The Scream and Its Episode: Thoughts on Family Guy’s “The Munchurian Candidate”

 

Note that this piece contains complete spoilers for the Family Guy episode in the title and also features NSFW discussion more or less throughout. I also spoil The Simpsons episode “Stark Raving Dad” and certain narrative elements from The Cleveland Show.

 

While I don’t think there was ever a point where I would have identified myself as a fan of the long-running animated adult sitcom Family Guy, there was a period of time a few years back when I did watch the show regularly—both the new episodes on Sunday nights and the re-runs in the evenings during the week. Part of that interest and time investment arose from the simple fact that we didn’t have much in the way of animation or weird or interesting stuff available on the channels we received, unless you wanted to watch PBS, I guess. Part of it was also genuine interest, though. I did (and still do) think the show is funny. I believe there’s a very valid critique of its style of humor to be made, but I still like it. It took a while for me to get into Family Guy—basically after I rationalized that being offended from time to time was a good sign, that I had actual beliefs I cared about—and then I ended up moving away from it due to both waning interest and the fact that it just felt like the show was doing more and more anti-trans stuff and I was sick of the jokes.

In terms of my online circles, I don’t really see much said about Family Guy. It seems to have culturally achieved much the same status as The Simpsons at this point. Which is to say, that of a pair of faded but functional curtains or of an old chair hanging around in the background of your house. Expected, unremarked-upon, even safe. I don’t want to downplay the raunchiness of the show, but it feels like its days of being shocking and boundary-pushing are behind it. Again, like The Simpsons. When I got the chance to watch a bunch of Cartoon Network back in the early 2010s, I was surprised at just how much the kids’ shows resembled The Simpsons instead of my own experiences with children’s programming growing up. Standards have changed, and while Family Guy is obviously more “adult” than something on Cartoon Network, it doesn’t change the fact that the glory days of censorious fervor around shows like The Simpsons seem to be gone for good, and, for better or for worse, the baseline edginess of our media seems to have shifted. Combine that cultural shift with just how long Family Guy has been on television and you’d be justified in asking both “Why?” and “Who is this for at this point?” As I said, I don’t see much online discussion of Family Guy, apart from some occasional memes or images or clips used ironically and pulled mostly from the earlier seasons I sometimes see people refer to as the good ones. There’s probably genuine, concentrated interest in new Family Guy out there somewhere, but it doesn’t typically register for me.

But then, a few days ago (as of this writing—months ago now, as of this editing), something actually got through—something new. I saw some clips and art on Twitter focused on a particularly loud, jarring scream from the mother character, Lois Griffin. I had to go looking to get the full context and was immediately interested in watching the whole episode. The fact that this moment and, by extension, the episode it was part of managed to actually make their way into my orbit made me curious to look further. Had the show managed to do something genuinely interesting or shocking enough to get people’s attention? Were we… entering a Family Guy renaissance? Having since looked more deeply, I’ll willingly lead with the fact that, on the whole, “The Munchurian Candidate” is a very, very average Family Guy episode. The scream (courtesy of Alex Bornstein) is its one notable quality, but, still, I saw this as an opportunity to check in with the show—to see how it’s doing and if it’s changed, to process my feelings about it and its style (of animation, of humor, etc.), and to revisit and refresh some previous thoughts on the MacFarlane-verse of animated adult sitcoms.

The cultural shrug that is modern Family Guy is possibly best captured by, appropriately enough, the short-lived spin-off The Cleveland Show, where the one major Black character (who still had a white voice actor at the time!) from Griffin family patriarch Peter’s little friend group left town to pursue his own adventures. In a season one episode of this new series, the titular character’s ex-wife is accidentally killed by Peter back in Quahog, resulting in her son, Cleveland Jr., later inheriting all of her money in the season one finale, much to the chagrin of his neglected father. At one point, after receiving his inheritance and sharing it with the rest of the family (except for Cleveland, who legally cannot have any), Cleveland Jr. says the following: “Apparently, to pay for [the reckless homicide settlement], Mr. Griffin had to get a series of new jobs. I didn’t see it, but I heard it was hilarious. Not as hilarious as it would have been two or three years ago, but there were still some solid laughs there.” At the time, maybe this bit was funny as a more biting, 4^th-wall-breaking critique of the oldest horse in the MacFarlane stable, though it now feels more funny in retrospect for the preposterousness of its own circumstances—the new, unproven series, the show that would be cancelled after only four seasons, taking a swing at its big brother, a series once resurrected from cancellation on the strength of its popularity via DVD sales, on the merits of that other series’ supposed declining quality. Still, the sentiment feels about right as far as my perception of Family Guy’s modern cultural cachet is concerned: “I didn’t see it, but—”

