Review: Family Guy “Pawtucket Pete”

Who do you think would be a better mascot for Pawtucket Brewery, Peter or Brian?

Overview:

Peter’s longtime boss at the Pawtucket Brewery, Angela, died swimming twenty minutes after she ate.  In her place, two bosses step in at the brewery.  Peter continues to get worse and worse demotions from picking up recycling to drinking pee.  However, when the company needs an every-man to become the new mascot, Peter fits the bill.

Peter makes the perfect Pawtucket Pat and becomes popular the world over.  After he brings Brian in to do a comedy routine, the dog takes the spotlight.  Peter ends up as Brian’s blundering sidekick.  Peter’s jealousy gets the better of him and causes way more destruction than its worth trying to get back at Brian.

Our Take:

Family Guy does a lot of things right.  It has a humoristic look at the world around us, specifically in pop culture.  It can develop a story all with the purpose of landing one great joke.  And, it has a lot of great characters.  What I don’t look to Family Guy for is the ongoing sitcom that they continually try to develop.  So many random events take place in each episode, and the writers choose to keep some as cannon and most the time they don’t.  So, how do we keep up as fans?  The point is, the episode starts with a significant death, but I hardly remembered who Angela was.

The episode kicked off with Peter delivering his eulogy for his late boss.  It was a eulogy that you would expect out of Peter including unhelpful definitions and the lyrics to the ‘Friends’ theme song.  At first, this was confusing as we haven’t seen Angela since last season, and a further a season before that.  But, Peter gives one of the most inappropriate eulogies you’ve ever heard, so who really cares what happened to his boss.

One thing that I always seem to struggle with when reviewing Family Guy is the story.  Thankfully, this one is at least cohesive in that it has a solid beginning, middle and end.  There is no wonder that the show has so many to-be-continues and three-parters.  The struggle seems to come from trying to fit a story in, play with all of those parts, and still deliver all of the random cut-scenes that we expect from the show.  That balance must be a struggle with each episode as they decide what must be cut to fit their twenty-something time-frame.  So, while this episode was a balanced quite well, I still feel like there was a lot of the story that hit the editing room floor.

Speaking of those oh-so-hilarious cut-scenes, this episode brought some great material with it.  For one, there is a significant crossover with Mr. Burns and Smithers of The Simpsons making an appearance.  It was a clever little addition especially adding in the confusion of how similar Homer and Peter actually are.  We also got to see Peter become a guest on ‘Billy on the Street’.  He makes a good point about Billy Eichner’s yelling at people unnecessarily ruining those strangers days.  There is also a funny little moment where Peter is a dinosaur walker – you know, instead of a dog walker.  Silly, I know, but the whole scene goes a bit fourth wall which makes it fun.

Overall, I thought it was a good episode.  Somewhere in the average of what we can expect from Family Guy.  It wasn’t a terrible episode by any means, but it was also not a stand-out one either.  I do appreciate that the story didn’t get rushed at the end, which is usually my pet peeve with the series lately.  As you can see from the review, there were lot’s of great moments sprinkled in, which really is what we all watch this show for anyways.  And, the episode did make me want to be a mascot for a brewery, so there’s that.