Review: Family Guy “Customer of the Week”

 

Overview (Spoilers Below):
Lois feels unappreciated by the family. When she noticed the “Customer of the Week” wall at her favorite coffee shop, Lois is determined to get her picture on the wall at all cost.

Our Take:
We’ve spent a couple of weeks seeing Stewie, Peter, and Chris get caught in some bizarre scenarios. Now it’s time to give Lois the spotlight. She’s going to need one for this week’s episode.
The episode started with Lois doing stuff for her family, like putting some clothes on Stewie and checking Brian’s butt. However, no matter how hard she works to keep them happy, she’s rewarded with nothing. Only by winning the “Customer of the Week” contest at the coffee shop could earn her the appreciation she needed. Seeing Lois getting recognition from only her Alexa device was a surefire sign that things started to go down an unfortunate path. Not just for Lois, but the entire episode in general.

The story in the episode is just Lois’s series of attempts to win “Customer of the Week”. This ranged from buying the employee’s expensive art to giving another employee, Lisa, a peanut allergy so she can pretend to save her. The latter resulted in Lisa being sent to a hospital and Lois getting caught by a surveillance camera. When a scenario like this happens in other shows, it rewards the viewers with charming and humorous fails and an ending that resolves the character’s predicament. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case here.

The “Customer of the Week” episode had similar qualities to the scenarios from the other cartoons. However, its execution towards those qualities failed to provide a fun experience of seeing Lois fail to win the contest. Instead, it turned out to be a miserable and humorless series of events that treated her as poorly as she was by her family. What a way to make her life feel even worse, guys.
This was another episode that’s left unsatisfied due to its mediocre humor despite a couple of chuckle-worthy moments. Probably the one piece of comedy that may get some viewers all riled up was when Lois classified the roommates she tied up as gay based on the fact that they live in the same room together. The ending wasn’t all that good either, as it provided no sense of closure to Lois’s quest to achieve appreciation. She just got arrested by the police for tying up the roommates, got released after six months in prison, and still got no gratitude after giving the coffee shop a tip. I didn’t see any humor in that. It just came across as dirty to me.

There’s a common theme shown in the “Customer of the Week” episode, and that’s appreciation. Sadly, there’s not enough material for me to appreciate what it offered. This episode just came across as sad and despicable instead of funny and charming. After seeing what she’s been through, all I can say is that Lois deserved a better episode than this.