Review: Family Guy “Stewie, Chris & Brian’s Excellent Adventure”

SPOILERS BELOW

The Holidays are over, everybody is back to work, and people’s favorite TV shows will gradually return to their regular schedules, including Family Guy! Hope you all had an excellent Holiday season and welcome to the first Family Guy review of 2015! Let’s jump into it.

Chris is failing his history class, and only a passing grade on his history exam can save him. When Stewie and Brian learn of the news, they decide to take Chris on a crash course of history with the help of the time machine.

Not a great start to the year for Family Guy. Not an awful episode, but Stewie’s time machine episodes seem too routine now. Obviously there is a lot of content the writers can pick and choose from when producing these episodes, but ultimately they all just seem the same. Using modern cultural stereotypes and applying them to whichever time period they travel to, it just gets old. Prior to watching the episode, I was hoping they’d stray away from some of that and maybe find a new way to make the time travel concept funny, but it was nothing new. In this episode’s defense, quite a bit of it made me laugh. It was the same old thing, but I guess the timing of it all was enough to be somewhat funny. I liked that Chris was brought on the time travel adventure this time around, he didn’t add too much to the experience, but it was still a unique ingredient to the formula.

Some things I think could have made this episode better would have been getting to the time travel a little sooner in the episode, and spend more time in each time period. How they introduced each period felt like a montage of cutaway gags, and most of them weren’t that good. If they had the time to flesh out where they were exploring, I think there may have been an opportunity for a wider variety of jokes. The first act of this episode was my favorite portion, but in relation to everything else I felt like it dragged down what the episode could have been because it took so much time to set up what the episode was going to be.

The jokes themselves were hit & miss in this episode. The first act of the episode really had me laughing, but the second and third was kind of painful to sit through. Like I mentioned before, the whole time travel thing is routine now and adding Chris to the recipe didn’t spice it up enough for me. I think the only idea that would excite me for another time travel episode is if Peter and the guys drunkenly stumble upon the time machine and then use it for a crazy adventure of some kind.

Ultimately, it was an alright episode. I was a little harsh on it in my review, but it was worth the watch. I had some good laughs and at the end of the day, that’s what matters with Family Guy. I would just love it if they found a way to reinvigorate these episodes, because I want great episodes, not just alright ones.

 

How did you guys like “Stewie, Chris & Brian’s Excellent Adventure”? Was I too harsh on it? Agree with my opinions? Let us know! Enjoy the rest of your week!