Review: Family Guy “Hard Times At Adam West High”

Overview

Chris goes back in time to prevent an embarrassing incident during a book report; Peter sits out on a lottery pool and gets mad when the group wins $123.

Cutaway Gags

Blow Pop, Chris Insults, Peter’s presentation, Charles Lindbergh

Our Take

Early Family Guy used to be rife with sci-fi humor, chief among them is Stewie’s machine which has fucked around with concepts like time-travel, the multi-verse, and cloning over the course of 23 seasons. Nowadays, sci-fi-infused episodes of Family Guy are quite a bit rarer but that is all changed with this new episode written by Steve Callaghan (his second debuted episode in as many weeks this season). And while this week’s episode doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel in either of it’s plots, anytime we get a time-travel episode I can’t help but get a bit nostalgic.

Let’s start with the lottery bit, mainly because we actually had a whole episode about the Griffins winning the lottery that saw what happens when Peter wins the lottery and ends up wasting all of the winnings. So to see another episode all about the rest of the guys winning a much smaller lottery and then blowing their winnings as well (hey! Family Guy followed The Simpsons with their own Ozempic gag!), wasn’t as appealing and there wasn’t much having me care that much either way. We had some funny one-liners but that’s about all there was to report on that one.

As for the time travel bit, again a bit cliched complete with the trademark 2.5D camera wraps around the machine and even the show’s classically orchestrated music that signifies that Stewie is doing something with his machine. Personally I would have preferred to have seen Chris mess with Stewie’s machine by himself as opposed to having Brian with him given that Brian has done this a number of times in the past and his naivete really doesn’t make sense here. But, maybe to get a whole episode of Chris fucking with the machine all by himself would’ve afforded more gags.

Cutaways were few this week and a lot of them actually more like cut-forwards but were for the most part pretty entertaining. Perhaps the best bit by far was the “After Guy” Family Guy after show giving us a much more straightforward satirical attack on a common Hollywood trope that I actually think could’ve made for an entire episode if the writers had kept working on that idea.

All in all,a rather weak effort this week. Both the time travel and lotto episodes were really paint-by-numbers Family Guy bits that have been done a bunch before. A few laughs ups the score a bit for me.