Review: Family Guy “HTTPete”

Peter goes viral and literally breaks the internet!

Overview:

The Pawtucket Brewery attempts to reach a younger audience by hiring a millennial, Hammer, to be head of social media.  Hammer teaches Peter how to be a millennial through vaping, attending Coachella, and being “on fleek.”  Unfortunately, Hammer is too distracted by his phone and is hit by a bus and dies.

Peter, now the head of social media for Pawtucket Brewery comes up with some brilliant ideas and helps the company and himself become viral. Peter is so successfully viral he gains an invite to Silicon Valley for him and his family.  While visiting the Boop headquarters, Peter mistakes the company’s servers as a urinal and brings the entire web down- obviously putting the world in chaos.  After attempting to recreate the internet, they do the only sure thing and put the internet in a bag of rice.

Our Take:

The millennial lifestyle may not be for everyone, but Peter Griffin’s short attention span is perfect.  This episode did a brilliant job of insulting nearly everyone.  The countless jabs at millennials were expertly done, and they described the generation better than most have been able to capture- even millennials themselves.  Other than that, this episode touched on many different subjects including sexual harassment and transgenderism.  And still, it was funny the whole way through.

Peter’s attempts at becoming viral and later his trials at recreating the internet encapsulated everything excellent and frustrating about the web all at the same time.  The “six-second talk show” is something that I think we would all actually enjoy, while “look at it, kick it”- well, I could use more. Meanwhile, his recreation of pop-up adds is so on point it is kind of upsetting.

Good for Family Guy for finally putting out a regular episode. This season has been, so cram packed full of special events and Stewie/Brian focused episodes that we almost forgot what this show had to offer.  Social commentary is the source of the show’s success, and this particular episode brought that back to the forefront.  It was a simple premise, but it gave us everything we want from Family Guy, and I would love more shows like this one.