In that spirit, “The Munchurian Candidate” feels somewhat lacking as a narrative. Granted, Family Guy episodes might often be criticized for having stories that function less like actual stories and more like justification for tacking on a lot of the series’ infamous “cutaway gags,” where somebody says something like “Wow, this is worse than the time I was Armie Hammer’s private chef!” and then we see the joke scenario play out, usually with no actual link back to or influence on anything else in the episode. Even so—even with a certain innate narrative flimsiness perhaps to be expected—maybe I’m just out of practice with watching twenty(ish)-minute network series like this, but, still, “The Munchurian Candidate” felt shockingly lean to me the first time I watched it. The time it takes to get from the inciting incident (Peter not being willing to go down on Lois) to that scream I mentioned (after Peter accidentally eats out his mother-in-law while in a hypnotic fugue state) feels quite short.

On rewatch, I didn’t feel the pacing was as bad, though I think that first impression might have had to do with the division of the episode and with how much screentime is allotted to what feels like it should be the story’s major focus versus the B-plot, a fairly standard inclusion for a show like this one that nonetheless may take up too much time. Sometimes these secondary plots dovetail with the A-plot (like in one of my favorite Simpsons episodes, “Stark Raving Dad,” where the more wild and absurd main Homer story about getting sent to a mental institution for wearing a pink shirt to work gets a heartwarming conclusion thanks to its eventual intersection with the sub-story about Bart forgetting Lisa’s birthday) in a way that enhances both and makes the writers look smart, but “The Munchurian Candidate” is a case where the two stories are largely separate and exist to fill time in their own ways and to give the different sets of principal characters something to do. While Lois and Peter deal with a sexual hang-up, precocious baby Stewie builds a treehouse man-cave and has to deal with the catty, back-stabbing critique from his older brother, Chris, and the family dog, Brian.

I won’t dwell on every scene of the episode, but I think spending a little more time with the first one is appropriate since it sets the tone for what comes next. The “His & Hers” restaurant where Peter and Lois are eating dinner and the subject matter and execution of the jokes tied to it speak volumes about both this specific episode and about Family Guy (and its brother/sister series) in general. Here is an illustrative screengrab:

 

Based on just the above image, you can probably imagine the main comedic thrust of the “His & Hers” scene, even if you have no real experience with Family Guy.

A few years back, I wrote about The Cleveland Show in an old blog post, and in that piece I described the show as disappointing because it had a chance to explore a different sort of familial status quo than what was depicted by Family Guy and American Dad! but ultimately fell into the same patterns almost immediately, of “a husband-wife duo who give us the same old ‘women do X but men do Y!’ bits that we have seen trotted out over and over again in sitcoms.” Apart from the perverse spin the three series put on these tried-and-true topics, a lot of their material really does boil down to the equivalent of a children’s playground rhyme about Jupiter and Mars and which of those planets boys and girls go to, to either get stupider or candy bars depending on their gender.

The “His & Hers” is a perfect representation of this focus rendered in the “state the obvious in the most explicit way possible ad nauseum” mode that characterizes so much of Family Guy’s humor specifically. That previous screengrab captures the essence of the bit very well at a glance: Men and women have radically divergent tastes nearly inherent to their very being. For the guys, it’s about mugs of beer and unpainted wood and pennants on the wall with “sports” written on them. Meanwhile, girls like flowers and little sweet delicacies and various shades of pink or purple. When the waiter comes to take Peter and Lois’ order, he casually offers to cover Peter’s ears “for [his] wife’s menu questions,” because that’s something women be doing, right? He equally casually tells Lois “Sorry, no substitutions. We’re a dick restaurant,” and she orders food for both herself and her Instagram. There’s a bit more to the scene that I won’t get into, including some jokes about the appearance of the neighbor’s baby being a result of her drinking while pregnant, but the important, plot-relevant thing is that it ends with Lois and Peter deciding to have sex when they get home—“Yeah, let’s do it on the couch where we all gather as a family and watch television”—and then we get a freeze frame of the two going in for a kiss, with their tongues awkwardly sticking out of their mouths, as a Pornhub-like logo for “Parent Sex” pops up onscreen and some voiceover declares that the show is brought to you by parent sex (“Pretty gross, right?”) in the style of old television sponsorships.

