Family Guy: Love Blactually [season premiere]
By fred | September 29, 2008
(S07E01) Sunday nights are animated again, as Fox series were returning to the air this Sunday. And along the the Simpsons another crazy family were back, the Griffins. Last season was short and quite uneven for Family Guy, with some terrific episodes as well as some pretty disappointing ones. When looking back though, one of the best episode last season had to offer was probably its season premiere, the famous Blue Harvest.
It’s going to be a very tough to try and top this one, and if you try to do a comparison you won’t like this episode. But the truth is that, in all fairness, even in itself this first episode wasn’t all that great. Looks like it had all it needs to be a hit, namely putting the focus of the episode on Brian and Stewie, as we all know how those are the greatest, and yet it wasn’t really there, and the laughs were missing…
Peter and Lois were around, but didn’t do much, as for Chris and Meg they weren’t even there, not even one single joke to make for of Meg! No it was all about Brian & Stewie this week. Or, actually, about Brian. Another dive into the mysterious ways of Brian’s love life as he gets a new girlfriend, and of course his non-official boyfriend, Stewie, got jealous and tried to mess things up.
But the problem was that it simply wasn’t really funny. I would blame that on too much Brian, not enough Stewie, but that’s me. Not to say it wasn’t ever funny or anything like that, but I found many jokes to be either not that funny, or just enough to make you smile at best, which is far from what you’d expect from the show. We should be laughing, laughing out loud, not just smiling or thinking “yeah, that’s funny.”
Unfortunately, this episode didn’t really bring the laughs with it, and as a regular episode I would call it disappointing, but the fact that it was actually the season premiere makes things even worse, obviously. I think another flaw of this episode, and that’s nothing new with Family Guy as they went there already in the past, is how they tried to have one full story that would go on for the entire episode.
I know many love to make fun of the show because it sometimes looks like it’s being written by manatees and they abuse gag-humor, but I don’t mind that, actually I think it’s part of the reason why I love this show so much : it’s not like anything else where there’s an ongoing story for the course of the episode, it’s just a succession of gags and jokes, and while it might seem to go nowhere, what matter is that in the end you spent half an hour laughing you ass off at those jokes. Oh sure, there was no story, no big plot or anything like that, but at least it was hilarious all along.
This episode is one of the many where the show tries to have one story for the entire episode, and like always it had a cost, laughs. It was far from being the worst episode the show ever came up with, but it was also nothing like a really great & funny episode like they used to deliver, either. And again, adding how the was the season opener and focused on Brian (and Stewie), and you get fans quite disappointed in the end.
I’m really glad the show is back, and I can’t wait to be laughing out loud at the crazy jokes they’ll come up with. Because sadly, this week it didn’t happen.
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Family Guy
Just finished watching the 2nd episode of season 7. While I think the 2nd was better than the 1st, to be honest, both episodes were quite disappointing. I’ve watched all FG episodes so far, and it seems to me that either the producers of season 7 are different people or some other sort of catastrophe has happened to the crew that is making the series. Anyway, I think I’ll wait for the 3rd episode and if this doesnt make me laugh, I’m no longer watching the series.
Everything has an ending