Review: American Dad “An Adult Woman”

Overview

After Hayley is deemed a big child by The Lady from The Hamster Rescue Society, she gets involved with two Roger personas who have a complicated family dynamic in an effort to prove that she is an adult woman.

Our Take

I’m with the old lady on this one, I’ve always felt that Hayley has straddled a line for years between altruistic and an idiot and on a weekly basis you never really know which one you’re going to get. But, I actually think that speaks to the strength of Rachael MacFarlane’s acting performance when portraying the Smith family’s oldest daughter because she’s so versatile she can lead into Hayley’s more childish ways or more assertive ways and still get a swell performance.

That said, I’m not so sure the plot agrees with the show this week. For starters, episodes with dual-personality Rogers give me a headache for a multitude of reasons: 1) I love Roger just as much as the next guy, but sometimes TOO much Roger is too much of a good thing and 2) trying to keep up with Roger’s multiple personalities can be exhausting at times and that was no different here as he portrays both a somewhat foreboding father and his coming-of-age daughter. Whatever they were babbling about to Hayley over the course of the 22-minute episode, I didn’t have a lot of interest in, and was even disappointed that we couldn’t get a “B”-plot to kind of give us a bit more levity and something different to the avalanche of Roger.

We’ve seen a number of Roger personalities in the past, but to do a whole episode where it’s really JUST him in multiples with no break makes watching this week’s episode of American Dad more of a chore than anything else. We’ve had far better episodes this season and we’ve got a lot more to come.