Episode 14 - Peter-assment
22 March 2010
Synopsis: Peter tries to become a celebrity paparazzo and succeeds only in getting his glasses broken. At work his boss Angela is suddenly attracted to his unadorned face. She begins harassing him and he tries to find ways to get out of the horrible situation. He turns her down and she tries to kill herself because no one finds her attractive. Saddened by this Peter tries to give her a perfect night by pretending to be Reginald Knickerbocker.
The Good: Nothing really. Though I suppose Peter's actual attempts to follow local celebrities had some logic to it. As opposed to him randomly finding actual celebrities that is. And the plot did end up with him doing something vaguely honourable but at this stage his character is beyond that meaning anything.
Flashback ratio (good-medium-bad): 0-2-0
The Bad: This wasn't an offensive or annoying episode, at least no more than usual. It just failed at everything it attempted. Perhaps that's because the main plot was built around characters with no sympathy whatsoever. The writers took every opportunity to make fun of Angela for being unattractive and yet the story called for her to be a figure of sympathy because she was unattractive. She was also the harasser and so hadn't done anything to make us like her. Similarly Peter has been so abusive and offensive to others that to see him being pushed around was difficult to care about. It didn't help that Lois talked nonsense about harassment instead of offering Peter support.
The jokes just failed at every turn. We had a typically pointless and tasteless reference to Terri Schiavo (a famous life support case) and an entirely superfluous dream sequence to show Angela finding Peter attractive. We had numerous unpleasant references to Angela's privates and several harassment jokes which never found a punch line. We had Stewie getting stage fright despite being on a live television show in the previous episode (and having been on stage multiple times before). There was also an incredibly lame joke about Future Peter watching current Peter's home movies. And an equally lame "black people all look the same" joke when Peter was filming Ollie Williams. When jokes are this bad it makes you feel the writing team are insulting your intelligence with the paucity of their efforts.
Best Joke: The plan for Quagmire to do the dirty on Peter's behalf was a fun idea but didn't go anywhere.
The Bottom Line: Not funny or interesting at all.
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