Review: Family Guy “The Woof of Wall Street”

We should expect a great show when Brian and Stewie become eccentrically rich.

 Overview:

Brian catches on that Stewie is brilliant when it comes to the stock market.  After an unexpected accident, Brian looks to Stewie to teach him the ways of Wall Street to pay back his debt.  The pair does pretty well for themselves, able to make some eccentric purchases. However, Brian takes things too far when he makes a new investment that is ethically wrong.  Brian gets himself in serious trouble, and it is up to Stewie to bail him out once again.

Elsewhere, Peter and his friends are shocked to find out that their local watering hole, The Drunken Clam will be shut down for a month.  As the bar owner, Jerome leaves to care for his ailing mother, Peter and crew agree to watch over the Clam and keep it open. Predictably, things go horribly wrong, and the friends scramble to put things back in place before Jerome returns home.

Our Take:

Stewie once again proves that he is a modern renaissance man with his mastery of the stock market.  However, the genius really gains by teaching Brian his skills in exchange for lessons in “Gymkata”- a mix of gymnastics and karate.  Honestly, somebody needs to make that movie; it was the brightest part of this lacking episode.

Besides the addition of “Gymkata” and a repeat of Tom Cochrane’s “Life is a Highway” playing soundtrack, there was not much depth to this show.  Both plotlines were stories that have been done time and time again.  From the moment the plots were established you could quickly estimate every step of the episode.  Instead of throwing a surprise twist like they usually would, Family Guy played it safe and gave us an uninspired, predictable story.

To make matters worse is the episode felt incomplete.  While there was more of a focus on the Brian-Stewie storyline, Peter’s plot felt like an afterthought and was only added to fill time.  After destroying their favourite bar, you would expect Peter and friends to learn a valuable after-school-special-type lesson.  However, the episode seemed to end without any morals whatsoever.

This was a hard episode to watch.  Family Guy is known for not following the norms and adding an extra level to stories we’ve seen before.  Instead, this episode felt like they have given up entirely or ran out of time creating a quality plot.