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Okay kids, as I write this, it’s eleven-fifteen Sunday night and I’m watching a Family Guy rerun on Adult Swim, and I just realized something.

Family Guy is performing some kind of really, really subtle mind control on me that keeps me watching it despite the fact that each episode is really only about fifteen minutes long.

Mind Control–Now In Syndication!

Now, for those of you who aren’t already familiar with Family Guy, let me bring you up to speed. It’s basically the collection of misadventures undertaken by a suburban Rhode Island family, the Griffins, in the town of Quahog (pronounced, for some reason, KOH-hog).

Each episode has a run time of, technically, about seventeen minutes or so with commercials, but as longtime fans of Family Guy well know, there’s plenty of non-sequiturs inserted throughout the episodes as a way to break up the plot. Which some people cite as part of the appeal of the series.

And Then There’s Mind Control!

And tonight’s rerun, where Peter attempts to open a restaurant on the strength of a Rhode Island ship token he found under the house’s carpet, is no exception. At one point, Peter and Lois are on the couch watching an episode of the old TV show Maude, with, as Peter puts it, “the really long theme song”. Indeed, the theme song is a long one, running about thirty seconds, while Peter, in a growing state of desperation, shrieks “AND THEN THERE’S MAUDE!” at the screen, hoping it will mark the end of the song. Finally, the song ends with the words Peter’s been waiting to hear, “And then there’s Maude!”, and Peter sighs in relief while telling Lois: “Finally! God, that was an ordeal.”

Yes. Yes it was an ordeal. I just sat there and listened to that whole song right along with Peter. There was zero reason to continue. I could’ve changed the channel for thirty seconds, watched some “Mythbusters” or something, and then come back none the worse for it. But no. I sat here and listened to thirty full seconds of a theme song for a parody of a rerun of a show I’ve never actually seen once. Not even on TV Land.

What happened there? How did I get so ensnared by this that I sat there and listened to this ridiculous song when it doesn’t even have a bearing on the plot?

Maybe That Really Is the Appeal….

Maybe they’re right. Maybe there’s an appeal to a show that can drag you off on ridiculous tangents for large chunks of the runtime and leave you totally unaware you’ve been cheated.

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