Review: American Dad “The Book of Fischer”

Overview: 

Some innocent father-son bonding between Stan and Steve at the barbershop exposes a serious flaw in Stan’s social skills that threatens to ruin someone’s life just as much as it runs the risk of embarrassing Stan in front of his son. Stan’s efforts to overcome this fault only cause more problems and soon one of the Smith family’s best friends may need to leave town. 

Elsewhere, Hayley turns Jeff onto journaling as a means for him to cope with his spotty memory, but this simple habit turns into a way of life.

Oh, and there’s coffin luge. 

Our Take:

Steve is an American Dad character who has tremendous heart, but he often leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to his more masculine traits, or basically any signs of basic maturity into adulthood. This frequently leaves Stan more frustrated than it does Steve, so there’s cause for celebration when Steve proudly boasts his first grey hair to his father. Stan is ready to pounce on this opportunity, but what begins as a charming milestone for the youngest member of the Smith family soon becomes an exercise in denial and selfishness on Stan’s part that leads to several deaths, which nearly includes a beloved American Dad character. Steve’s aging hair follicles can’t compete with Stan’s matured ego.

Tuttle is a character that American Dad has really embraced over the past few seasons and he’s become elevated above most other tertiary characters to the level of someone like Principal Lewis. Tuttle isn’t someone who usually works for me (although more Richard Kind is never a bad thing), but the development that he’s possibly been so close to the Smiths for all of these years because he needs to report to Stan for witness protection duties is actually kind of brilliant. This is once more an area in American Dad that’s probably not meant to be examined under this level of scrutiny, but it does justify Tuttle’s heavy presence in the series, even when it doesn’t make sense.

“The Book of Fischer” throws a lot at the audience and it tells some relatively simple stories in some very convoluted ways. There’s some sloppy plotting going on where there’s excess in the wrong places and insular narratives that isolate a lot of the characters so that nearly half of the cast doesn’t really have anything to do here. That being said, the risks that the episode rakes work and it’s still a funny episode even if a lot of the individual pieces work better than the collective whole. It’s still encouraging that American Dad thinks outside of the box like this and strives for something different and not just phoning it in. It’s the sort of lesson that people will hopefully continue to follow 1000 and 2000 years in the future.