There’s a bit of all the old standbys in there: the essentialist view of men and women; the casual absurdity of the physical space and of certain lines, all of which are presented in concise, unbothered ways; cruel and crass language, again, without much in the way of fanfare. It is archetypal Family Guy, all of its usual stylistic modes and impulses captured pretty effectively in under two minutes. It is not the case that I think this scene is unfunny, however. The absurdity of Lois ordering for her Instagram without a second thought, and without any acknowledgement (in dialogue or music or the visuals) to underscore what is meant to be a funny moment, works for me. I also do like the joke with the restaurant’s design—both just how absurdly essentialist it goes with its décor and also how the men and women’s respective sides include some overlap, with something themed to their sex’s particular assumed preoccupations on the wall across from them so that they, presumably, don’t have to engage with the aesthetic of their partner.

It’s an “Are straight people ok?” joke rendered in the most garish and obvious sort of way. The implication isn’t so much that the show believes in these values but that it finds them ridiculous, though reproducing them, even in such a clearly satirical form, still requires reproducing them (period). Though a discussion of how even critical or comedic media can reinforce retrograde or dangerous things through the reproduction necessary for its critique is beyond the scope of this discussion, suffice it to say that shows like Family Guy and South Park have, among other things, spent years softening the impact of white supremacist ideas and imagery by way of, nominally, ridiculing them. If there’s a modern-day problem with people seeing these things as just funny memes or as “based,” then media like this is partly to blame for making them seem playful rather than abhorrent. Seth MacFarlane, who, to be fair, isn’t exactly steering all of these shows himself, seems like a generally progressive—or at least “liberal”—guy, but his work is very problematic, whatever his own personal beliefs might be.

Returning to the idea of the “His & Hers” scene being “archetypal,” however—This opening for “The Munchurian Candidate” is worth digging into because of how it sets expectations for the rest of the episode. This scene represents Family Guy at its most predictable and safe. Coming back to the show after all this time away, I didn’t feel like I’d left at all, which is not a bad feeling to cultivate, I suppose, when you’re doing a largely non-serialized show that’s deep into syndication and you want people to be able to pop into a randomly chosen episode or three (that’s new or even any number of years old) and pop out again with as little friction as possible. And it is competent enough for what it is if you vibe with its particular brand of humor, but this scene also represents a microcosm both of the larger episode and larger series. It’s nothing particularly remarkable, in other words. It immediately lowered my expectations as far as expecting anything else noteworthy or new from “The Munchurian Candidate” was concerned, up to and including the aforementioned scream.

Like all good animated adult sitcoms, “The Munchurian Candidate” begins with something human and relatable and then twists it in ways that make it shocking or funny. In this case, the human element of the A-plot is that Peter doesn’t go down on Lois like she wants, and while she still seems to love him and likes having sex with him, she wishes he would be more accommodating of her needs in the bedroom. It’s a perfectly fine, fairly nuanced starting point for kooky animated craziness and is a real issue in that there are people out there (not necessarily just guys) who aren’t willing or able to satisfy their partners, which is a reasonable day-to-day concern for a lot of people. Straight men being unwilling to go down on their girlfriends or wives and/or not being good at it is basically a free space in terms of humor and discourse, though. The musician DJ Khaled briefly became the poster boy for this issue back in 2018, with his own apparent unwillingness to perform oral sex on his wife prompting a torrent of jokes and responses, including a diss by Nicki Minaj in her song “Barbie Dreams”: “Had to cancel DJ Khaled / Boy, we ain’t speakin’ / Ain’t no fat n***a tellin’ me what he ain’t eatin.’” What freshens up the issue in “The Munchurian Candidate” is, again, the ready absurdity. Peter and Lois go to a therapist, and almost immediately after Peter demonstrates how unwilling he is to have a conversation about his hang-up, the therapist casually suggests hypnotizing him so that he will perform cunnilingus when he hears a trigger phrase. The intention is for Peter to respond to the phrase “vanilla ice cream,” but his phone goes off as the therapist says the words, so “vanilla ice cream” overlaps with the “Extra! Extra!” of the Extra celebrity “news” show’s opening. (A show I didn’t even know existed before watching this episode.) Apparently, the characters just let that weird moment pass and do not try the hypnotism again before the Griffins leave the office.

