Just two months ago on this blog, I gave a fairly positive review of the ninth "volume" of Family Guy. In a nutshell, I appreciated that the show seemed willing to try a slightly retooled approach after so many years of episodes that were light on actual stories and heavy on cutaway gags. The good news is that the trend toward deeper plots and fewer non sequitur one-liners and pop culture references was maintained here. The bad news is that I'm not sure if the show is even very funny. Before, when the show was fast-paced and random, even if only one in every five gags was funny, you'd still get several laughs per episode. Now, with a great reduction in the number of cutaways, you need a much higher success rate with those cutaways to get the same overall quantity of humor. The quality of the jokes in this volume might have been better - marginally - than in past seasons, but there were also plenty of bits that just ran on for way too long. Don't get me wrong; this wasn't an awful stretch of Family Guy episodes or anything. It just reminded me that Family Guy isn't a very funny show. Perhaps Volume 9 raised the bar just a bit too high. Consider this post an adjustment to future expectations.
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