Brian Griffin: An Icon in Ruin

when i was a young kid around 10 i want to say one of my favorite animated cartoons of all time was a popular adult comedy known as family guy it was great for a young lad such as myself i loved the wacky griffin family and their many adventures laughing crying alongside them rooting for them to succeed with whatever challenge came their way my favorite was always the lovable family dog brian griffin oh hi i enjoyed watching him struggle to find meaning in his life to become a better person creating new bonds with different members of the family you really did see just how much he cared about each and every one of them and in return how much they cared about him but something happened the older i got the more i seemed to notice how the family i once knew and loved were starting to change they were starting to devolve it wasn't the same show anymore and just got worse and worse over time that became meaner more pretentious more obnoxious i no longer was a family guy fan the show i had once loved made me miserable to watch and with no character in the show was this more apparent than with brian [Music] griffin yes this is gonna be a serious character analysis of brian griffin from family guy what of it i think i've made it pretty clear over the years that i have a certain fondness for brian griffin anyone in here who watches my twitch streams knows what i mean brian's in the chat guys thank you so so much awesomeness for subbing with prime guys give awesome some brian's but i really i'm not lying when i say he was my favorite character i don't even really know why i guess he just seemed like the realist you know despite being a talking dog but first of all did you know this video was brought to you by manscape.com the premium global brand for men's grooming and hygiene products the lawnmower 4.0 trimmer has these ceramic blades with skin safe technology to reduce mixing cuts and can easily be replaced and on top of that is even waterproof so you can conveniently trim in the shower they also sent me this car package filled with a ton of cool items such as deodorant cologne eraser and even this little thing called the shears 2.0 looks like a wallet or something but bang an assortment of scissors and files and other useful stuff and they even give me this cool little bike to keep it all in for traveling so if you want to join over 2 million men worldwide who trust manskeep then get 20 off plus free international shipping when you use promo code alicemarketmonscube.com and thanks to montsec for sponsoring this video it's weird see as a kid i always find myself liking the sidekick more than the main character or the street man in his show or video game and that's exactly what brian was he was peter's conscious but we'll get more into that in a bit because this all changed i've been watching a lot of early family guy for an upcoming video and it made me realize just how completely different the show is in the first three seasons compared to the current ones that mainly being that the first three seasons were good but with a show like the simpsons this stems from things such as it being obvious that the writers are out of ideas and are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks therefore putting the characters in scenarios that don't fit them or just grabbing random residents of springfield and pairing them together to see what kind of mileage they can get out of it setting up relationships between people who really should never have met but with family guy i'd argue it isn't down any of that with this show i believe it's entirely down to the writing and the attitude that the writers have when will riding and this is all down to one word that you probably get sick of hearing when discussing long-running cartoons but for the sake of keeping things simple i'm going to use it anyways flanderization what is flanderization i hear you ask well it's a term to describe how over time a once complex and nuanced character can become more and more simplified over the years by exaggerating their essential traits to give an example based on who the phrase is literally named after ned flanders and the simpsons he started as a comedic foil to homer the simpsons family were a lower middle class one so to bring out the worst in his jealousy and overcompensation you make his neighbor someone who's simply more well-off than he is homer is self-indulgent and greedy so you make his natural enemy a christian guy who's extremely giving he wasn't just a religious guy he was a guy who so happened to be religious but now that's all they ever seem to do with him i mean i can understand why it happens shows don't have the same righteous forever so when bringing in new ones i can imagine they're just giving a rundown of what the character is like who therefore write their version based on that then new people come in who write a version based on the already simplified version and that cycle just continues until we have well current brian griffin brian started as an extremely simple character in the earlier episodes of family guy he was the voice of reason that was all brian has almost no story relevance in the first batch of family guy episodes all he's there to do is sit beside peter hear what he has to say and try to set him down the right path again he was the voice of reason and you know what i'm glad they didn't stick with that because in these earlier episodes brian is boring he's barely a character he's basically just peter's conscience and the writers must have thought this too because by the end of season 1 they decided they were going to do more with brian they would try to expand upon him and set them apart from just being peter's dog and treat him more like a member of the family starting with season one's brian portrait of