The bane of late 1990s, early aughts adult animated comedy may finally meet its end after decades of scolding, threatening and harassing artists like Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Seth MacFarlane.
Ever since South Park ruthlessly roasted Family Guy with the two-part episode “Cartoon Wars” in 2006, the shows’ respective creators have been mortal enemies whose mutual dislike runs deeper than simply having different senses of humor. However, before Parker and Stone ever uttered a single unkind word about Family Guy and its aquatic-mammalian writers, the media watchdog group Parents Television Council (PTC) was trying to get both South Park and Family Guy pulled from cable as it waged a war against any televised material that went against their own staunchly conservative values.
The PTC hated South Park and Family Guy more than either of them could ever hate each other, and, for years, the Christian censorship organization regularly denounced the shows while orchestrating write-in campaigns urging the FCC to take action against them. Unfortunately for the perpetually triggered parents of the PTC, this week, the once-feared organization filed for bankruptcy amidst mounting debt and following a steep, decades-long decline in their political influence.
Don’t Miss
The ancient and common enemy of crass cartoon comedy seems to be defeated — the PTC might even have to sell all those pearls they’ve been clutching.
Conservative political activist Leo Brent Bozell III founded the PTC in 1995 to combat what he perceived to be a decline in “decency” in mass media. Officially, the PTC advocated for “responsible, family-friendly content across all media platforms,” but, in practice, that meant using public shaming and the mass filing of FCC complaints to pressure networks into censoring or pre-empting any material that didn’t align with the PTC’s socially conservative politics. While the PTC was most famous for lambasting networks whenever a performer in a live broadcast would slip in a swear word (or, in Janet Jackson’s case, slip a nip), the group was also accused of being a deeply homophobic organization that fought against the rise of gay representation in television that coincided with their own cultural ascent.
Given how, despite its theme song, Family Guy encapsulated all the crass, violent and sexual degeneracy that the PTC hoped to eradicate from American media, the organization made numerous attempts to pressure Fox into taking Family Guy off the air — although the show’s brief cancelation in 2002 had more to do with poor ratings than Christian rage. In 2009, the PTC was behind one of the biggest controversies in the history of Family Guy when the self-described watchdog group and their supporters submitted over 188,000 complaints to the FCC over the episode “Family Gay,” specifically calling out a scene where Stewie eats a bowl of cereal with horse semen instead of milk.
South Park, of course, was another point of emphasis for the PTC. Bozell personally condemned the series during just its first season, writing, “South Park is so offensive that it shouldn’t have been made. It doesn’t just push the envelope; it knocks it off the table.”
Presumably, such a lurid condemnation drove scores of interested viewers to the fledgling series, and the PTC would be forced to spend the following decade awarding South Park with dubious honors such as “Worst Cable TV Show of the Week.”
However, while the soon-to-be-defunct censorship group raged against iconic comedy shows like South Park and Family Guy, the artists themselves found the PTC to be positively hilarious. When Family Guy earned one of its many condemnations from the group in 2008, MacFarlane celebrated the attack, telling an interviewer of the honor, “That’s like getting hate mail from Hitler. They’re literally terrible human beings. I’ve read their newsletter, I’ve visited their website, and they’re just rotten to the core.”
“For an organization that prides itself on Christian values … they spend their entire day hating people,” MacFarlane said of the PTC. “They can all suck my dick as far as I’m concerned.”
While the PTC probably made their umpteenth attempt to end MacFarlane’s career after such an obscene comment, 17 years later and with the debt collector on their door step, they should probably reach out to the Family Guy creator to inquire, “How much?”