Review: Family Guy “Snap(ple) Decision”
Overview
Winner of a Snapple contest, Lois uses her winnings to take Meg on a tropical vacation; flaunting their wealth, the two are kidnapped; Stewie and Brian undergo “friendship therapy.”
Our Take
This week’s episode of Family Guy has all sorts of problems and they pretty much start from the get-go. That said, sometimes Family Guy can have shitty episodes, but still bail itself out with funny cutaway gags or at least SOME sort of humorous dialogue throughout the episode, neither of which is presented here.
Instead, we get a more than tiresome plot with Meg and Lois being kidnapped given that we’ve had dozens upon dozens of episodes of Family Guy with any and all of the family members being kidnapped at some point in time that have had much much funnier outputs than this piece of shit.
Then we get a therapy bit with Brian and Stewie with no real sense of what the hell transpired in their relationship to deteriorate to the point that therapy was even needed. Moreover, we’ve seen a number of episodes that featured therapy plots, hell one of them, “Send in Stewie, Please” made national news because everyone thought Stewie came out as gay.
Normally I would come close to a conclusion that may feature some sort of shout out for the cutaways, but we really didn’t get any of those anyway, so we have two tired plots in an episode written by Travis Bowe that didn’t even have a SINGLE joke in the ENTIRE script. Not…a…one. Typically Travis gets my ire because he writes those ridiculous anthology episodes of Family Guy, now he’s getting it for being just as unoriginal with this week’s episode which is by far the worst of the season. This coming off of a week where FOX has announced that the show is moving to Spring in 2024 and the thought whether or not the franchise can be a lone animated presence in the middle of the week with episodes like this is a frightening thought to the future of the franchise.
Short of getting Roiland back, which I'm sure isn't going to happen, I don't even think they could get much better than the new voices from the previous season. And the ratings for season 7 weren't much lower on average than for season 6; it was pretty much just a normal season-to-season drop that most likely would have happened regardless.
I mean, look at the actual averages:
Season 1 - 1.57 million viewers Season 2 - 1.97 million viewers Season 3 - 2.33 million viewers Season 4 - 1.52 million viewers Season 5 - 0.96 million viewers Season 6 - 0.56 million viewers Season 7 - 0.42 million viewers
Ever since season 3, it had been having steep drops even with Roiland still involved; the season 6 to 7 drop is actually the smallest-percentage drop it's had since it started dropping, and if anything it's possible that changing the voice actors actually *boosted* interest a bit and prevented it from dropping even more.