This rapid escalation works as comedy but also contributes to the feeling I mentioned before about the episode being kind of weak in terms of its narrative. It feels like the equivalent of the writers saying, “Yeah, yeah. Ok. Now let’s get to the really funny part!” It just feels like Peter accidentally eating out his mother-in-law needed more buildup, with perhaps a bit more time elapsing between the hypnotism and the incident. Instead, we get a scene later that night where Lois discovers the conditioning has worked, just with the Extra sound instead of the intended phrase, and then a short one in the morning where they go for round two, and then another pretty long one that same morning where the fateful dinner at Lois’ parents’ house is foreshadowed for later that evening and where she pulls Peter out of the dining room for another go-round while the rest of the family waits on breakfast. Obviously, there’s only so much time to work with, particularly factoring in the B-plot, so the show has to operate efficiently, and, after rewatching the episode, I wouldn’t even say that the pacing is truly off like I thought so much as the impression of it could be better. My proposed fix would have been some kind of montage representing several days passing with the conditioning going fine, maybe set to some sort of winking needle drop that evokes oral sex. They could have come up with various visual gags to go with it, with different settings and different ways of indicating Peter is going down on Lois without actually being able to present the action literally. The goal here would probably be to set up that this is a risky thing Lois is doing, which prepares the audience for something bad to come from it.

If there’s any sort of wider message or moral to be gleaned from “The Munchurian Candidate,” it may be that hypnotizing Peter to get him to do what Lois wants sexually is a step too far. He wasn’t willing to meet her needs, but now her needs trump his (and his very autonomy, despite his immediate willingness to let himself be hypnotized initially). The final lesson of the episode would be that they needed more give and take—sort of like the overlapping sides of the “His & Hers” maybe?—and that honest communication, however uncomfortable it might be, was the solution and not, if you can believe such a thing, hypnotism. Making that message, which currently barely exists (if it exists at all) in the episode, more explicit while showing the use of the hypnotic conditioning getting further and further out of hand would better set up the fact that something probably would go wrong, making what does go wrong hit harder. These are narrative concerns but also comedic ones. It’s why I don’t care for The Simpsons after a point—specifically where I feel like the narratives start to lack staying power, weakening what are still, when I examine them in isolation, typically funny enough jokes. “The Munchurian Candidate” has a similar latter-day Simpsons feeling to it. On the one hand, “Peter accidentally performs oral sex on his aged mother-in-law” is at least a little suggestive of a show that’s run out of meaningful character dynamics to mine and is now swinging for the fences. On the other hand, though, that sort of wild swinging is kind of this show’s M.O. anyway on a good day, and this is a nice, big, appealing (in its own way!) swing that ultimately isn’t as impressive as it could be because of the aforementioned fighting with the B-plot for space to build up momentum ahead of its big moment.

           At Lois’ parents’ house for dinner, we learn that her mother, Babs, isn’t feeling well, so Peter takes her a plate of food (“Hey, Babs? I got something I think’ll make you feel better.”) in an uncharacteristically gentle and caring sort of way. Lois is sad her mother feels badly, but her father (characteristically) gruffly dismisses her concerns: “Don’t worry about your mother. She’s got her celebrity news programs up there keeping her company.” As the reality of the situation dawns on Lois, the music and camerawork kick into a higher gear, and this is an area of the episode where I lack the technical expertise necessary to describe the exact effect, but there’s a sense of a sudden onset of competent dramatic framing of the action as Lois leaves the dinner table in a rush and ascends the stairs calling for Peter. We cut between this rush and an image of Peter sitting on a lounge chair at the beach eating vanilla ice cream, which is dripping onto his hand and from his mouth in the second of these shots which is also an extreme close-up emphasizing the flicks of his tongue. The visual language is, if it even needs to be said, quite explicit.

