Review: American Dad “Silicon Steve”

Overview

Steve spends his summer working on an app with some unlikely friends; the rest of the family becomes cord-cutters.

Our Take

I’ll be honest when this week’s episode of American Dad kicked off I was flooded with a number of questions almost immediately. For starters, I didn’t know what the hell Principal Lewis was even doing in Steve’s garage to begin with during a summer day where none of his friends are around. Like, wouldn’t anybody be a tad creeped that some kid is hosting the Principal of his school in his garage? Fortunately I had to get by that quickly because I became equally concerned that we were getting a whole episode about an app being built which had me really worried because it’s kind of a trope that has been done numerous times before by other animated sitcoms, but then the writers gave me another left turn when they started turning this thing into a musical that I thought I was going to not like because I’m not a big fan of hip hop but, overall, I’m coming away from this episode of American Dad with immense satisfaction.

First thing’s first, you can go ahead and keep that cord-cutter storyline, American Dad. Clearly it was a topic that you guys thought was a good idea but really didn’t want to venture TOO deep into knowing full you were on a contract season and didn’t want to rock the boat with TBS too much and I get that, but with how busy Steve’s episode was you could’ve just as easily deleted this entire premise and we probably would’ve been fine.

Next, we would be doing a disservice if we didn’t mention how absolute fire all of the songs were on American Dad tonight. Again, not a hip hop fan, but even I can recognize the amount of heart that went into producing all of the music and it is much appreciated from over here. From a technical perspective some of the mixes sounded a tad low on the vocals, possibly as a result of any or all of the voice actors producing their music-recordings from home which is a different skill-set than it is with just straight voice acting. If the performances weren’t produced from home then maybe bringing in a re-mixer would have helped just so all of the audio levels would be evened out.

Overall, a pretty classic episode of American Dad. Somewhat indicative of prior musical episodes and as previously mentioned that whole B-plot could’ve been left on the cutting room floor, but still a very watchable episode worthy of your time.