Review: American Dad “Fantasy Baseball”

…and welcome back!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While trying to watch a baseball game, Stan walks in on Steve’s Dungeons and Dragons session with his friends, but that’s TOO NERDY for Stan. So, Steve tries coming up with a compromise game between it and baseball, which Stan rejects. Steve then ends up at a local game, where his fantastical flair ends up stealing the crowd’s hearts. He soon finds himself gaining more and more control over the style and rules of professional games as the Major Leagues begin using him as a way to spice up diminishing game attendance. This turns out to be a COLOSSAL failure. But before that becomes obvious , Steve realizes that all he wanted was for Stan to appreciate him, which it turns out he does!

Meanwhile, Francine and Roger suddenly find out that their favorite daytime soap opera has been canceled, so Roger tries turning their lives into a soap opera with expectedly awful results.

OUR TAKE

After what seems like an eternity, American Dad returns for its landmark sixteenth season. It feels like ages since I last reviewed an episode of this show, to the point that I almost forgot a lot of the cast names. But what brought me back was remembering the breakout star of last season: Tuttle. Seriously, someone on the writing staff must have REALLY liked Tuttle because he is a major part of almost every episode of Season 15. He’s practically the eighth main character at this point. And it’s well deserved for someone like him. Tuttle.

So, onto this episode in particular, which seems to be setting up a possible theme to get people hyped for the upcoming 300th episode. If I had to guess, they’ll likely be doing an homage to an early episode of the show to get the nostalgia going before bringing it all home. At least, that’s the only reason I can think of for this premiere feeling like just a reheated version of Season 2’s “All About Steve”, which has essentially the exact same story of Stan discovering how much of a geek Steve is, trying to remedy it with baseball, and the two trying to reach common ground about it. Only in THAT episode, the show still remembered that Stan worked for the CIA (or at least wasn’t as bored with that as they seem to be now). I’m just saying that when you make an episode that is basically the same as the one you’ve already written, people are going to notice.

That said, despite the total dilution of Stan’s personality to “angry stubborn sitcom dad”, it does also show how Steve’s character has developed a bit since 2005, since back then he was just your awkward creepy nerd son archetype, but now he’s EVEN MORE of all those things. Only now he looks to be really owning his nerd-dom, which makes sense during a point in time where nerdy stuff is becoming more mainstream. Though I have to say that the eagerness of the baseball executive to listen to literally everything Steve said off the top of his head was kind of unbelievable. Unless that was a commentary on how executives will just completely lose themselves over an idea they think is good at the moment, in which case…well done.

But the most egregious thing in this episode has to be the B-plot with Francine and Roger. Specifically how they were only JUST NOW learning their show was canceled. In this day and age where the Internet is used by more and more people, news of the show’s cancellation would have gotten to them at least months in advance! Especially if they followed a website that kept them updated on news, reviews, and previews of things happening in the entertainment industry, including whether or not their show was renewed for another season. Perhaps a site that was named after, as Wikipedia defines it, “a globule of one substance in another, usually gas in a liquid”, paired alliteratively with a term for “talking foolishly, mindlessly, or excessively.”

Why, if we lived in that dream world where that kind of site existed, one can only imagine the ease of which people could get connected with their favorite shows, movies, comics, and games!

Assuming they were animated. Otherwise, no dice.