I can't say with much certainty as I don't watch much television anymore. And rather than "cartoons" being bad, I feel that live-action series aimed at children are bad. They teach kids about the values of shallow materialism and playground prejudices and entitlement and stupid teenage drama. They'll produce enough of that naturally that I don't feel we should reinforce it. And while the shows themselves feature 14 year-old characters played by 20 year-old actors, the only people who watch these shows are pre-teens. So not only are children adopting stupid high-schooler traits, they're adopting them years sooner than they should.
I can't tell you how many times my 8 year-old niece has rolled her eyes at me and said things that I'm pretty sure she learned from Miranda Cosgrove or whoever because I did something she considered weird like put hot-sauce on my scrambled eggs. She should be annoying me by singing the Sponge-bob theme song over and over again, not treating me like an uncool dad because I decided to wear my Batman shirt that day.
A series like Max and Ruby isn't meant to be entertaining really, more meant to teach 2 year-olds things like "play nice with your little brother" and "what color the sky is" and "don't track mud into the house" if even that. It's dialogue recorded so that kids can learn to speak. It's moving colors and sounds that are meant to babysit toddlers while their parents slip off for a quickie. And nobody over 4 actually watches it because that's not the audience it's aimed at.
As for being nostaliga-blinded, I'm not so thick that I will claim that The Amazing World of Gumball is inferior to Johnny Bravo or that Catdog is far more intelligent than Camp Lazlo. Do you know why? Because I realize that they're equally stupid. I look at Rugrats fondly because it gives me a sense of warm, naive familiarity. I look at a modern cartoon and feel contempt because I'm too old to appreciate it and I don't have the benefit of nostalgia to make me like it. So for me to say that the original Transformers cartoon is better than the new cartoony anime thing is stupid. (Especially since the original Transformers cartoon, in all seriousness, was about as entertaining as a six year old playing with his Transformers toys and trying to squeeze out a comprehensive narrative.(Which is fitting since it was meant solely to push toys.))
The gentleman above me currently is mentioning Family Guy as the worst animated show on television, and that's something I'd like to approach too. Family Guy has definitely gotten a little too big for it's britches these days and Seth MacFarlane has gotten a serious god-complex from its success. And you can definitely see him abusing his running jokes and spewing liberal vomit every chance he can, trying desperately to use his popularity to preach to us.
It's become cool to hate the show. Maybe it's because this is the pretentious, indie age where graphic novels like Scott Pilgrim can be declared brilliant because it was published by someone other than Marvel or DC and only about a 100 people read it before the movie came out, or maybe it's because it genuinely has declined in quality.
Family Guy has always been crude, and that crudeness was charming at it's beginning and I still like it. It's not nearly as intelligently crude as South Park, but it's still fun and I like it. The characters have changed a lot since its early days too. I'm sure we're all familiar with that picture that diagrams the changes in the characters since 2001 and 2009 where Brian started off as "The Voice Of Reason" but became "Liberal Douche" and Meg was "Normal Teenage Girl" but is now "Punching Bag" and Stewie was "Mad Genius" but is now "Future Homosexual." All of those are true. But again, to be honest, I still like that. It's not just another animated sitcom anymore, it's a bunch of jack-asses that vaguely resemble a family and that's funny to me. No, they don't have much of those "good ole' fashioned values on which we used to rely" and has since started to resemble that "violence and movies and sex on TV" that they demonize in the theme song, but it's still funny.
It's evolved (or devolved, if you prefer) into something quite different, but still entertaining. No, it's not the funniest thing on television anymore. Hell, even American Dad, that show everyone used to hate, has become funnier, but it's not Dane Cook/Jeff Dunham/Carlos Mencia-unfunny yet. It's more on the level of the Simpsons (which is appropriate since it has been often stated that the two shows are very, very, VERY similar). Just because a LOT of douche-bags find it funny, doesn't mean we should abandon it.
Now, I DO want to address MacFarlane's pretentiousness. I assume everyone saw that one episode where he talks to himself for the entirety of it. If not, let me summarize: Brian and Stewie get sealed in a safe at the bank for two days with nothing to keep them entertained but each other and the stuff in Brian's safe box. The entire point of the episode is delving deeper into Brian as a character. While it was interesting, it doesn't really fit with a screw-ball pop-culture-referencing sitcom. It feels more like something that would make for a really cool fan-fic like The Protomen or The Megas write. It's cool to make a uncomplicated character complicated, but since the series is about people being jack-asses to each other and crude, violent, fart jokes, it doesn't fit. The preaching in the Christmas episode was fine, but it's Christmas so you're allowed to be serious, and it's the same preaching every other Christmas special does so that's fine.
Family Circus sucks because it tries to push Christian values on people who just want silly jokes. Family Guy is starting to do the same thing with MacFarlane's political point of view. And while I agree with him on a lot of things, it doesn't quite fit with the toilet humor and movie/television parodies that are the main attraction. South Park pulls it off because South Park is satire and while there is no shortage of morals that can be gleaned from the show, it never starts taking itself too seriously and is content with being a political cartoon about social issues with poop jokes. "Hey, let's do an episode about High School Musical where a kid who's really good at drama and singing wants to play basketball but is put down by his disapproving father. And then then kids can dress up as yuppie teenagers, sing a really gay song, and look like a bunch of jack-hats."
