Review: American Dad “Santa, Schmanta”

When better to have a Chanukah episode than 5 days after?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

We begin with a short reminder of the ending to the last American Dad Christmas Special, where Santa, after completing his master plan to revive the monster Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh, was sucked into its mouth but climbed out after it was killed again. We pick up from there, where Santa once again swears vengeance on the Smith family but stumbles and breaks his neck, dying in a very dignified pose in the snow.

The following Christmas, the Smiths are finally able to have a nice and festive holiday with a bearded old man now no longer trying to kill them in increasingly awesome ways. Roger, however, is only concerned with showing off some new dance idea and becomes peeved when no one is paying attention to him. So, next best thing is going over to Snot’s house, who relates Roger’s lack of attention to his own Jewish heritage’s relative obscurity, especially its connection to Chanukah. Roger decides to become Jewish himself and, being Roger, takes the path with the least effort and most cultural gags. And of course, being Roger, this newfound Jewish awakening is just a means to get more attention. So, when this doesn’t automatically get everyone focused entirely on him, this means the best course of action is to have a musically charged drive over to the mall and harassing people just trying to get on with their own holidays, including dragging Santa’s frozen corpse out in front of everyone to get maximum traumatized kids (because really, when you’re trying to traumatize kids, take no half measures). In his tirade of mockery, Roger tries on Santa’s robe, which fills his gut to relative jiggly-ness, and puts on his cap, which gives him the white beard. Seems we’re playing by Tim Allen rules as now Roger has Santa’s powers and, going by the name “Schmanta”, will use them to make Chanukah the dominant winter gift-giving holiday.

…L’Chaim?

By the third day, Roger (again, being Roger) makes a public spectacle of being the official face of the holiday by selling it as a Christmas level of festiveness. Most everyone seems pretty on board with it, but the Smiths start struggling to find proper Christmas decorations. This is once again not enough to get the Smiths to completely focus on Roger, so he doubles down by setting up shop with Miami, and putting up an aesthetically Jewish headquarters while being blissfully ignorant of what any of it means, including the Star of David. Which obviously means this episode will have to work extra hard to not get a 1/10.

But yeah, this is basically just an excuse for Roger to through a big party. Snot tires of this, and gets the Smiths together to revive Santa with mystic Hebrew texts. Which is totally real by the way, don’t test me. This doesn’t totally bring him back as he’s more like a brain-dead zombie, but they’ve gotta work with what they have. They arrive in Miami on the eighth day to confront Roger and take back the suit, leading to a pretty dull fight between Roger and zombie Santa set to a rock cover of Jingle Bells. Santa gets the suit back, immediately double-crosses the rest of them, and everyone drives off after finally reconciling that Roger is an attention whore. On Christmas Day, Snot and his mom decide to go eat Chinese Food and see a movie, as is the sacred tradition.

OUR TAKE

To be completely honest, this was never going to be a make or break episode for me, even with the subject matter. It does fall into the usual traps of making Jewish culture just sort of “not normal” and having to put it in the context of modern Christmas for the sake of Christian/secular viewers, but this show (or any other Seth MacFarlane show that tackles Jewish stuff) has never had enough bite for me to really get that offended by it, not that it excuses it.

One of the things that do irk me, however, is how they really could’ve gotten creative with this but chose not to. It’s just another “Roger wants a petty thing and uses something else to blow that want out of proportion” episode but using Judaism as that thing. At the very least, instead of just reusing elves, we could’ve had him using little golems for his helpers. It wouldn’t have been a lot but at least it would have seemed like they had SOME imagination or creative drive here.

And imagination is not something an American Dad Christmas Episode has ever been in short supply of before now. When the show isn’t hopping Stan across alternate timelines and putting clever spins on tried and tested Christmas stories and clichés (“The Best Christmas Story Never” blowing Family Guy’s recent take on A Christmas Carol out of the water, for starters), it’s constantly adding onto its insane Santa mythos, which I guess this was supposed to continue? It’s just that we started with a vengeful St. Nick with an invading army of elves, followed a reinvention of the Krampus myth as his tough but fair counterpart, and most recently capped it off with Santa’s goals being to revive a giant monster from Sumerian myth. I’m not saying they necessarily needed to top that, and a more grounded Christmas special like this is refreshing in some ways, but it was almost entirely poorly thought out jokes at my culture’s expense and, an even greater sin, it was just boring in comparison.

I’m not going to jump the gun and assume that this is a harbinger of further mediocrity when American Dad comes back in February, I just think this was a massively wasted opportunity. My search for even a serviceable Chanukah special post-Rugrats continues. I’m plenty eager to see where the show goes when we pick up the rest of the season, but for now, I shall eat my Chinese Food in awkward silence.

Score
6/10