It’s when Lois bursts through the bedroom door that we get the scream, which starts “normally” enough but then trails off in this ragged and shrill way that feels altogether more genuinely pained and horrified than you would expect. Appropriate for the scenario (as we see a tousled Peter rise from the bottom of the frame, a whole lot of a whole lot just out of view, presumably) but still a surprise given the show’s usual tone and its age. There is a great funny visual and aural “bit” here as well, as Lois’ accented “PEEETAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!” transitions naturally into Peter’s own cries of distress, the camera lurching closer to his horrified face with each “AH!” before we cut to the satiated Babs and a long, drawn out “ahhhhhhhh” that also mirrors the movement of the camera drawing us smoothly closer to her and into silence at last.

 

A fearful Lois on the stairs. Obviously, there’s an “enhanced” perspective here, employing camera angles and movements atypical of the series’ standard fly-on-the-4^th-wall view taken directly from live-action sitcoms.

This sequence represents one of those frustrating moments, I think, for the harsher critics of the series’ visual style because it demonstrates that it could do more. I’m extremely resistant to the obsessive, narrow-minded take that animation is simply objectively better in other places, but when people argue that Family Guy has played a large role in adult animation in the United States being like This, with the flat overall visual design and downright rigid camerawork—imitating the typically unobtrusive look of live-action sitcoms shot on a soundstage through the 4^th wall, no doubt—I do have to sort of agree. It's frustrating to see something more ambitious occasionally show itself, even if those “heightened” visuals might just be parodying a more accomplished work. Even so, it’s always proof that the show does understand how to competently present perspectives other than the most obvious, head-on one it defaults to. A counter-argument would be that these spikes in attention to detail and in visual momentum are kept as the outlier because of the humor that arises when they do occasionally show up. The change creates an immediately noticeable, stark (and therefore humorous) contrast whenever these shows do try something more expressive with either the animation or camerawork. Everyone is allowed to like what they like (and to not like what they don’t like), especially where comedy is concerned, but the style is clearly intentional and has been effective, across at least three different shows, for me. I find Family Guy, American Dad!, and even The Cleveland Show to be just kind of comfortable to watch and intermittently quite funny, even if I can also offer some criticism of any one of them.

         I said this before about the “His & Hers” scene, but the overall tonal flatness of the show—the lack of acknowledgement of what is clearly absurd or upsetting or whatever—is part of its charm and what is undeniably its signature humorous mode. Lois and Peter spend most of the rest of this episode in the car driving home in silence. Those flat designs, lacking in character and now inexorably fixed in expressions of weariness and apprehension, coupled with the length of these shots of more or less nothing but two troubled people sitting in a dark car and occasionally illuminated by the lights of other passing vehicles… You sit and wait for something to change, for someone to say something, for some explosion of motion or sound, but nothing comes that can fully unsettle or upend the situation. Each of the car ride scenes ends with a brief moment in a somewhat “louder” mode, with “Eat It” coming on the radio in the first and Lois spying a billboard advertising “Faruq’s Old Carpets” in the second, but these are only brief diversions that elicit a stronger response from the characters which momentarily passes as they lapse back into their tired, contemplative state. For the most part, it’s just the naturalistic darkness and intermittent illumination and sound of tires on the pavement that dominate here as the show withholds its most uproarious self for comedic effect.

In the first of these car ride scenes, the phone begins to ring, and it rings, and rings, and rings. The characters’ eyes slightly shift and we cut to a view of the phone screen: It’s Babs calling, with her contact photo wearing the usual Family Guy expression, with the half-hooded eyes. Her satisfied smile is, of course, a reminder of the previous scene and also funny for how out of place it is tonally just now. The phone eventually stops ringing but then, after a very short interval, starts buzzing instead. This time it’s Lois’ father, his photo wearing a similarly unbothered expression, though without the smile. It’s the unnatural stillness, the similarity of the framing each time we cut to the phone or back to Peter and Lois in the car, how long this goes on, the fact that we return to this silent car ride again later in the episode and still without any change. It’s this sort of chronic visual understatement which outstays its welcome (is overstated, even, for its persistence) that defines so many Family Guy bits, this sense that a show with arguably very little time to spare in a given episode is willing to devote big chunks of any given one to, say, Peter trying to get a dead frog’s body out of a window without using his hands or to a Conway Twitty performance. The characters and their ostensible conflicts are secondary or even tertiary in this arrangement, where style, even if it’s a style some don’t like, takes precedence over substance.

