Review: American Dad “Top of the Steve”

What is this, a crossover episode?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After one more time of Stan pushing Steve and Roger, they decide to run away to a special boarding school. Only it turns out it’s a GIRL’S boarding school! With a special technicality for Steve being the only boy (Roger’s a girl here)! But the technicality has a clause! But that clause has an addendum! Roger starts piecing things together and realizes they’re in a spin-off made to get Steve away from his family forever! So they come up with the only solution out of things: using really expensive copyrighted music. They then arrive home to reunite with the other Smiths, who have been dealing with potential Steve replacements all week.

OUR TAKE

Oh, we’re doing another Steve & Roger episode, huh? But seriously, I kinda rushed that Overview, but this IS actually a pretty clever premise. What happens when a TV character becomes aware that they’re being pulled into a spin-off? Steve basically gets thrown into a western version of a harem anime, which, as I was watching, I swore I had seen somewhere before…because I HAD seen this exact scenario of a teenage boy getting thrown into a school for girls on a technicality before in the anime Infinite Stratos (only it involved flying robots because of course it would). Go look it up if you don’t believe me! And then slap yourselves because you watched Infinite Stratos.

But yeah, the way everything slowly came together and as the mystery fell away, it slowly became clear that it was following all the steps of a spin-off pilot: Character from old show is in new unfamiliar place, meets quirky new main cast that set up their own side-plots, faces a new challenge to test whether or not they should stay, then ends up succeeding in order to cement their place in that new place until it is inevitably cancelled once the novelty wears off and they return to the main show. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that sort of situation done from this kind of meta perspective…probably because I haven’t seen a ton of traditional sitcoms or their spin-offs (not even recent ones like Black-ish or Grown-ish).

Though what keeps me from giving this a better score is that there doesn’t seem to be much of an explanation for WHY this is happening to Steve and Roger at this moment. For one, Roger saying that Steve needed to escape or else he’d never see his family again didn’t make a whole lot of sense considering the concept of Crossover Episodes exist. But other than that, I get that this is sort of a “played by the Network gods” kind of deal, but I feel like it could have been so easy for them to do a sort of Truman Show-like angle where they end up off the set somehow and run into someone from the network who explains the purpose of all this and why they’re spinning off Steve of all people. They could even get EVEN MORE meta and have it be Cleveland Brown, the last guy that they gave a spin-off from a Seth MacFarlane show (maybe even mention how it doesn’t even air on Adult Swim anymore).

So, while this is yet another case of AD’s niche weirdness that I love about it, I gotta say I don’t think they went as far with it as they could have, which is a damn shame. Still, great concept that I loved the heck out of.