took this exact dramatis personae and set in the future: the perfect post-war picture of technological bliss, with human frailty mixed in. Other “adult cartoons” have come and gone: Beavis and Butthead, Daria, Dr. Katz, Home Movies, and others. But it was The Simpsons that catapulted this new art onto the global stage, not just in popularity, but into the realm of genius and cultural relevance.
For some time The Simpsons was the unchallenged ruler of made-for-adult cartoons, but in 1999 this supremacy was deeply and profoundly challenged by the advent of Family Guy. Family Guy has explicitly referenced its debt to The Simpsons, and the similarities are more than obvious. But for all its derivative nature in setup, Family Guy changed the rules, by making the cartoon topical (to a fault), impossible (especially with the cutaway), and extremely offensive. Family Guy’s creator, Seth MacFarland, a rare talent, spun the show into a cartoon empire, including the ill-fated spin-off The Cleveland Show, as well as the subject of this little essay, a show called American Dad!. [Simpsons creator Matt Groening also created another adult cartoon in 1999, the spectacular Futurama, which breaks the Simpsons mold completely.]
One could describe this format that gets passed around so much as a nuclear family paradigm: Parents (heterosexual couple), male child, female child, baby (wild card), animal. The wild card in the Jetsons was probably Rosie the Robot, but The Simpsons keeps it as a baby, and the animal is of course the family dog, Santa’s Little Helper. Family Guy keeps the baby, but gives it a voice, and a devastatingly resonant one too. The animal is also intensified with Brian the talking dog. The Cleveland Show makes a carbon copy of Family Guy, with a talking toddler, and replaces the dog with a bear. American Dad! fits the template like a glove: Stan and Francine, male child Steve, female child Haley, “baby/wild card” Roger the alien, and talking animal Klaus the goldfish. As we will see, Bob’s Burgers matches the Simpsons paradigm, as does Rick and Morty, an unusual instance where the wild card is Rick himself.
My own experience with American Dad! has been complicated. Initially, like most of the world, I hated it. But unlike the rest of the world, I couldn’t look away. What’s so wrong with it? The Simpsons mocks the show in one episode, in which the characters leaf through a book of wanted criminals: Peter, from Family Guy, with the caption “plagiarism”, and then Stan, from American Dad!, with the caption “plagiarism of plagiarism”. If you doubt the chain of inspiration, say all the names of the famous cartoon families in a row: Flintstone, Jetson, Simpson, Griffin, Smith. Smith breaks the iambic two syllable pattern, but it copies the family form in an embarrassingly transparent way. But apart from its 3rd generation feeling, American Dad! was panned almost immediately as just plain bad television. I remember reading an article that was titled “American Dad! is the worst show on TV”—I can’t find this article anymore, because if you google “worst” and “American Dad”, you get hundreds of results, mostly fans naming the worst episodes, the worst moments, and describing how it is worse than Family Guy.
In so many ways they are all right. American Dad! is kind of a terrible show. The storylines may be unpredictable on the surface, but underneath, their structure is cookie cutter to the max (see below). But before I take a crack at form analysis, let me mount a defense of this most unusual of TV shows:
The characters do grow, and we actually find ourselves caring about them. Stan in particular is a markedly different character by season 4.
The combination of a CIA agent and a costume-loving alien is brilliant—it allows the show to go to any place imaginable while still maintaining the facade of “reality”—or at least a self-contained universe with laws.
The casting is unbelievable. Not only is McFarlane giving his usual brilliant best in every episode, singer Scott Grimes voices Steve, resulting in some stunning moments, and acknowledged theater genius Patrick Stewart (also of Star Trek fame) voices Avery Bullock, the deputy director of the CIA.
But what keeps me watching is the surface level writing. It reaches a Harvard-Lampoon-type absurdity and then constantly exceeds itself. In its absurdity it outdoes even Family Guy. The writing seems to come from that kid in your elementary school class that you hated, but was genuinely funny. A whole room of these kids writing jokes. Sometimes I laugh so hard that I can’t breathe.