The previously mentioned Cleveland Show post of mine also contained the following line that I think makes a good lead-in to this next part of “The Munchurian Candidate” discussion for how it touches on another consistent element of the MacFarlane-connected series’ approach to comedy: “Donna, Cleveland, Peter, Lois, Stan, and Francine are not characters: They are comedy vehicles.” This specific critique of the MacFarlane-verse isn’t original to me. I might have gotten that impression independently at some point without necessarily formalizing it, but the exact thought was one that I read about in a, I believe, A.V. Club piece I can no longer find. Basically, the “characters” of these series lack consistent personalities and instead are malleable, made to fit whatever joke the writers want to tell. You can see the converse in action in similar animated shows like King of the Hill or Bob’s Burgers. There, the characters matter most, and the storylines and jokes are built around their personalities. The alien character Roger from American Dad! is perhaps the perfect example of the other approach working well—His disguises/personas allow him to be radically different characters from one episode to another, which is a boon for the writers because it gives them a lot of flexibility. Since Roger’s changeable nature is actually part of his character, however, there is at least a somewhat satisfying in-universe explanation that doesn’t really exist when a character like Peter behaves radically different from episode to episode.

Like a lot of other elements of Family Guy—or the other sibling series—this mutability can be seen as both a weakness or a strength. In my Cleveland Show critique I said “[t]his approach is not necessarily ‘wrong,’ but I would argue that it makes the difference between a show with true cultural staying power that can summon genuine pathos for its major players . . . and a show that is ultimately throwaway, forgettable.” Clearly, I came down on the more negative side at the time, and I still agree with what I said about pathos. Seeing a consistent character move through the world in ways that are sensical and seem true to that character just feels like the more human, empathetic TV viewing experience to have. Although, I would now say that having your characters be essentially ciphers has, perhaps, a greater advantage over time if your show is going to stay on the air for so many years.

In that case, you can basically have the characters do whatever you want for any reason, giving you a lot of freedom to keep coming up with stories and jokes, whereas a show with defined characters is going to probably be more at risk of running out of meaningful things to explore. Never mind questions that arise about characters aging (or not aging). The Family Guy approach avoids these issues by establishing that nothing is set in stone. Nothing truly matters. Peter can eat out his mother-in-law because it’s a funny, gross, wild thing to do, and maybe it will come up again in a later episode (probably one featuring a family get-together like Thanksgiving or Christmas), or maybe it won’t. The obvious absurdity of the characters doing and saying things that are wildly out of character or that have tremendous implications for them and others around them but that pass without (consistent) consequences in service to a joke can be, in fact, very funny in its own right.

In “The Munchurian Candidate,” the inconsistent characterization most clearly rears its head in the B-plot. Specifically, it appears in the dynamic between Brian and Chris during these segments. In case anyone is reading this piece without knowledge of the Family Guy cast, Brian, the talking dog, is a deep-voiced, faux-intellectual liberal hypocrite and writer. At least, that is his modern characterization. Though he started as Peter’s friend (“man’s best friend,” essentially) and as a sort of voice of reason—albeit an at times well-lubricated one—his personality and his dynamic with the other characters have shifted over the course of the series’ run. He now more typically pairs off with Stewie in the show’s narratives and has had his hypocritical, pretentious, and misogynistic side played up more. The B-plot of “The Munchurian Candidate” actually starts with a very in-character joke for Brian, where he spends a bunch of time dressing up and putting on glasses and getting his computer set up to write just so that he can post a picture to Instagram about how he’s writing. He’s then immediately interrupted by the construction of Stewie’s treehouse in the backyard and doesn’t write another word this episode. It’s an appropriately Brian-like behavior in keeping with the established character and also a biting criticism of a certain type of “writer” who spends more time on social media putting on a performance of being a writer in place of actually… writing.