a dog fittingly the entire plot of this episode revolves around the first time where brian is directly going against peter and his wishes the family needs a new air conditioner and to raise money peter asks brand to compete in a dog show with him eventually agreeing but then going back on it i like this it shows a bit of disobedience to the character that was needed i feel in making him stand out there's a scene where brian directly calls out peter on the fact that he's incapable of providing for his own family oh look at you big man can't even afford to buy an air conditioner for your family hey what a the rest of this episode then continues to delve into this feeling brian has of being seen as a lesser citizen just because he's a dog and while you may think this is just a weekly episode topic that will be forgotten in the next season no they continue to build upon this as time goes on they start to explore brian's self-worth and how he believes that his life has no meaning people who were fans of the original family guy remember when brian went to a therapist yeah they kind of abandoned that didn't there in season two brian started to face a midlife crisis resulting in him needing to see a therapist in order to see why he's feeling that way this all culminates on bryan realizing that he's in love with lois with him initially trying to completely disregard the idea because peter is his best friend but does eventually give in to those urges he uh thinks i'm in love oh my god you can talk i'd argue that this was brian's first true stand-out moment in the series we see here that he's a real person who's capable of having complex feelings and not knowing how to handle them season two's brian in love is one of the best episodes of the entire series and it's because it manages to be funny when it needs to be but knows to take this plot extremely seriously when it needs to i feel more often than not adult cartoons are afraid to be sincere or have a heartfelt moment out of fear of boring the audience or having them feel it isn't edgy enough for their standards but when they avoid that i think it creates some of the best episodes in the entire series as it allows them to tackle serious subjects with some weird i love how direct they are with it the episode doesn't now lead into bran comedically trying to impress or woo lois or goes into peter finding out about this and proceeding to get in a fight with him or anything brian just sits lois down and talks to her this is one of my favorite moments in the entire show and it's because this issue is treated with the severity that it needs we should cherish what we already have like a very special friendship let's say like the one you and i share that someone like me wouldn't change for anything in the world that's what i feel family guy is missing now it was about the family sure it was all wacky and cartoony but most episodes were still able to have that emotional core that tied the insanity together you know what else was a great episode that perfectly showed bronze character brian wallows and peter swallows from season 3. the peter plot for this one is completely out there and wacky which is a perfect bounce for how sad and summer the brand story is brian is tasked with taking care of this elderly shut-in who hasn't experienced the real world in years and after eventually finding a common interest in growing closer brian tries to take her out of her house to experience the world which immediately leads into her dying i know i know status quo and all but i don't mind this shift in the plot as it leads into one of the sweetest moments of the entire show where brian tries to show her the life they could have had together while on her deathbed that's what i loved about early brian he was depressed and didn't feel like he had a lot of good in life but when he tried to find it he really tried despite his attempts feeling but beginning with season four and onwards they tread on all these same plot points but in ways that caused brian to become way more unlikable and unsympathetic brian never truly finds love after this he just deets women way younger than him purely for their looks high shallow and then just continue to make jokes about how shallow he is boy that sure is a great contrast to this i remember the lowest thing how brian accepts that he needs to cherish the friendship he has with her nah in season 4 he straight up just gets in her relationship with her yeah just after a few months of being presumed dead peter returns home to find out that lois and brian are not together that sure isn't disrespectful at all yeah that definitely feels in character for both of these guys makes perfect sense i think it's fine if they want to revisit this aspect of his character that loves lois if anything i think that's great goes to show that he's more complex than initially thought just because he's able to hand the rejection at one moment doesn't mean that those feelings for lois have gone away completely but they go way too overboard with it and it just starts to get sad and weird season six is played again brian has brian take lois and peter to the city of massachusetts is massachusetts to the state or a city i don't know where he's going to be accepting an award for a poem he wrote very clearly about his affection for lois but as it goes on it focuses more so on the concept that brian thinks lois is too good for peter who does nothing but ignore the whole trip which results in brian getting lois in a room alone with him where he comes on to her and begs her to kiss him this is creepy it's like fine i guess if they want to try and explore this more deranged side to him the side of him that desperately wants to give into his urges but you gotta handle that with some class in this episode everything is made way too