Family Guy seasons 12 and 13. Man, that was a dark era for an otherwise good show.
The fact that we got so many of the show's most infamous episodes such as "Brian's a Bad Father", "Herpe, the Love Sore", "Fresh Heir", "The 2,000 Year Old Virgin", "Life of Brian", "Christmas Guy", and "Quagmire's Mom" without the short span of TWO seasons really speaks for how awful the show had become at that point.
I recently re-discovered the DVDs of seasons 12 and 13 I had stored away, which when I was a teenager were my all-time favorite Family Guy seasons. So I decided to re-watch both of them for nostalgia purpose, having mainly stuck to the older seasons during recent Family Guy viewings. Holy crap, I totally forgot how much gory violence, suicide references, masturbation jokes, racism, sexism, F-bombs, disgusting vomit scenes, and references to people having sex with animals are in those two seasons. I almost felt physically sick watching some of the harsher scenes (Peter killing a beached whale with a forklift, showing it's blood and entrails being graphically displayed on screen comes to mind as a major example of this).
While the newer episodes have certainly gotten better and Family Guy remains a favorite cartoon of mine to this day, I just can't deny that the show hit an all-time low for a little while there and I'm a bit surprised that they ever got their groove back after two seasons of pure unadulterated shock "comedy" that would feel more at home in a horror cartoon than an animated sitcom.
That season had one of my least favorite episodes in the history of all animation, PERIOD in it. It was called "Grimm Job" and it was easily one of the darkest and most sickening cartoons that I've ever laid my eyes upon. It was done in the style of an extremely dark gothic fairy tale, with stories like Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella being horrifyingly corrupted. The two most cringeworthy scenes were The Big Bad Wolf being violently sliced in half by the wood cutter (they showed hyper-realistic drawings of his intestines, blood, liver, bones, brains, and other guts without any attempt to make it look cartoon-ish or unrealistic) and Meg randomly hanging herself at the end of the episode with no reason as to why that even happened.
Another extremely disturbing theme I noticed being utilized time and time again throughout the seasons was the awful topic of pedophilia. I can't even begin to count how many of season 12 and 13's sexual jokes revolved around children or underaged characters. I honestly can't believe that some of the things they showed are even legal! I mean, it certainly wasn't full on animated child porn or anything but they still got surprisingly over the top with the writer's obvious obsession with pedophilia that seriously makes me question their mental health. There were times while watching the two seasons that I actually worried in the back of my mind about getting arrested for owning those DVDs due to how they constantly pushed the envelope with sexual jokes regarding characters that aren't of the legal consent age in the United States.
So yeah, those two seasons were certainly something....to say the least. I'm glad that now Family Guy is back on it's feet but I'll never forget that not too long ago, there was a time when the show I love was a complete nightmare loaded with gory violence, psychopathic humor, sexualization of minors, and gross vomiting sequences that made me want to vomit alongside the characters on screen.