Review: Family Guy “Pitch Imperfect”

Overview

Peter must gain his family’s respect back after he makes a humiliating throw; Brian and Stewie become chiropractors.

Cutaways gags

Oktoberfest, Family Photographer, Karate Sensei, Stanley Tucci

Our Take

The one and only Artie Johann of “Fat Gun” fame is back and primed with a new episode of Family Guy, but did the time slot change jimmy something loose? Let’s dig in to find out.

For starters, when I think of the most gags done for being a chiropractor, I always think of Alan on Two And A Half Men and a lot of those jokes are largely represented in this week’s episode of Family Guy, so much so I’m actually surprised that the producers didn’t call back old pal Jon Cryer to guest star. Coupled with the fact that we’re getting a rather cliched premise of “Brian and Stewie start a business” which we’ve already had a few of this season ,and I was a bit worried about the entire B-plot. Fortunately, Chris’ contributions gives the whole bit a passing grade.

The A-plot is where I get even more miffed because there were two big ideas here that I thought were really funny that could’ve had bigger impacts but because of time both seem unlikely to happen. For starters I could’ve taken a whole episode of Family Guy taking place at some sort of an Oktoberfest. Granted we’re nearing April, but I bet if the writers kind of took that pitch and reworked it they would’ve had an even better episode that could’ve followed a football game. Perhaps sending the Griffins to Munich for the REAL Oktoberfest with the family ingratiating themselves into German culture could’ve been a more advantageous effort, but to no avail.

On the other end, if Peter throwing a ball terribly led to him joining up with other famous celebrities who have had notably terrible ceremonial pitches, the likes of 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, and Baba Booey all come to mind, could that have been more of a baseball homage that would’ve fit more perfectly during FOX’s baseball season. Who knows? That’s not to say the A-plot wasn’t good, it was, fake Roger Clemens gets torched, and Peter’s trip sequence with Meg was directed beautifully (shout out to director Mike Kim for crushing that scene), but I felt like there was a lot left on the table that could’ve been taken advantage of. I get that the show is largely written in Los Angeles, a city that doesn’t care about sports, but with Alec being a big Boston sports guy and Artie coming from Bayport I feel like a more firm baseball episode would’ve been the torpedo bat to really hit this one over the fence.

The cutaways were few but very quality. Matt Friend returns in his hilarious Stanley Tucci impression but I couldn’t help but notice where there were some audio directing issues. For starters, when the guys are at the clam and Peter’s friends are ignoring him, Cleveland’s voice sounded super muffled, almost not mixed correctly, and Seth Green’s vocal delivery of Chris Griffin sounded extra gravelly tonight for whatever reason which has me thinking is Seth’s long time performance of the character starting to take a toll on him at all.

In any event, a solid, nothing special, episode of Family Guy and we’ll see ya next week!