Spoilers Below

At the start of the show’s ninth season, American Dad was just plain awful. After the first six episodes I didn’t think this show was gonna find a sack of marbles but alas episode 7 everything just seemed to be turned up a notch. Enter Will Forte who guest starred that episode and gave us a Francine we never saw before. Traditionally, animated women have taken a more subservient, stereotypical role as a stay at home mom yelling at her husband and kids, but this season was a bit different. She all of the sudden broke that mold and I think helped further distance itself from the other Seth shows. Francine has turned into every guy’s fantasy woman. She argues, she cusses you out if you get out of line, and she’s sexually frustrated. And oh yea, she has a talking fish and a scumbag alien that lives in her attic.

This is another way that the show has distanced self. Sci-fi. Yes, I know it can be an ugly word in animated comedy as we have had the cancellations of two sci-fi faves Futurama and Ugly Americans over on Comedy Central. However, this season American Dad seemed to further embrace its sci-fi characters and take us places we’ve never seen before. For example, let’s rip off E.T., grab Jeff, and shove him on a space ship into orbit. JEFF!!! Of all people!! What has he had like maybe a total of a 100 pages of total  dialogue the prior eight seasons only this year to become an underlying arc for Hayley, and more importantly, help deliver us one of the finest episodes of American Dad with ‘Lost in Space’. We also finished the season with a rather entertaining play on Klaus by way of zombies and such for the finale and that in it of itself was out of control great and truthfully was one of the few bright spots for Stan this year.

Yep, I said it. Stan was boring as shit this year. His story lines seem rather cliche again handing us the hammed together husband/wife argument stories that we see in other Fox series’ which usually leads to boredom because by the time you make it to American Dad you already saw three of them. It also gets rather formulaic when Roger dresses up to go start trouble. We get it Roger, you are a trouble maker, do we REALLY need more? Again, I’ll take more sci-fi elements over cross-dressed drug-induced story lines that Roger seems to always get stuck with.

As a result, American Dad is getting a so-so grade. But, if the writers do it right and try to spice up the 9:30pm night, this show should have no problems celebrating its tenth season with best show of the year.

7.5 out of 10

Highlight Episodes

“Blood Crieth Unto Heaven”

“Lost in Space”