The inconsistency in the characterization comes with how Brian is paired off with Chris in this episode. Chris, the overweight chronic masturbator teenaged son of the family who is usually depicted as very slow-witted, here teams up with Brian to criticize Stewie’s taste in treehouse décor behind the baby’s back. The episode employs a “rule of threes”-style approach to the B-plot structure: Brian and Chris visit the treehouse three times, and each time they end up initially praising Stewie’s choices (of décor and, on the second visit, frozen quiches, for example) before leaving and criticizing the youngest Griffin loudly enough that he overhears it. For his part, Chris is remarkably… coherent, even poised, in this episode. He and Brian have an unusually close relationship here, as well as this unseen mutual friend named Eric they mention at points who’s turning fifty soon. The unlikely pairing, the uncharacteristic portrayal of Chris, and the weirdness of a talking dog and teenaged boy casually being friends with a grown man (that we never see and I don’t believe has ever been mentioned before) all contribute to the absurdity of the whole situation. This is either obnoxious or funny depending on how you feel about Family Guy’s humor in general and its handling of its characters in particular.

Stewie’s characterization, like Brian’s, has undergone changes over the course of the series. He was originally a talented inventor with murderous intentions, and his earliest stories in the show tended to focus on him either trying to murder Lois or him taking some sort of thing or experience typically associated with youth and innocence—like expecting presents from Santa—and twisting it “humorously” with the aforementioned gadgets and/or murderousness, and with the unusual behavior for a baby being essentially overlooked by the rest of the cast. Over time, this baseline characterization changed, keeping the inventions (read: fun, flexible contrivances for stories and jokes not unlike Roger’s disguises on American Dad!) but ditching the attempted murder in favor of making the kid very, very gay (or bi, or maybe trans?) and building jokes around his general lack of self-awareness regarding his own queerness or else winking at it via his behavior and having the other characters just sort of stare down the obvious secret truth of Stewie with the usual long-suffering, disgruntled looks.

Murder Stewie makes a brief appearance in this episode, as, after the second go-round with Brian and Chris and their back-stabbing chatter, he lures them out to the treehouse a third time at night and takes them hostage, physically beating them, tying them up, and forcing them to eat the leftover frozen quiches while threatening to kill them with a crossbow. They ultimately escape by appealing to his pride in his inventions and praising his precociousness before once more getting not quite out of earshot and turning on him again, prompting Stewie to kill(?) them off-screen with the crossbow before seemingly turning it on himself after seeing his sister Meg, the designated whipping girl of the Griffin family often derided for her looks, topless. Brian, Chris, and Stewie do not appear again in the episode, seemingly confirming their deaths. Though, of course, they’ll return the next week, which is all part of the absurdity.

 

This moment, following the first scene in the treehouse, where Stewie first hears Brian and Chris making fun of him, is another example of the show’s visuals kicking into a higher gear for comedic effect. We linger, sans music, on Stewie happily working to tidy up his treehouse as we listen to the derisive conversation in the background. His growing understanding and then frustration are expressed silently, using just his body language and facial expressions. For example, this particular shot of him rubbing frantically at a smudge on his coffee table says a lot without words. The singular smudge that he can’t get rid of correlates with the needling laughter of the people he thought liked him and his treehouse earlier. In a symbolic sense, he can’t escape the awareness of his shortcomings in their eyes. The execution is dramatic enough that it could be at home in a different show (and maybe comes from somewhere else anyway, the eternal question accompanying a lot of Family Guy bits), though, in context, the noticeable shift from the show’s usual visual storytelling style just adds to the comedy.

The only intersection between the A- and B-plots occurs at the very end when Lois and Peter finally get home. Lois immediately—but casually—picks up the trashcan, and Peter vomits into it repeatedly and with such volume and force that it probably should overflow but doesn’t. The nonchalance/understatement is, as always, part of the joke. Then Meg enters the room (from the B-plot, we can assume) and turns on the TV. Peter’s trigger phrase immediately comes on via Extra, and the episode ends with Lois desperately struggling to hold back a vomit-smeared Peter as he tries to climb over the couch to eat out his daughter, who sits there in blank-faced ignorance. In this case, the humor comes in part from a little jolt of dramatic irony—what we know but Meg doesn’t.

