Sit Down, Shut Up is what you get after close to eight years of unchecked Seth MacFarlane animated aggression. Brought to us by the guy who created Arrested Development, this new entry in FOX’s Sunday night carries with it so much detached irony it actually features a prolonged scene in which all of the characters sit around winking at one another. It’s a mobius-strip of show that is as unsatisfying as it is brilliant.

Arrested Development was endlessly self-referential. This show is more broad in its focus. The target is clearly Family Guy and its joke-o-matic approach to humor. The problem is in doing so Sit Down, Shut Up very much turns into the program it’s attempting to cut down. The problem lies in the lack of dimensions. There is nothing remotely relatable to any of these characters outside of the voice talent (Jason Bateman, Will Arnet, Henry Winkler, etc), and half of them aren’t even particularly funny. Arrested Development worked so well because all of the actors were right there in the same room playing off one another. Here, it’s just a series of detached voices edited together.

I suppose this makes it sound like I hated the program. I did not. It’s funny, a few scenes quite funny. Tonally, it reminded me a lot of Clone High (maybe because the character design is similar and Will Arnet is in both), but when the half hour was over I wasn’t exactly dying to see another episode. What’s interesting is that the writing is quite brilliant. Unlike Family Guy, this show never felt like the gags were a result of pulling pieces of paper from a hat. It’s clearly a parody, but of the type where you write it and then pass it around to your friends saying, “Hey, check out my take on animation!” Everyone has a big laugh, comments on the cleverness of having the unseen principal suffer an “accident” while air-quoting, only to put it in a drawer and go back to working on that thing that you actually intended on making.

Look, all signs point to an Arrested Development movie to be in the works, so how angry am I really supposed to be. Maybe it’s all for the best. At least this way I won’t have my heart broken when FOX inevitably pulls the plug.