When you love a certain show, you hesitate to admit when it turns to crap. I will admit right now, I loved Family Guy. Note the past tense there in that last sentence? That's because one episode finally got me to admit that it was going downhill. Honestly, if Seth MacFarlane was going to end the series, he should have just done with this episode and pulled off the bandage. He said he wanted to focus on American Dad, but he's been going with this dumpster fire for another seven seasons.

That was the episode titled "Thanksgiving", the sixth episode in season 10. The jokes in it were denigrating and too offensive even for me. That says something right there because, with comedy, nothing should be off the table. But this episode missed the mark with being funny and was trying to offend just for the sake of offending. And yes, I had to watch it again to make sure I had it straight. This episode is so bad that I try to suppress it.

It only takes 35 seconds to get to the first uncomfortable joke. The James Woods High football team is performing them "not gay revue," which involves smacking each other's butts with towels and using innuendo when referring to the result of the game. The last two lines create a gigantic "no homo" situation: "And though it sounds suggestive we must stress that it's not." Yeah, hard to keep that line fresh when there have been openly gay male athletes in any of the four major sports.

At the 3:15 mark, dinner guests are piled in the living room. Joe and Bonnie are discussing how Quagmire is uncomfortable around his father, who had undergone a sex change operation. Now, this would have been a perfect opportunity to show the struggles of transfolk and the people closest to them and how hard adjusting to big life changes such as this kind of surgery can be. Then Lois's parents come in, and her mother announces that they brought chicken wings. Quagmire's father, who now goes by Ida, says "Oh, yum, I hope they're the kind with the bone removed."

The awkward responses to Lois's mother continue at the 4:50 mark. As everyone sits down to dinner, she mentions how the sweet potatoes look delicious. Lois replies: "That's the stuffing, ma. Now put on your glasses before you run over another black guy." You know, nothing says Thanksgiving like a little able-ism (ageism? I don't freak know). At the same table, Brian and Ida have a tense moment, because, well...yeah.

Stewie then feels the need to tell Ida that "he (Brian) threw up when he found out you were a monster." Yet another jab was taken at gender dysphoria. But the icing on the cake comes when Kevin walks through the door. Peter groans because h spent the entire night making "dead kid jokes." He then makes Kevin go back outside, after which he makes a joke about tomatoes, in which the punchline is "Is it sun-dried tomato?." No parent should have to bury their child, and the fact that they would even go down this route is just disgusting and insensitive.

Kevin's story starts to crumble, with Joe becoming more and more suspicious regarding his son's return from the Middle East. Everything comes to a head when Kevin claims to have ditched his war medals in Washington when originally he said he flew straight home. Of course, Peter has to interject with something about staring at hobo's junk for an hour because he "was showed a purple head, but never saw a Purple Heart."

Then when Kevin admits to faking his death and going AWOL, Peter announces he faked his own death, going to a cutaway gag at his funeral, which he wakes up during, laughs, and says "no dentist appointment for this guy." While this joke isn't necessarily offensive, I cringed so hard that I pinched a nerve in my neck. The scene wraps up with another jab at transgender people, with Lois telling Ida that she can use the yard for the bathroom.

Just as Joe is taking Kevin to prison, Bonnie puts her foot down and stops that from happening. Peter responds by saying how they are ruining Thanksgiving, his second favorite holiday behind "Pretending Not to Notice People's Race Day," in which he looks for his friend by creating the stereotypical black guy, only for the gag to end with a white guy showing up. When Kevin is asked to explain himself, he is called a coward and a traitor, and Chris makes a quip about "taking care of a certain need" for no reason. And for good measure, we get one more joke about trans people: Brian comes to Kevin's defense by saying that only Ida could understand the choice that Kevin made.

When Ida voiced her opinion that she did not understand or support it, Brian's response to that was that she was "just some dumb drag queen." The only reason I can even chuckle at this is that it points out the hypocrisy of so many people who believe that if you belong to a certain group, you have to think a certain way on issues. And if you don't agree, well, you're not really who you say you are. At the least episode ended reasonably well, although the cliffhanger of having another guy coming through the door claiming to be the real Kevin, coupled with Peter breaking the fourth wall, could have been better.

So, what do we have for terrible, even offensive jokes? We have jokes about trans people, jokes about dead children, jokes about penises, and jokes about gay people. If these jokes were actually funny, I would say that Seth was pushing the envelope as to what is acceptable, and what isn't. But with how unfunny this episode was, this can only strike me as him saying "Let me end this so I can focus on what I want to focus on!"

Bottom line: You have to be a glutton for punishment or the biggest jerk in the world to be able to enjoy this episode.