Earlier this year, critic Richard Rushfeld proposed the coining of a new trope: “strangle the dog,” a play on the trope of “pet the dog,” in which screenwriters would have a character pet a dog as a shortcut to getting viewers to like that character.
To “strangle the dog,” however, in Rushfeld’s words, would “signal to viewers that a series will be highbrow, serious, and edgy.”
Not a single one of those words could possibly, for any reasonable person, apply to Family Guy.
However, the traumatic death of beloved talking dog Brian last month at least seemed like an attempt by the show’s writers to lend some genuine emotion to a series which, even in its earliest days, failed to balance humour and sentiment nearly as well as its predecessor,
