Family Guy Send in Stewie Please Full Episode

Every week, we choice a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could exist bad. It will always be interesting. Y'all can read the archives hither . The episode of the week for March 18 through 25 is "Ship in Stewie, Please," the twelfth episode of the 16th flavour of Fox'southward Family unit Guy .

Manner back in 2004, before Family Guy was uncanceled by Fox, when it was all the same the tardily-night Adult Swim viewing of selection for many mostly young, mostly male person Americans (including your by and large young, mostly male correspondent), my friend Jaime Weinman fabricated a 10-signal list of why he hated Family Guy.

Sometimes I render to Weinman's list, at present that dunking on Family unit Guy has become relatively uncontroversial, and I wonder how Weinman could have accurately pegged essentially every unmarried criticism people would come to take of Family unit Guy from episodes that, at the time he was writing, were seen every bit generally enjoyable at worst.

A lot of that stems from how succinctly Weinman dissected the main source of sense of humor in Family unit Guy — an affluence of references to '70s and '80s pop civilisation meant to masquerade every bit jokes — at a time when the references seemed new enough to provoke laughter in those who recognized them. Simply Weinman noticed, accurately, that at that place weren't jokes there, just winks and nods designed to make the evidence seem knowing to a more often than not young, mostly male viewership cohort.

Yet office of that commodity gets at why Family Guy has proved so surprisingly durable withal, and it's non the 1 you'd recollect, but it'south one I idea of instantly while watching "Send in Stewie, Delight," which sends the famous malevolent babe to a therapist voiced past Ian McKellen.

Here, I'll quote Weinman directly:

Good comedy writing gets laughs from the characters; the writers on this testify write effectually the characters. By the last few episodes [of the serial' original run], Stewie was so tapped-out equally a character that he was written out of character in almost every episode (that is, almost every gag featured him taking on a personality other than his own), a sign that the character had aught to him in the first place except the stuff that was taken from superior characters.

Family Guy'south characters are sparse plenty that they can be just about anything

Stewie has traveled through seemingly all of fourth dimension and space.

Fox

Family unit Guy has always been bedeviled past comparisons to The Simpsons, an older serial with which information technology has shared every single one of its xvi seasons. And to be sure, the two shows feature very, very similar setups, correct downward to the makeup of the family at the heart. (The only major difference is that the babe and domestic dog on Family Guy can talk.)

But on a purely structural level, the 2 shows are pretty different. The Simpsons is rooted in the well-made sitcoms of the '70s and '80s. Its comedic rhythms might be very different, but fifty-fifty now, as it approaches its fourth decade on the air, The Simpsons tries to tell involved, character-based stories. It doesn't always succeed, listen, but that'southward what it'due south trying to practise, at least.

Family unit Guy isn't specially interested in its characters as characters, as Weinman accurately noted. Information technology's interested in them as broad archetypes, equally ways to avoid story equally much every bit possible. In many means, Family Guy is near similar to sketch comedy, where honey running gags (similar, say, Peter Griffin getting in a fistfight with a chicken) have like functions to recurring characters on Sabbatum Night Live.

This isn't really an impediment to great TV comedy. Something like 30 Rock was structured similarly, only comparing that serial and Family Guy shows why Family unit Guy has never quite hit the same level of quality. The characters on xxx Rock are mostly excuses to tell jokes, but they all have more personality than the gang on Family Guy. And fifty-fifty when the characters on 30 Stone were thin, the jokes were really skillful, as opposed to Family Guy's parade of references.

Yet the thinness of Family unit Guy'due south characters has concluded up being a weird benefit to the serial this deep in its run. Where a series like The Simpsons was forced to spend well-nigh of its teens trying to observe new characters in its seemingly space ensemble to tell stories about, Family Guy only takes its existing ones and tosses them into different comedic sketches. What would it look like if Brian and Stewie traveled the multiverse? How about if Peter really wanted to win an Emmy? Oh, hey, it looks like Brian and Stewie are cosplaying equally Holmes and Watson side by side calendar week!

More than and more than episodes of every flavor of Family Guy are taken over past these kinds of format-shifting — if non format-shattering — gimmicks. And in that location's nothing wrong with this! For most long-running shows, a skilful gimmick episode is the once all involved get to cutting loose and have a fiddling fun, and that fun oft translates to the audience.

But what happens when the gimmick on a graphic symbol-low-cal show is specifically designed to highlight the depth of ane of your characters?

"Send in Stewie, Please" wants to be profound. Information technology ends upwardly existence unpleasant.