Ultimately, I wish the A-plot of “The Munchurian Candidate” had been built up a bit more and the B-plot reduced or probably removed. As previously established, I get why it is the way that it is: Peter and Lois spending a precious chunk of the episode sitting in weary silence in the car is funny in its own way, but they could have done more more “active” jokes and better spun an actual narrative out of spending additional time on the A-plot. By comparison to “Peter goes down on his mother-in-law,” “Brian and Chris make fun of Stewie’s treehouse” just feels rote and boring. Paired with the outlandishness of the other plotline and with the powerful scream from Bornstein, it just looks weak in every regard. And maybe that was the intention—to have something more typical and bland going on that still functions as comedy but that won’t more or less pull focus from the A-plot. On the other hand, it does take up a lot of space for something aggressively baseline and, consequently, makes the more interesting aspects of “The Munchurian Candidate” feel diminished for lack of room to express themselves fully. (It’s worth quickly noting here that the three other current episodes of the show that I watched while working on this piece didn’t divide their stories up like this and were probably better for it.)  

The one thought I did have about the B-plot and possible notable links to the main story of the episode has to do with a likely unintentional connection between the opening scene in the “His & Hers” and the evolution of Stewie’s treehouse, specifically how it goes from something more light and feminine in design to something more dark and masculine. I say it’s not intentional because I think the show would have laid the parallels on much thicker if it was (by literally re-using assets from the “His & Hers” rather than just relying on vibes, probably). Still, there is a sort of parallel there that actually does fit with what has been a consistent element of Stewie’s character for a long time—namely the question of his sexuality and maybe gender, which kind of maps onto the contrast between feminine and masculine, I guess. Even before that question became a major focus of the show’s narratives and jokes, there was always a contrast in the character along similar lines: a cultivated, adult voice and behavior contrasted with the body of a child, or the “British” accent contrasted with the American family and upbringing. The inconsistent characterization is, in its own way, kind of consistent and actually means something with this one character. As a baby who’s still figuring out who he’ll grow up to be, it’s the one place where wild vacillations almost make sense. At least some of that is explicitly acknowledged by the show, as the moral it goes with for the treehouse plot, before undermining the sincerity of the moment with the final crossbow rampage, is that Stewie needs to learn to just be himself and like what he likes (“His and-or Hers,” maybe?) and not let other people’s judgment bring him down. It’s a sort of rejection of the rigidity of the divide in the restaurant, assuming there’s actually a link back there.

Perhaps a good litmus test for how you might feel about “The Munchurian Candidate” in general is to consider how you feel about its title: a perverse little portmanteau-like spin on the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate meant to tie hypnosis and the concept of cunnilingus together in that way Family Guy often mixes high and low art (see, for instance, the show’s musical numbers). I think it’s pretty cute and that the episode itself is a solid enough outing for Family Guy. However, it isn’t anything as wild or as interesting as the scream itself in isolation might have suggested. Said scream has its own Know Your Meme Page, and at least one three-year-old video containing the opening for the show Extra has quite a few recent comments from Family Guy viewers referencing the use of the “Extra! Extra!” in “The Munchurian Candidate.” Whether the scream will continue to stick around—to be referenced and have its references iterated upon in the style of the best memes—remains to be seen, of course.

What is pretty clear is that, obviously, the scream is the centerpiece of this episode. It’s the load-bearing pillar of novelty in the midst of an otherwise predictable, familiar outing. It will likely remain a fascinating outlier in the grand portfolio of Bornstein’s noteworthy Family Guy moments. A very hyperbolic statement would be that the scream “deserves better” or possibly that it represents a break from the hum-drum half-life of a show well past its prime that hints at something warm and alive buried within it somewhere. Likely, it deserves no such grand sentiments: It’s just a moment of emotional anguish performed with a surprising degree of veracity and oomph in contrast to the rest of the episode around it. It doesn’t represent a brave new world of novelty for Family Guy, as, after watching the two episodes immediately after this one (and one from earlier in the same season), I didn’t notice anything other than business as usual, though, as I’ve hopefully established by this point, that does work for me. There were, in fact, some solid laughs there. The scream still is, however, an anomaly, and what sort of life it might enjoy as its own thing, separated from its source material, is something I look forward to seeing—or perhaps not seeing.