I’ll admit that it’s true that Family Guy has been able to get away with some borrowed or recycled plots in the past, but usually the execution was entertaining enough to where you didn’t really care because you were laughing with it and felt along for the ride. It was to the point that I was calling plot point after lackluster plot point, and found some tropes that I used to enjoy (such as “everyone hates Meg” and “hey look Herbert’s a pedophile) become increasingly tiresome whenever they cropped up. I’ll give credit to a couple of them (particularly the Back To The Future joke featuring film cast member Lea Thompson) for precipitating some earnest chuckles, but the rest were pretty mediocre at best and left me confused as to how the writers could see them as potentially hilarious.Īs for the actual plot of the episode, “Finders Keepers” comes off as a formulaic mess that fails to do anything new or interesting with his characters. The cutaway gags miss more often than they hit, producing only a handful of genuine laughs that stem more as a reaction to their audacity than as a response to something honestly funny. Much like the greed-crazed citizens of Quahog on the treasure hunt though, “Finders Keepers” makes mad grabs at everything but succeeds in grasping nothing. But at other times, such as in Brian and Stewie from Season Eight, the show can narrow its focus to an almost minimalist scale and pursue character-driven stories that elevate Family Guy to unprecedented levels of poignancy. On the one hand Family Guy is a wacky show at heart, and much of the enjoyment comes from the seemingly random and off-the-wall cutaways that spew from the endearingly demented writing staff. It’s a bit of a daunting task to critique a cartoon steeped so heavily in opposite strengths as Family Guy.
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