Review: Family Guy “Our Idiot Brian”

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 SPOILERS BELOW

Happy Monday! Not really, I won’t even try to defend Mondays. But I’m in a pretty good mood today because despite a season that has disappointed me at almost every turn, I think we found this season’s crowning jewel last night. Plus have you seen that Peter Griffin impersonator that went to New York Comic Con? Excellent stuff! If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to go check him out on YouTube or something. That’s another story though! Let’s just get into this review.

When Meg is faced with her SAT that she knows she’s going to fail, she persuades Brian to take it for her, but he ends up flunking it. He becomes so distraught with his failure he begins to embrace his stupidity with some help from Peter. Not everybody is pleased with Brian’s new identity though.

I really enjoyed this episode. There was a lot to enjoy about it, the jokes were well timed, the story was engaging with the comedy, and it was well paced. The episode made me laugh quickly, and didn’t waste time getting to the next joke. In recent Family Guy episodes I feel there are a lot of jokes that get dragged out too long, and end up eating up a lot of the episode. I lost interest in the Chicken vs. Peter fights for this season. This episode was very fast though, and I think that’s how I like Family Guy best.

The story reminded me of the episode of The Simpsons “Homr”. (The one where Homer became intelligent after having a crayon removed from his brain.) “Our Idiot Brian” is sort of a reverse of that premise, and I found stupid Brian very intelligent. This episode almost took a nose dive for me when it was discovered what had been causing Brian’s stupidity, but it ultimately didn’t end up affecting the episode in a depressing way. When you watch this episode, you can tell all of the characters are having a fun time, so you sort of have fun yourself. They could have turned this episode very dark, very quickly, and that would have really pulled me out of it, but they kept their pacing and the fun ensued till the end. This episode was also very self-aware. Family Guy has never been afraid of making fun of itself, it knows what it is, and sometimes I feel like the writers know this and that gives them permission to half-ass episodes. I didn’t get that impression last night though. There were a couple winks to the audience in this episode making fun of Family Guy, and just the ways they were presented were clever and seemed well thought-out to me.

Now it’s time to rain on the parade. While this is easily my favorite episode of the season thus far, I must also mention things that didn’t work for me. The first thing that didn’t work was how they explained Brian’s stupidity. To me, it didn’t feel necessary to explain it at all. I really just thought he was acting up until the big reveal, and after that I couldn’t help but wonder if it was at all needed. I don’t think it was. My second complaint also doubles as a positive, sort of, and it is how the episode pulled the rug out from under Meg during the first act. It seemed like we were getting a Meg episode, but it quickly transitioned into a Brian episode. Meg’s usually mute group of friends were actually speaking and showing some personality in this episode, and it seemed like a cool opportunity to develop these characters further and possibly give Meg better characters to play off of in the future. They were confined to one scene, but who knows? Maybe Meg’s friends will play a bigger role in a future episode.

Great episode, overall. I really enjoyed this one. Everything from the jokes to the story, how the characters interacted, it was all very fun. It was certainly worth missing a half hour of watching drunken celebrities at the Golden Globes. Just barely though.

 

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How did you guys like “Our Idiot Brian”? Agree with my points? Think I’m crazy? Let me know! Enjoy the rest of your week!