Season Review: Family Guy Season 20

Before the 20th season of Family Guy commenced, questions surrounding the future of the franchise were abound. Literally this week, show creator Seth MacFarlane lambasted FOX for being the parent company of the terrorist-creating FOX News despite the fact that FOX has several divisions that includes Entertainment, Sports, News, and others. Even with that, Family Guy itself had some changes it had to make when Mike Henry was one of the most well-known voice actors to relinquish his role as the voice of Cleveland Brown to that of Arif Zahir.

Even with that, I think Family Guy season 20 is a bit of a “rebuilding year” for the show. For starters, the series introduced not just the aforementioned Zahir doing an awesome job as the new voice of Cleveland, but also the likes of Chris Parnell, Peter Macon, Jay Pharoah, and Patton Oswalt have all portrayed new characters that appear to be on the road to that of “recurring” status, and all of whom play really funny and fresh new characters. Family Guy also continues to push the limits on challenging pro-trans extremism, Stewie fretting for having an abortion, and more.

That’s not to say the franchise doesn’t often find itself repeating tired premises over and over again. “Rock Hard” and “HBO-No” are both in that “Family Guy parody in threes” trope that I can’t stand anymore, and we still get a have dose of “Peter does something stupid and Lois has to clean it up” or “Stewie and Brian fuck up and have to fix it” tropes a few times over the course of the season, but my hope is the aforementioned fresh characters will continue to lead to fresh storylines and that the show continues to push boundaries. I get that Seth hates being on FOX, but that might be the type of shit he needs to refocus and go to war and get some of those creative juices flowing that would then give us a taste of the glory days of the Family Guy in the early aughts.