In regards to The Phantom Menace, I think people were pretty scathing right away.
I recall people clapping in the theater...
Maybe my cannibal zombies were over the top, but my point was that South Park and Family Guy aren't given to gentle humor. Think about how they depicted Scientology on South Park. When they go after someone, they don't do it with subtlety, and the humor is almost incidental to the point they're trying to get across. On The Simpsons, there was the episode w/ the three-eyed fish, and the several episodes where Homer nearly causes (and then stops) a meltdown, but in those episodes, the meltdown is almost incidental to the action. (I can't remember the names of the episodes, but in one, Homer nearly causes a meltdown but then randomly presses the right button ("pulling a Homer"), and in the other, Homer goes on workman's comp and works from home, nearly causing a meltdown). You could watch either of those episodes and not get the idea that the danger of nuclear power is the point, because they both center on Homer's ineptitude. That's not the way South Park handles things.
Again, in saying this I love South Park to death, and have seen every episode; I was one of the few people in the theater the day "Team America" came out, too. Matt and Trey are heroes to me (and not just because I'm from Colorado).
But while The Simpsons (in its best years) certainly had a different approach, it was hardly less cutting or biting. An episode like, say, King Size Homer may not have been trying to make a particular point about nuclear power, but that's factoring in that said satire of the nuclear industry was already
built into the show. It's biting satire of the industry without even
trying to be. I can think of few other shows that have accomplished something like that.
Much of The Simpsons' satire is like that. It's embedded into the show. Even the episodes that are just little stories or character studies and don't have any particular political or social point at the core of them still often say so much about the society they're depicting. And the way the show consistently portrays authority figures, corporations, societal structures, etc is so much more biting and harsh and insightful than anything even South Park (one of the sharpest, funniest shows on the air) has done. And often, it does it effortlessly.
South Park tends to hone in on one particular subject or target in a particular week and just tear them down for 22 minutes. The Simpsons has episodes somewhat akin to that, also, but it's indeed a different approach usually. But it's not that The Simpsons is gentler, it's just less obvious and on-the-nose about its points most of the time. (And even then, I wouldn't say that, for instance, "Homer Badman" or "Sideshow Bob Roberts" were really any nicer, even on the surface, toward their targets than South Park is.)
Well, MacFarlane may be inept at writing good satire, but he's neither gentle nor subtle about it. That's what I was getting at. It might have been a crude way to express himself, but equating McCain and Palin with the Germans invading Poland was pretty direct.
MacFarlane is basically writing toothless jokes for people who think he's being edgy, when the reality is that his jokes are safe and cuddly at their core. The directness is part of the problem; they directly reference whoever the target is, but then don't actually
say anything. The McCain/Palin Nazi thing is a good example, but even more so I like to use the one where the girl with Down Syndrome mentions that her mother used to be the governor of Alaska. The
reference is obvious, but...what's the
joke, exactly? What is it saying? At best it's a tenuous reference anyway, but it doesn't even really say anything about Palin's politics or even Palin as a person; it's just a reference, a potshot without even any clear target. A bolder joke would have at least said
something about either Palin or her child; and yet, it appears superficially "edgy" just because it happens to reference the fact that Palin does, in fact, have a child with Down Syndrome (of a DIFFERENT GODDAMN GENDER. Ahem). In essence, it's a completely safe joke designed to offend no one, while giving the illusion to its audience that it's a "dangerous" joke that's really sticking it to someone (and pretty much all "edgy" Family Guy jokes are like this). The very worst episode of The Simpsons is so much bolder than that. And that's not a compliment to the worst Simpsons episodes, either.
I still think there's something to be said for nostalgia, though. Some relatively short-lived series have diehard fan bases that grow over time. Gilligan's Island aired for only 3 seasons, but it's a part of our shared culture still, and people look back at it fondly. 