obvious brian is overly nice peter is obnoxiously dismissive and lois is just somehow oblivious to it all what i like about bran and love is that nobody was acting out of character are exaggerated to the point of unbelievability bran was trying to figure himself out peter was being a supportive friend of that and lois caught on pretty quickly how brian felt about her and that is tackled with the respect it needed wanna know how the story is resolved here because that's a pretty big bombshell you gotta fix peter now knows that his best friend is trying to his wife that's gotta shake up the family dynamic peter and brian have an epic chicken fight then brian immediately says sorry and a joke comes to interrupt the scene that's all it's just sad it shows an absolute lack of confidence on the writers part where they feel as if actually taking this subject seriously for a few minutes would bore the audience and so instead they just present the concept brush over it and move on great glad to know we can never return to that sort of dynamic again they've pushed this lowest thing to its absolute extreme so now they basically have to abandon it so what do we got left well he wanted to be a writer or something didn't he let's just just have him be a writer and this brings us to the brian writes the book fees despite winning awards and being a successful director for a while they really start to hammer home this idea that brian is a hack writer and is egotistical about his abilities at this point he just becomes unbearable it's pathetic they devote many episodes to showing brian writing his book and being pretentious about it thinking it's hot then having it released and actually be and selling no copies but he had such an ego about it that you don't really care for him to then eventually releasing a book that performs extremely well but the theme then goes to his head and he starts acting like a prick to the people around him jesus christ i can't have anything here can i damned if you do damned if you don't he's gonna be an if it comes out he's gonna be an if it doesn't come out after his book was written there really had nothing to do with him he had been milk dry he's got no more meaning to search for because he was bad at everything he tried to do he just becomes so pathetic at this point it's hard to watch at times he just sits around the house being an alcoholic and smoking weed that's his character at this point they've just completely run out of things to do with brian when you chip away at everything deep and complex about his character all that remains is a pretentious depressive and it was completely intentional they actively want you to think of brian like this they want you to hear them multiple episodes are focused on the idea that brian is unlikable he's a guy who has no solid opinions and instead chooses to follow the crowd like how he's pretty consistently betrayed to be a liberal you know i like hillary clinton i don't care what anyone said but changed his mind on a whim because he's not easily influenced or the episode where brian tries to figure out why quagmire doesn't like him and he just unleashes every single thing wrong with his character that's the worst of it brian you're just a big sad alcoholic bore and you know what's funny about it not a single thing that quagmire says here applies to brian from seasons one to three meaning that they intentionally went out of their way to make brian as much of a prick as possible and then proceed to call themselves out on it he just becomes a punching bag almost as much as meg they just bring him in whenever they want to do a joke about how pathetic his life is he stops being peter's best friend and becomes delegated to the rule of stewie's sidekick because of the popularity to the road to episodes and they were good episodes because it showed you a dynamic that had never really been explored before and treated the two as equals but as time goes on and brown becomes more and more pathetic their dynamic can basically be summed up as i am smart and then brian says yes i am also smart then stewie says no you are not smart you are dumb which makes it all the funnier when they try to be serious with them again i had already made a terrible video on the atrocity that is life of bran a couple years ago so i'll sum up why it's so awful pretty quickly it is almost impossible to take a character that for the past 5-10 years has been shown as nothing but a pretentious whiny douchebag and make me care about him dying the writers don't even care about him dying they can't even show the death of one of the main characters without interrupting it with a shitty joke that guy sucked they go out of the way to try and make him as clean and nice as possible here to convince you that this isn't the same brand who tries to lois the same brand who abandoned his son no this is the cheery nice brand who loves life god look at this date once the fan outcry happened for his character to be brought back the staff knew they'd just slam dunked they can do whatever they want with them now they can make them as much of a as they'd like because audience are aware to attach to this family now to just kill one of them off like that so brian continues to get worse and worse doing shitty thing after shitty thing a couple episodes after stewie brings brian back to life yeah brian gives him herpes why just felt like it i mean why not it's something to do quagmire of all characters helps brian art by paying the dental cost for him to get new teeth and what does brian do in return scams might have a ton of money for his own personal gain why not if you don't like that viewer well gee that sucks well i mean we could always just kill him off again no we wouldn't want that would we and what about his son he finally makes a reappearance