By Dave Andrusko

I grant you up front, I am not the target audience for "Family Guy." From the little that I've seen (and a lot that I have read), on its best day its humor is sophomoric and scatological.

But after reading an account in Wednesday's Washington Post about an episode that never aired--headlined, "'Family Guy's' Look at the Lighter Side of Abortion"--I had to wonder if the Washington Post still considers people with even a modicum of taste part of its target audience.

We learn that the cartoon show has been nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for the best comedy series. According to the Post's Lisa de Moraes, originally Twentieth Century Fox TV, the division of NewsCorp that produces the show, was going to present one of the programs that made "Family Guy" Emmy-worthy to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and the press. That's when the creator--Seth MacFarlane, who is also the source of many of the voices on the show --decided it was time to go for yucks.

"But then the studio decided it would be more fun for the academy members to hear the 'abortion episode' that show creator and 800-pound gorilla Seth MacFarlane had penned, about which few details are known, except that the Fox network has chosen not to air it -- a development that shocked . . . well, no one," de Moraes wrote. Her theory was that it was just a tease–"that the unaired episode is destined to become extra material for the DVD boxed set."

Judging by other quotes, not fit for a family blog, MacFarlane was confident members of the Academy and reporters would find the episode hilarious.

So what was it about? "All we know at this point is that in the episode, family matriarch Lois Griffin agrees to act as a surrogate for an infertile couple who are then killed in a car accident, leaving Lois to decide whether to have the baby or not, and hilarity ensues," de Moraes writes. "At the very end of the episode, her husband tells viewers she had the abortion."

In case that didn't go low enough, "One company source said the episode has an antiabortion message and, while 'hilarious,' is 'pretty rough' stuff." And to top it off (or bottom it out), the Associated Press (AP) reported, "Inappropriate or not, the crowd was in stitches."

To give you some idea how far we've come, "Family Guy" is the first animated comedy to be nominated for a comedy series Emmy since.... "The Flintstones."

So how do you excuse away such tastelessness? If you are the AP you remind the reader that the show is "bawdy" with "a penchant for political incorrectness and going to the edge."

Well the "abortion episode doesn't merely teeter on the brink, it leaps into the abyss. Shame on everyone associated with it and, worst of all, for hiding behind the excuse that it has a "anti-abortion message."

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Part One