Satire for the times

Post-Intelligencer TV critic Melanie McFarland offers these interesting musings about how Americans' preferences in animated satire reflect bigger concerns:

There used to be a time when your friends and co-workers fondly quoted the best zingers from that week's episode of Fox's "The Simpsons." Nowadays, they're more likely to rhapsodize about Comedy Central's "South Park." A sign of the times if there ever was one; as for what it means, well, that's open to interpretation.

One way to look at it is that irreverence for its own sake, "The Simpsons' " life juice, is out. "South Park's" undying ability to find new ways to give the bird to propriety and authoritarian rules is, in these days of an FCC driven more by theocracy than bureaucracy, very much in.

It's the introduction to her review of Fox's revived "Family Guy," which she says has not been well-served by its three-year "hiatus."