Aristotle, in his Poetics, famously writes that the worst ending a playwright can employ is the Deus ex Machina. This is the device in which a god literally appears above the scene, on a machine, to set everything right. We see this often in Euripides, most obviously in plays like Ion, where Apollo shows up to explain the misunderstanding and set things right. But Euripides also makes frequent use of what I would call the “Prepared Deus ex Machina”, where an unrelated element ends up unexpectedly saving the day: think of Herakles in Alcestis, or Theseus in Herakles. At any rate, one tends to agree with Aristotle: we are happiest, and most moved, when the fated conflict is worked out by human means, even if it means immense tragedy and suffering.
Nearly every single American Dad! episode fits the same story-telling form, and nearly every episode is resolved via the Deus ex Machina, whether explicit or prepared. Here is my understanding of the structure of just about any given American Dad! episode:
A principal character has a fatal flaw
First form: the character hates something and condemns it irrevocably, but later discovers they love that very thing. That love goes too far, and the character has to cover up the new addiction (e.g. episodes where Stan is addicted to crack, or texting)
Second form: character discovers something unpleasant and goes to great lengths to ameliorate or avoid it (Stan discovers the chaos of life and combats it by creating a tiny world)
Third form: family based conflict in which character takes family for granted and/or wants time away, only to find that family was what they wanted all along (Stan’s all night pills to get away from Francine, his devotion to Spring Break when Francine stops laughing at his jokes)
The flaw is pointed out by another character, but the chance for quick resolution and redemption is refused.
The situation deteriorates until the principal character’s family or loved ones are directly endangered by the flaw
A lesson is explicitly learned and articulated, often in the very jaws of danger
Resolution, most frequently via Prepared Deus ex Machina.
This structure is so regular that one sometimes has the impression of painting by numbers. What of it? Isn’t a cantata form the same basic shape every week? It’s how each tile is painted that’s what’s interesting; and for me the endless absurdity of the writing makes each tile worth a second look. But perhaps the world’s animosity toward American Dad! comes from the fact that the writers really just don’t seem to care about exit strategy. Once the flaw is exposed and the lesson is learned, they are totally willing to just pull the eject cord right at the 19 minute mark. What exactly does the Deus ex Machina look like? Here are some examples from recent seasons:
The Explicit Deus ex Machina: In the explicit situation, a savior unexpectedly shows up, sometimes literally from the sky, just to save the day.
Season 10 Episode 7: Big Stan on Campus. As Stan is being chased by the student mob, Avery arrives in a helicopter just in time to save the day.
Season 10 Episode 17: American Fung. Fung Wah repeatedly interrupts the action, and provides an escape hatch ending
Season 11 Episode 10: The Two Hundred. Klaus arrives as literal Deus ex Machina, godlike in the sky above the action, and the story is sidestepped.
Season 13 Episode 6: The CIA shows up to save the day, as an explicit Deus ex Machina.
Season 13 Episode 8: The CIA shows up to save the day, as an explicit Deus ex Machina.
The Prepared Deus ex Machina: an element from earlier (or from the B-story), often an absurd one, returns to save the day. The art of the Prepared Deus ex Machina is setting the prop at the beginning of the episode in a way that’s still funny and stands on its own—like crafting a Mad Magazine fold-in. Here are some Prepared examples:
Season 10 Episode 8: Now and Gwen. Francine avoids jail time when Stan calls in a favor with a local judge.
Season 11 Episode 8: Stan-Dan Deliver. Klaus arrives and burns the problematic document, simply undoing the problem.
Season 12 Episode 5: Bahama Mama. The Kids Klub shows up to save Steve.
What’s crazy to me is that there really are American Dad! fans out there. Not only that, it is, at the time of writing, in its fifteenth season. That’s an extremely successful record by any metric. I personally hope that American Dad!, as well as its two major predecessors, run forever, or at least until their creators decide to pull the plug intentionally. In the meantime, in the last few years several more majorly successful cartoons-for-adults have been minted, some of which are very much on the Simpsons model: Bob’s Burgers, an explicit homage to the Simpsons (down to the rabbit ears on the Maggie-Louise character), BoJack Horseman, undoubtedly the most tragic of all the cartoons, and Rick and Morty, which in its towering philosophical genius puts itself in an entirely separate class.
11.24.20 NYC