Episode 2 - Family Goy
22 March 2012
Synopsis: Peter falls in love with a cardboard cut-out of Kathy Ireland, the old Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover girl. Lois discovers that she is Jewish and Peter takes that to heart. He forces the whole family to become Jewish before his father comes to him in a dream to warn remind him that he is a Catholic.
The Good: This is another joke packed episode with plenty to enjoy. Though it's not that difficult to write jokes when you mine one of the most over-explored themes in all of American comedy.
The Kathy Ireland cut-out coming into Peter's life is an interesting one, at least from the point of view of animation. Like in South Park the producers decide to display her as a real human rather than a Family Guy animation. It makes sense for people who remember what she looked like to see the familiar image. As with all of Peter's deluded fantasies, there was humour to be had as he acts as if she is alive ("No no I'll do it" he reassures "Kathy" when it comes time to confess to Lois).
The Jewish story provides a raft of jokes you have seen a thousand times before but the odd gag may sneak a laugh from you as Peter uses Stewie's crib to make a cross and we get an amusingly accurate dig at Mark Wahlberg’s acting range. Peter's father intervenes to snap Peter out of his new religious zeal which makes sense as his character was a hard core Catholic. In classic Family Guy fashion, Peter decides to take advantage of this visitation to live out a Star Wars moment. His father's unconvincing request that Peter visit the "Dogoba System" draws an amusingly disappointed thank you from Peter. In the end Jesus turns up to give us Seth MacFarlane's views on religious belief. At least it allowed for a fun aside about Christian-Jewish-Islamic similarities.
Unlike many episodes in the last couple of years, the flashback jokes added to the comedy rather than breaking up the momentum. Peter's foibles are exposed nicely when he doesn't know the story of Macbeth and becomes obsessed with old TV show Parker Lewis Can't Lose. Meanwhile Stewie's strange sexuality runs into a nice joke about a paediatrician being friendly to his patients and Peter acting like a cat is good for a chuckle.
Flashback ratio (good-medium-bad): 3-2-1
The Bad:Â Quagmire is an airline pilot and so would have known about the internet for a long time. I probably wouldn't have made such an anal point if the follow up joke to his new discovery hadn't been so obvious. In general I always think - surely the world has heard enough jokes about Jews? Of course the odd joke about races or ethnicity is part of life, but here the writers just seem to reel off every easy gag which comes to mind. Hebrew Moneygrabber, Jews are bad at sports, they are hairy and so on. Yawn. And in modern Family Guy fashion the plot served no real purpose. It just followed Peter's whims as presumably the writers thought of new jokes to amuse themselves with.
Best Joke: There were several equally good jokes. But I will take the flashback which brings up The Cleveland Show. Quagmire gets in a nice dig at the mindless Conway Twitty jokes before realising he wasn't the one getting a spin off.
The Bottom Line: When the writers are focussed on jokes which make sense Family Guy still provides a fine half hour or irreverent sillyness. This is certainly on the good side of that equation even if it doesn't try to break from the most predictable fare.
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