Fox’s popular animated series have a tendency to stick around well past their glory, and that’s doubly true for Family Guy, Seth Macfarlane’s brainchild that hit its peak in its first four seasons and has been embarrassingly bad ever since. A few running gags still hold their charm, but for the most part, episodes have become indistinguishable from one another and the writers seem to have lost the ability to differentiate between comedy and padding weak episodes with overly long, one-note jokes that exceed their welcome within a few seconds only to continue on for a full minute. Maybe it’s our fault for laughing so hard the first time Peter tripped and grasped his shin, rocking in pain, or maybe it’s the writers’ for ceasing any and all effort for all but 2 episodes of each season.
Maybe the best explanation for season 8 having such a poor selection of episodes is the amount of money spent on the CGI spacefighter sequence in the opening of “Brian Griffin’s House of Payne”. Okay, we’re not actually suggesting that would affect how well the other episodes are written, but otherwise we’re left with no other explanation for the series’ comic bumbling than the writers just not being as funny as they think they are. The few episodes where Family Guy can squeeze out even a meager laugh, like when Peter takes over his father-in-law’s company or the rare but requisite Brian and Stewie episodes, barely manage to scratch the surface of what the series used to be.
Perhaps the most frustrating part of this Family Guy release is not that the episodes are consistently unfunny, but that Volume 9 is misleading as to suggest that it’s the ninth season, which has “New Kidney in Town”, easily the funniest episode of the series in years. However, as you might have guessed, or as you might know if you’re a frequent buyer of Family Guy seasons, there’s no real correlation between the first episode of this volume and the order of seasons. How the Family Guy DVD seasons got so thrown off in how Fox sorts each season into volume sets is hard to say, but it makes for very erratic selections. Why does this matter? Because assuming the writers made any attempt at all to give one season an overall tonal direction or make a few concentrated efforts towards one story line, you’re not necessarily going to get that when released like this.
DVD Bonus Features
The highpoint of the Volume 9 release has little to do with the episode selection and more to do with the extras packed in to supplement them. The commentaries on the episodes are decent, but not too interesting considering the episodes have little merit, and the deleted scenes and animatics have the same problem. The best part of the extras is easily the featurette following the creation of the season 9 premiere episode “And Then There Were Fewer”, which takes Agatha Christie’s mystery novel and lampoons it quite effectively. A cut scene from the “Brian and Stewie” episode has the Brian’s cellphone conversation with Peter after getting locked in the bank vault. It has all the typical tedium in what should be a frantic phone call, but it’s the final line that’s the funniest. “The History of the World” – According to Family Guy easily outshines the jokes of just about every episode in the collection, going through all the random interstitial jokes from the past 8 seasons and compiling them into a really loose interpretation of history that lasts about 20-minutes. This is one of the best extras the series has ever put together. The 2010 Family Guy Comic-Con panel and an episode of The Cleveland Show close out the discs.
Volume 9 continues the series’ descent into comedy mediocrity, but that one extra brings the history jokes of the season into context with one another, so if you can find a copy of the third disc in the set just for that, do so.
"Family Guy: Volume Nine" is on sale December 13, 2011 and is not rated. Animation, Comedy. Directed by Peter Shin. Written by Seth MacFarlane, David Zuckerman. Starring Alex Borstein, Mila Kunis, Seth Green, Seth MacFarlane.