Ian McKellen is really proficient, simply what else would y'all expect?

Trick

The Family Guy episode "Send in Stewie, Delight" most resembles is "Brian & Stewie," a 2010 episode loosely inspired past a very similar All in the Family episode, in which Brian the dog and Stewie the infant go locked in a room together and have a long, heartfelt conversation. (Fittingly, "Send in Stewie" is a riff on sitcom episodes where characters become to therapy for one calendar week — and the most famous example of such an episode is from AITF spinoff Maude.)

When reviewing the episode at the fourth dimension (yeah, I used to review Family Guy regularly), I constitute the whole thing largely unconvincing. But my mild pan of the episode ended up proving more controversial with the bear witness'south fans than my pans commonly did. Where I constitute the episode'southward attempts to dig into the characters' psyches a footling hollow, the show's fans were fascinated by this glimpse into the cores of two characters who largely existed to power comedy sketches.

A similarly dynamic befalls "Send in Stewie," which, like "Brian & Stewie," was written past Gary Janetti, a veteran one-act writer who's as well written for Will & Grace and created the British sitcom Vicious (which aired on PBS in u.s.a. and starred McKellen, so at that place'south that connection for y'all). What I find fascinating, if ultimately flawed, about these two episodes is how far Janetti tries to button the show into outright drama in the proper noun of grappling with who the characters "really" are, earlier hastily trying to reassemble the status quo at the end.

In the center of "Send in Stewie," for case, Stewie begins performing the opening vocal from Hamilton, as snot descends from his nose and he occasionally hiccups. It'due south simultaneously meant to exist a performance showcase for creator Seth MacFarlane (whose voice is almost the only thing you lot hear in the episode, outside of McKellen'southward occasional entreaties), a deeply emotional moment, and a gross-out gag. There isn't a lot of pop culture living at that Venn diagram intersection, and information technology'south not hard to grudgingly respect Family Guy for trying.

And, weirdly, "Send in Stewie" is even better at earthworks into who Stewie really is than "Brian & Stewie" (which is probably a better episode overall) simply because it turns its examination of Stewie into a weird, metatextual examination of Family Guy itself. Stewie admits, at one betoken, that everything he's doing is a performance, an affect, designed to distract from the things he fears people won't like about him. He fifty-fifty uses his "real phonation," which is much closer to MacFarlane's natural speaking vocalism.

Combine this with the sequence where Stewie suddenly starts using the voices of all of the other characters MacFarlane performs on the show, and y'all have a surprisingly succinct cocky-critique of the series itself: Information technology's and so concerned with putting on a very particular kind of operation that it forgets to be real. But if it ever is real, the upshot is so disorienting every bit to polarize the audition.

At every plow, "Send in Stewie" wants to be a sincere examination of a complicated character, simply it also needs to be an episode of Family Guy, which ways gross-out gags and humor that'due south "politically wrong" in a very late-'90s mode, and weird, showy stunts. Early in the episode, for example, Stewie picks up a photo of the therapist with another man and talks for well-nigh five minutes about what he imagines of the therapist's life from this one photo.

Some other show might have turned this into a push-and-pull between the two characters, merely on Family Guy, Stewie is merely correct, because Stewie gets to be right. (Also, despite much hype virtually how Stewie would discuss his sexuality in this episode, it by and large amounts to a i-off line about how he's "comfortable" with his heterosexuality. Family unit Guy'due south producers say in this Deadline piece that they didn't want to make too much of the sexuality of a baby, which makes sense.)

So there's the ending, in which Stewie allows the therapist to suffer a fatal heart attack rather than let anyone who knows the truth near his real voice live. I wouldn't say "Transport in Stewie" always brushes upwards confronting anything truly profound, but I found information technology more often than not intriguing until it finally, brutally undercut itself with that unpleasant catastrophe. Simply peradventure that'southward merely the toll of existence this prove. Sooner or later, you need to get back to the place where a chicken could burst through the door and first beating everybody up.

Family Guy airs Sundays on Fob at 9 pm Eastern. Previous episodes are available on Hulu or, actually, just plow on your TV and flip effectually until you find it.

Correction: The original version of this slice said the end of the episode implied Stewie's visit to the therapist was all a dream. While I maintain y'all can read it that way (and would adopt to do and so), the fact that Stewie says he "did something atrocious" when Brian comes to talk with him after Stewie wakes with a start suggests he really did keep medical attention from reaching the therapist and essentially murdered him via inaction. Yay?

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/25/17155940/family-guy-stewie-therapy-recap-send-in-stewie-please-real-voice

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