The later seasons—Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen—were ghosts. They had seen everything. They had been praised, cancelled, revived, hated, loved, and parodied. They had outlived their rivals. They had watched The Simpsons grow arthritic and South Park grow righteous. They were simply there , a digital river flowing endlessly, each episode a drop of water indistinguishable from the last.
They didn't speak much. They sat in the middle of the box, their discs covered in a thin, strange film. These were the seasons where the cutaways grew long, pointless, and cruel. Where Meg was tortured for the crime of existing. Where a joke would start, realize it had nowhere to go, and simply beat you over the head until you stopped laughing. Season Seven had a nervous twitch. Season Eight just stared at the wall, mumbling, "Remember when we were about a family? No? Me neither." family guy seasons
Then came the dark ages. Seasons Six through Nine. They had outlived their rivals
And as Leo laughed at a joke about a 1980s TV commercial he didn't understand, the seasons settled back into their scratched plastic trays, content. They were not a story with a beginning, middle, or end. They were a noise. A long, stupid, glorious, endless noise. And for now, someone was listening. They didn't speak much
"Good luck," groaned Season Eight.
Season Three, sandwiched between the earnestness of the early years and the chaos of the revival, felt a bit forgotten. It was the quiet intellectual, the one who remembered being cancelled and then resurrected by the faithful. It had a melancholy wisdom. "We are not a show," it once said to Season Five, who was too busy doing a musical number about diarrhea to listen. "We are a broadcast aneurysm."
Season Four was the middle child, but not the quiet one. Season Four was the steroid-pumped teenager who discovered sugar and rage. It was bloated, brilliant, and completely unhinged. It was the season where Peter fought the giant chicken for the first time. It was the season of "PTV" and "Petarded." It spoke in a loud, rapid-fire staccato, cutting away from reality every twelve seconds. "REMEMBER WHEN I DID THAT THING?" it would bellow. "THAT WAS LIKE THAT OTHER THING! BECAUSE OF THE THING!"