Review: American Dad: “Julia Rogerts”

Eat, Pray, Love the Crow God.

Not gonna lie, it’s been a rough couple of days hearing about the death of the Bright Knight, Grey Ghost, and Mayor of Quahog on Family Guy, Adam West. You can check here for our own site’s send off to this great man, and here to see the many people he touched in the industry pay their respects. But for now, we turn to the other airing Seth MacFarlane show, that will unfortunately never be graced by the talents of Mayor Adam We (not a typo!).

To shake things up, let’s get the B-plot out of the way first. Getting out of a film with Jeff, Steve realizes Jeff’s quirks match up oddly close with his friend Barry and makes eager and calculated plans for their first meeting. Apparently things go well, and the two announce they are now working on a “project” together, as well as the implication that this story thread will continue.

American Dad does sometimes have long running narratives going through their stand alone episodes, like Reginald’s (ultimately failed) courtship of Hayley, Jeff and the ghost of Sinbad on a quest to return home from space, and the “Golden Turd” storyline that started way back in Season 1. Though we do only have eight more episodes left in the season after this, so they better hurry up. But it’s still a pretty funny set-up either way, since I’m sure there’s been a point in everyone’s lives where they feel so sure that two friends from separate social circles will just hit it off. Sometimes it goes great, sometimes you end up driving down to Vegas to stop an elopement and having to sword fight your way out of a LeBron James shaped ice sculpture.

Let’s just say I had a bit of a rough Memorial Day weekend.

Moving onto the meat of the episode, Stan accidentally drinks Francine’s special wine while on a Roger-induced bender, and so gets his help in recreating it themselves. They end up caught up in a tornado, where Stan apologizes to Roger for getting him into the mess. Roger’s feelings are hurt when he asks Stan if he would have done the same for him and he can’t answer.

Roger is then thrust from the tornado, right into a parody of Julia Roberts’ “Sleeping With the Enemy”, with Roger playing Roberts’ part, hence the title of the episode. He meets a farmer boy named Jessie and they seem to be getting close, but Stan arrives to take Roger home. Aaaaaaand then things just spiral into a Children of the Corn riff, where Jessie and the rest of the town try to sacrifice Roger to their “Corn God”, only for him to be rescued by Stan, who blows up the villagers with Roger’s makeshift nitroglycerin wine.

This episode really liked to wander in its direction, and even the title doesn’t really fit most of it, but the majority of it is about the dynamic and relationship between Stan and Roger, which has been touched upon a number of times across the series. But instead of just listing the number of times it’s done that, I’ll just cover how it was handled this time. Roger begins the episode just wanting to get Stan to cut more loose than he already was trying to get, then shifts rather suddenly to him feeling insecure about his and Stan’s friendship (along with issues with Stan’s own insecurities about expressing his feelings), and then turns into a combo parody of two unrelated movies. If there was ever an episode that felt like it was constructed by throwing darts at a dartboard, it would be this one.

But it’ll have to be enough to hold us over, because American Dad returns July 24th with…yet another Stan and Roger episode. Let’s hope it’s more organized than this one. See ya then!