This November 4th, Family Guy’s biggest star, Stewie Griffin, gets his greatest wish: After 100 episodes of the animated sitcom, the homicidal infant will, we’re told, kill his doting mother, Lois. In fact, the anniversary episode is even called “Stewie Kills Lois.” Not a bad way to celebrate somehow getting 100 episodes of a show Fox network execs twice assassinated and twice resurrected on the air.

Personally, I can’t get enough of it, much in the same way I wasn’t able to get enough of The Simpsons until, oh, about the tenth season. After that, The Simpsons sort of became like that girlfriend you’ve been dating for a couple years now and, even though she’s okay and, you know, you don’t hate her, she’s nowhere near as much fun as she was when you first started seeing each other. That’s how The Simpsons feels to me, and I imagine to a lot of people these days, which is why I intend to spend Sunday evening planted firmly in front of my television, laughing my ass off at Peter Griffin and his dysfunctional family and friends.

Family Guy gets a lot of criticism for being, well, sort of pointless. To be honest, it kind of is. Only rarely do episodes have narrative threads, quite often the story it begins with has nothing to do with the one it ends on, and its tangential bouts of nonsensical humor and fantasy are usually so random – um, the boxing chicken? – that these skits, the episodes they’re wrapped up in, and the seasons they’re aired in, blur together into a great big Family Guy mush that’s probably just better experienced than analyzed. Family Guy is not necessarily a sitcom, I guess; it’s a lens through which creator Seth McFarlane and his gang of deviants can weekly focus their extensive knowledge of pop-culture with no purpose other than humor and entertainment.

As for its comparisons to The Simpsons, I imagine this debate will one day rank up there with Pepsi versus Coke, Marvel versus DC Comics, original Trek versus Next Generation. Even after McFarlane admitted he steals from The Simpsons, of which he’s a big fan, the rancor didn’t abate. However, all shows that serve as pop-culture commentary steal from their predecessors and their peers, so I’m not exactly sure what the Family Guy haters want – for McFarlane to ignore The Simpsons’ tremendous impact on pop-culture? On top of that, as I already noted, after about Season Ten, The Simpsons became, more or less, an act of repetition. The show abandoned character-driven plots in favor of storylines almost as dizzy as Family Guy’s most sensible. Family Guy has picked up the slack, their absurdist humor, like musical numbers around the bed of an HIV patient, going where The Simpsons, far too institutionalized now, couldn’t even dream of going.

In other words, Family Guy, though certainly not a perfect show, has its fingers much more firmly on the pulse of what’s happening in its generation and The Simpsons and its fans have become those stodgy senior citizens from a past era bitching about how good things used to be. Yes, they were good. The Simpsons is still good, too. But Family Guy , in a lot of ways, is better.

That’s why this November 4th, I’ll be excited to watch Stewie achieve his dream. We should all taste that satisfaction, at least once. Of course, I’m sure Lois will be resurrected in some fashion, much as Family Guy has been time and time again, and that’s fine. Family Guy is so pointless it could run another 100 episodes without feeling old.