Best Character on Family Guy: Meg Griffin

In declaring one of their characters the worst, the lowest, the least popular, the creators of "Family Guy" created their best character: Meg Griffin, the perpetually downtrodden teenager whose desperate quest for attention and acceptance goes unrewarded, keeping her at the sidelines on a program all too noted for heaping attention on its lesser running gags.

The smart thing about creating Meg was in the physical design of the character. Meg isn't drawn as overweight or acne-stricken or even particularly unattractive: plain, maybe, and with a poor sense of fashion as pertains to the pink hat, but drawing someone repulsive would kill the humor of everyone's evident sense of repulsion. It would be like the famous observation that you can't make fun of a clown-what would you mock, his floppy shoes? Meg is portrayed as ordinary and average, which puts the humor of the running joke in the reaction rather than the premise... and comedy is all about the reaction shot.

Creator Seth McFarlane states that Meg's treatment on the show as more object than subject is the result of the writers not being familiar with the mindset of a teenage girl, but maybe they know more than they let on. By horrifically upping the ante of the tradition sitcom teenage girl's woes-boy troubles, parents not understanding, et cetera-into Meg's abuse and disregard at the hands of the entire cast, "Family Guy" parodies the mindset of the poor-me self-centered teenager without having to actually write many stories centering around teenage melodrama.

By keeping Meg on the sidelines, "Family Guy" keeps her from the fate shared by so many of its running gags: blatant overuse. Well-deserved criticism has been flung at the program for running a joke into the ground; a jovial old-time barbershop quartet comes to mind, as do an evil monkey in Chris' bedroom and a lecherous old man pursuing the boy for decidedly different reasons. Weary fans often discuss a general disillusionment with the program's stream-of-consciousness parade of disconnected pop culture references and "that one time when" something offbeat occurs. Meg, by contrast, is so marginalized that there are entire episodes where she does not speak. And her humor is based in our emotional understanding of the character and situation, not the easier factor of recognition of a pop culture element.

Or maybe this argument is too pretentious. Maybe the reason Meg works is because deep down, everyone's been a Meg Griffin. Quahog may never feel the same.