Review: Family Guy “Connie’s Celica”

Overview:

Lois has become the new music teacher at Adam West High. Unfortunately, her quirky nature isn’t loved by everyone, specifically school hottie, Connie D’Amico. Showing authority, Lois inadvertently causes Connie to be expelled. Connie gets her revenge by beginning to bully her former teacher. After Lois confronts the teenager in public, Connie meets an untimely death.

As a suspect in Connie’s death, Lois is put into prison. Peter and Brian try to solve the mystery of the death in hopes of clearing Lois’s name. But, when the police discover that Connie faked her own death, Lois is cleared of all charges.

Our Take:

Family Guy premiered in a different time-slot following The Simpsons during Animation Domination in place of Bob’s Burgers. But, it does so entering into the 2020s, a whole new decade to contaminate with outrageous humour and attacks on structured storytelling. What better way to usher in the new year than with another tale that takes us in a completely unexpected direction. The synopsis of ‘Lois becomes the music teacher at the kid’s high school’ could go in many predictable directions. In good Family Guy fashion, there was no telling that the episode would conclude where it did.

The story begins with Chris struggling to play his recorder thanks to lack of direction from his new music teacher. When Lois intervenes and takes the position on for herself, you would expect it to create conflict. However, you would expect that conflict to be with her children/new students, or even with her husband, who often does not like his wife working. But, the antagonist is actually Connie D’Amico, the hot girl that typically picks on Meg. This alone would have made for an exciting direction, but of course, the series had to take it to drastic heights.

Getting Connie expelled, Lois quickly becomes the target of her cyberbullying. Which could also stand for an interesting place for the episode to lead down. Yet, even that was not enough. The young girl has to go and get herself killed, or at least pretend to be to mess with Lois at an extreme level. Predictability has never been a word to describe Family Guy, but they really brought out the guns with this one.

The downfall to all of this work is that the episode concludes abruptly and unsatisfyingly. With Lois in jail, Peter and Brian make an attempt to clear her name. With only a couple of minutes remaining in run time, this part of the story was limited to just a couple of short scenes. Family Guy makes this mistake often trying to cram in too much, and the results are always the same. Within the dying seconds of the show, everything is quickly explained off, and we miss a satisfying end. In this case, it involves the cops just bringing Lois home cleared of all charges. We don’t get to see what happened with Connie or who, if anyone, has learned a lesson.

A bonus to taking the story in so many directions is there are a lot more themes and topics to make jokes about. From Chris’s former teacher being an actual bird to Lois ending the show as a beefed-up ex-con, there was no lack of humour. The highlight was easily when Peter discovered that his wife had been hiding his Nerf gun. Something every parent or former child can resonate with, and executed hilariously. There’s also a great moment of Brian attempting to stand up to some bullies that ends with Stewie breaking the fourth wall. Some episodes suffer from missing these little moments that make the show; thankfully, there was plenty during this one.

Overall, this episode was slightly above the average.  If Family Guy was what I ate for food than this episode would have been a substantial meal. It wasn’t a fancy steak dinner with all of the trimmings. At the same time, it wasn’t leftovers that I heated up just because I need to eat something. No, this episode was like a tasty pasta dish. A filling story with a surprising sauce that challenged my tastebuds. Those added jokes and lighthearted moments were like a nice bite of bacon or chicken. In the end, I felt satisfied, but it will also be easily forgettable as better meals come at me in future days.