Review: Family Guy “V is for Mystery”

Sherlock Stewie leads this olde-timey episode.

Overview:

Family Guy gets a Victorian-era makeover, as the characters are thrown back to the turn of the century.  Stewie and Brian take the place of Sherlock and Watson in a murder mystery with a classic feel and look.

A new murder has the detectives worried that they have wrongly imprisoned the Scottish Brute.  As they follow the clues and through a series of jokes referencing the time change Sherlock-Stewie discovers the murderer is someone dear to Watson-Brian’s heart.  But, it turns out that even she was a pawn in a much bigger conspiracy to murder the Queen of England.

Our Take:

When you think about what the producers of Family Guy does best, it is this situational comedy that makes fun of an entire genre.  Whether it is the old west or outer space, MacFarlane-produced shows have a list of jokes lined-up.  So, why not do a Sherlock episode? It may not hold up to some satires that they have done, but it adds to the collection in the long-run.

The jokes about being a 100-years in the past, and how people used outdated words wore off quickly and were only funny because they don’t know when to stop.  Beat a joke tell its dead seems to be Family Guy’s secret formula.  However, I was happy to see the steampunk robot-whore exo-skeleton that Stewie used to flush out the murderer, nice addition.

Overall, I thought this was a decent episode; I always enjoy it when Family Guy takes me somewhere unexpected, and we can live in that world for an episode.  It was also clever to have Peter Griffin pop out to assure us a regular episode is coming next week.  I also agree with him that they should have done a Harry Potter satire, that would be a winner.  As for Sherlock-Stewie, it was average.