Review: Family Guy “The Marrying Kind”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Stewie gets the taste of domestic life when he receives a mail-order bride from Ukraine. Meanwhile, Peter and Chris become addicted to free hotel breakfast buffets. This resulted in them traveling to different hotels to feast on the breakfast items.

Our Take:

It looks like Stewie is getting into hot water yet again this week. After dealing with plastic surgery and Terminators, he’s now about to experience life as a domestic husband. Is there anything that Stewie couldn’t do during his childhood?

The episode began with Peter and his friends singing the iconic theme song from The Muppet Show. Admittedly, it is a catchy song to sing along to, especially for people who watched the Muppets growing up. After that, the episode took a bit of a nosedive. The two plots showcased Peter and Chris eating breakfast buffets and Stewie playing the role of a husband. The former had some tolerable moments in terms of the humor despite the whole scenario being forgettable. The latter had put an interesting premise into play when Stewie received the bride from Ukraine, but it wasn’t able to maintain its interest throughout its 30-minute runtime.

The Ukraine bride segment represented Stewie experiencing life as a husband. He even worked at an Enterprise car rental store cleaning up people’s vomit on the car seats by himself. Thanks a lot, Levi. With a plot like this, I assumed that the episode would teach Stewie about the responsibilities of adulthood and marriage at a very young age. Of course, since it is Family Guy, the plot is more of an excuse to lay out some chuckle-worthy humor that failed to stick the landing. The part where the bride wants to have sex with Stewie was more awkward than funny, considering the age difference between the two.

The segment did start to get more interesting when Stewie discovered that Brian was sleeping with the bride. However, they quickly resolved it with them coming up with a double husband plan. Brian gets the sex part of the marriage while Stewie handles the other parts. This was then followed by the bride leaving Stewie, officially ending their marriage. In short, it’s a so-so conclusion to Stewie’s short-lived domestic life. 

The hotel breakfast buffet segment is what I expected. It’s basically Peter and Chris eating breakfast from different hotels after discovering the buffet during their stay at a New Orleans hotel. They continue to eat until Chris gets caught by security and sent to jail. It ended with Chris and Peter, disguised as a policeman, having free prison breakfast, so I’m taking that as a good thing. Aside from the Inception visual gag and the Alpha-Bits letters telling Peter to murder his family, there’s nothing too special about this segment. It’s Peter and Chris getting into trouble as usual, which should impress fans of these types of segments.

This was another average episode of the show’s 19th season regarding its plot and humor. A couple of moments managed to get a few chuckles from me, especially the hotel breakfast scenario’s gags. Unfortunately, they weren’t enough to save this middling marriage from slowly falling apart.