Review: Family Guy “Hefty Shades of Grey”

How does being locked in a basement help Peter land a job with the Trump administration?

Overview:

Peter discovers that someone was murdered in his home before he moved in.  After he gets locked in the basement with the ghost, his hair turns completely white.  The new style makes him look more distinguished which lands him a new job on the local news.  Unfortunately, his journalism performance is less than honest.  A quality that lands him in good favour with President Trump who offers Peter a job starting in the next episode.

Meanwhile, Chris is struggling to understand the finer sex after he turns down one of the best looking girls in school.  Stewie and Brian take it into their own hands to help him out with his dating game.  But, they have to start by desensitizing him from his massive porn addiction, which may be more difficult than anticipated.

Our Take:

Family Guy returns after the holiday break and goes all paranormal, or as Peter calls it “like the female Ghostbusters, but with all guys.”  The episode starts out promising as Peter and the gang become ghost hunters.  But, when they don’t find anything, the show goes an entirely other direction.  And, even Stewie is possessed by the spirit at one point, but quickly forgotten as the story progresses.  A strange move by Family Guy which loves to take one small joke and carry it through and play it out through any story.  But, this is definitely not the ghost story you expect when the show starts.

In fact, the entire plot about Peter’s hair turning white is all over the place.  The erratic plot is probably done as an intentional lead up to him gaining a new job in the Trump administration – the story promised for the next episode.  So, how can I even complain any more?  Family Guy taking on Trump sounds like the best episode in years.  I’m pretty excited, I hope they knock it out of the park.

With that all said, we can focus on the rest of this episode, which includes Chris’s strange relationship with women.  In a generation that is raised on the internet, Chris’s natural hormones are blocked by his addiction to porn.  What does a teenage boy need from girls when he can literally find anything that he could ever need on the web?  It seems like a bit of a stretch considering nothing beats the intimacy of true interaction, but I don’t disagree that sexual desensitization may be an issue with the rise of the porn industry.  Though, the best part of this plot was Brian explaining the ways we needed to fulfill our desires before the rise of the internet.

I also loved how they concluded the Chris storyline.  I often complain that this show has sloppy endings to their plots.  Episodes tend to end abruptly without any finite conclusions to the stories they began.  Not that this episode was any different, but they seemed to acknowledge their own folly in a corny and hilarious manner.  With Chris gone, Stewie and Brian make a lousy joke and share a high five to end the scene.  Sounds simple and cheesy, but it delighted me in a satisfying way.  I don’t even care that it ended sloppily any more.  So, maybe we just need more corny finishes.

It’s funny that this episode was all over the place – something that usually drives me nuts – but, I still loved it.  It’s like I am going against everything I believe in.  Or maybe I am just that excited to see Trump in the next episode that they could have done anything this week as long as it ended with that ‘to be continued’.   To be honest, though, that is about all the episode had going for it.  Even the cutscenes were not that humorous, and I think we could have done a lot more with Chris’s porn addiction.