Review: Family Guy “Adoptation”

Overview

To restore his public image, Carter adopts a young girl named Tatum from an orphanage, drawing jealousy from Lois.

Cutaways

Brooks Brothers,Phone Call of Awkwardness, House Hunters Australia

Our Take

If you aren’t a canon buff for Family Guy(wait, what happened to Carol and Patrick?), then this week’s episode is going to be right up your alley. We’ve seen a lot of episodes of either Stewie or Peter or Brian making a new acquaintance or friend or something and then spend more time with the new relationship thereby forgetting about the old one. Hell, even Rupert had a few. Lois checks in with her take on this trope and the results are adequate.

The real win is any episode with Carter Pewterschmidt who happens to be one of my favorite characters of Family Guy of all-time. It does sound like his dialogue has been tampered down a bit, but whenever he gets the floor to himself to smash a joke its usually pretty awesome, and the character has some of the best one-liners in the history of the series.

Quite frankly, in all my years of covering baby characters for Family Guy, Tatum has become one of my least favorite so far. There was hardly any interaction with her and the other members of the Griffin family (though maybe she sticks around and that changes) so we really don’t have a LOT to go with on who likes who, but I could sit and watch an entire 45-minutes of just the Griffins fucking around in the zoo. Brian, Peter, and even the Anchorman-esque ending all gave me lots of chuckles, an ode to the fact that this franchise has always had hilarious animal characters other than Brian.

Not a TON of originality this week, but a fun episode nonetheless. Let’s see some more of Tatum in the future and hope she’s not a “one and done” character.