god you know i loved this episode from the earlier seasons screwed the pooch where brian gets with lois's father's dog and she's right to have puppies and so to save him brown gives this speech about how good of a father brian would be peter i meant i meant that peter says it not brian just look at the clip brian should be allowed to see his puppies peter think about what you're doing i am your honor brian will be a great dad yeah i know brad refuses to see his son until he can get a writer's get out of the relationship love it it's what i hear most about family guys degradation they aren't written like a family anymore like people they're just written like a bunch of cardboard cutouts who live together characters are too flexible to the point where they can be put in any scenario the writers won whether or not it makes sense stewie is rarely treated as the bb peter and lois never treat chris and meg like their children when a character talks i can just picture a writer speaking through them not that they're an actual character real people talk differently when under different dynamics peter wouldn't talk to lois the same way he talked to stewie and he wouldn't talk to stewie the same way he talks to his friends at the bar but it's like they don't even register that because everyone just talks the same way constantly to the point where things become unbelievable and i no longer give a about these characters knowing that they can change on a dime i don't know maybe you think i'm taking this too seriously maybe you think i shouldn't be analyzing a dumb comedy cartoon this closely but i don't know sometimes family guy manages to have hints of quality behind all this that makes me feel as if there's someone even just one person on the staff who is still able to recapture what makes the earlier season so green season 8 has this episode i really love where bran hits a dog with his car and struggles to confess to this but once he finally brings himself to do so he's dumbfounded as it seems that nobody actually cares about what he did that he basically committed murder because it was only a dog this causes brian to basically have an existential crisis where he starts to contemplate whether or not the people around him actually value his life that's something that feels very in line with bran's character that feels like the sort of plot that could have been done back in season two or three it's wonderful it baffles me the odd time where they managed to write bran to be somewhat likable it's a genuine joy there's this episode all the way in season 18 where brian gets together with quagmire's trans mother who he had previously slept with in an earlier episode and was disgusted by the episode shows brian getting over his embarrassment for not wanting to be seen going out for trans woman but once he does he acts like a genuinely good partner for her everyone is accepting of it and he even makes a genuine effort to be nice to quagmire who ruins the entire thing by giving her an ultimatum between him and brian with her of course picking quagmire and therefore leaving brian he can't even get a win in the times that he's doing something nice but there's one standard episode that gets talked about a lot in relation to bran's character and it's the season head episode brian and stewie this episode features no cutaway gags no characters outside of just bran and stewie and takes place in one central location the entire time i don't think it's all that amusing heresy i know but i think this episode is really brought down by its humor not because i don't want humor or anything i wouldn't expect a family guy to be devoid of that the humor it has is just really bad and unfunny no i didn't laugh at the first joke about bran being forced to eat and no it didn't become any funnier when you extended said joke for like two more minutes but when this episode shines it really does shine there's the scene that everyone talks about where still he asks brian why he has a gun in his bank vault and he admits that it's there in case life ever becomes too much for him and he wants to take his own i think the reason this works so well surprise surprise is because of stewie's reaction he treats this moment with the severity that it truly deserves to think that brian would ever think of going through with killing himself it re-contextualizes the entire midlife crisis stuff from previously to know that if he never find his purpose in life he would have taken his own but that only becomes all the sadder when you realize that he really doesn't have a purpose in his life they try to pull this heartwarming moment where stewie lets him knows that because brian existing by proxy makes stewie's life better then he doesn't even have a purpose i'm not sweetened context to the episode but in context to the rest of the series it does not work at all again brian has fielded everything he ever tried to do his love life relationships riding he's constantly disrespected by his family and his so-called best friend who does nothing but on him for how much of a failure he is that doesn't sound like much of a purpose they've stripped this character of all his likable traits his interests his aspirations what does he contribute it pans me to set because well brian you're more than just a cartoon character you're my friend like a good friend even and that's why i gotta be honest because just like his role in the show brian griffin serves no purpose [Music] [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: LS Mark

Views: 1,823,681

Keywords: Brian, Griffin, Family Guy, Brian Griffin, Brian Griffin An Icon in Ruin, Peter, Peter Griffin, Family Guy Review, Brian Griffin Analysis, seth macfarlane

Id: ul3YIWAGALk

Length: 19min 57sec (1197 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021