Review: Family Guy “Take My Wife”

 

Another season of the Family Guy in the books, ladies and gentlemen. Be sure to keep an eye out for the season review that will be up shortly. That’s where I’ll really get into what I thought of the season as a whole. Before all of that though, we do have one last episode of Family Guy to review, so let’s jump into it!

In “Take My Wife” Lois books a couple’s vacation, but it turns out to be a marriage counseling program. Carter is frustrated because the kids are so into their electronics.

As far as season finales go, Take My Wife was a bit of a disappointing sendoff for the season. The last hurrah for season thirteen didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary. I remember having a similar problem last season. For both season twelve and thirteen, the penultimate episode felt more like the season finale than the actual finale. Cleveland returning to the show in “He’s Bla-ack” seemed like a fitting way to wrap up season twelve, and Peter having a showdown with Liam Neeson seemed like a cool way to wrap up season thirteen. So as far as being the conclusion to a season, I don’t think this episode performed well.

Being an episode all on it’s own, it really isn’t that bad. If this were just any other episode during the regular season, I would have looked at it more favorably. I thought a lot of the jokes were well written and thought out, the stories themselves were pretty interesting to see develop, and we had a bunch of different characters in this episode to enjoy. Even Donna had a few lines. Many may recall that one of my hopes for Family Guy was that Donna and the rest of the Cleveland Show characters would play a bigger part in the Family Guy world, but in season thirteen you could almost forget they even existed. So it was nice to have her around in this episode. That’s about where the positives end.

While a strong episode on it’s own, it sort of copy and pasted the “Peter doesn’t appreciate Lois” formula into the episode, and developed around it. It’s the type of story I hope to see less of in season fourteen, because it’s been played out. We know how it ends every time and it just feels lazy. I didn’t care for Carter in this episode either. Being the old guy who is out of touch with how things are today isn’t that interesting. Admittedly it did get a bit funnier as the episode progressed, but I lost excitement when I read the synopsis because you know exactly how this story will play out also. What made the stories in this episode good was that I don’t feel like we’ve seen the stories presented to us in this fashion. I liked the island scenery, and I liked that all of the Griffin kids shared a story as opposed to just one or two of them. It really seemed like a family focused episode. I don’t think we see enough of that from the show these days.

Overall, it’s a good episode. Not quite how I would have wanted to see the season wrap up, but I did find myself laughing quite a bit and there were a lot of things to look at in this episode and recognize that they are good. There are definitely some flaws in this episode that hold it back from being one of the better Family Guy season finales.

 

 

Remember, if you want to read my thoughts on the season as a whole, keep an eye out for the season review.

What did you think of “Take My Lady”? Good episode? Bad episode? Share your thoughts!

Family Guy returns September 29th on Fox!