Another season of Family Guy has now come to an end, and that means it’s time to look back on everything from Season 24 thus far and rank which of its episodes are truly the best of the best. Family Guy has gone through some changes with Fox in the last couple of years as the animated series has been pulled from the Fall lineup and moved towards the midseason schedule as part of a newly changed Animation Domination block. And with that shift comes a much shorter episode order for the seasons overall.
Family Guy Season 24 has been a big deal for Fox as the animated series not only crossed over its 450th episode milestone, but also had a few notable episodes that took place outside of its usual setting. There were a few anthologies, and even a fully alternate universe revealed over the course of the stories this time around, so it was clear that the time was trying out a lot of different types of ideas. Read on to find out which Family Guy Season 24 episodes ultimately landed the best.
“Man-Fest Destiny” sees Peter and the guys accidentally crash landing on Fire Island, but that doesn’t really go anywhere interesting. It makes a lot of the same jokes about Peter’s fluid sexuality that have gone on record multiple times before, and phones things in even further with a terrible musical number that relies on a lazy Bowen Yang joke. The B-story isn’t too hot here either as Stewie discovers memes, makes a book about them, and Brian is jealous once more. The ideas here have just been done much better in far better episodes in the past.
Meg focused episodes can be a bit of a toss-up as sometimes they steer too much into her sociopathic tendencies. That’s thankfully not the case with this episode as it has more of a focus on the guest starring Tom Brady. Meg helps him commentate and Brady does well enough in his role, and ultimately Meg finds out what’s really going on. It’s not one of the cases where she takes her revenge too far, thankfully, but also that does keep the episode from being memorable. It’s the same for the side plot of Brian and Stewie living in IKEA, which starts out like a fun idea but ultimately doesn’t really amount to much.
Family Guy has quite a few episodes that take a single joke to their absolute limit, and that’s the case with “Phony Montana” as Brian suddenly starts to speak with a Cuban, Tony Montana like accent. It does lead to some good jokes such as the callback to Cleveland’s broken tub fall, but it ultimately just takes up way too much time. Peter and Lois’ side of things goes for full gross out as they try and get with a pair of swingers, and it does reveal some fun new designs for the two of them that have never been seen before as a result. It’s actually a fairly good strengthening of their relationship too. It’s just outweighed by Brian’s main plot.
Lois and Meg episodes are also generally a toss up depending on the route they take, but genuine team ups between the two are usually great. That’s the case here as Lois gets Meg addicted to Pumpkin Spice lattes (with some good hallucination visuals), and the two of them end up sparking a whole smuggling ring to get more. There’s also an increasingly rare team up between Joe and Quagmire that leads to Lois and Meg getting found out, and it’s just packed with a lot of fun shenanigans. The jokes that see Stewie ignored for months on end because of all of it are even funnier as well.
It’s revealed that Peter actually had a very rare G.I. Joe figure stuck in his colon, and it comes out after he and the guys all prepare for a colonoscopy together. It’s a pretty fun set up as we see all of them trying to use the bathroom all at once in a rented out cabin, and then leads into the main plot where the guys all want a piece of the thousands of dollars that would come from selling off the figure. It’s just not as interesting as some of the other hooks in other episodes, and Brian’s side plot of accidentally killing Mayor West’s cat is more gruesome than funny. It’s got some standout jokes and moments, but it’s just not enough to get it higher on this list.
“Dear Francis” is the first time that Peter’s adoptive father has been brought up in quite a while, and it’s actually a fairly unique way to bring him back into the picture. Peter accidentally yells out “Francis” when sleeping with Lois, and doesn’t want to admit it’s the name of the new waitress at the Clam. So the entire episode sees him instead admitting that he wanted to sleep with his dead father, and having to continue to lie until Lois ultimately figures it all out. The waitress is ultimately dealt with in a rather cold, but hilariously appropriate for Family Guy fashion too. It feels unique all throughout, and pushes more of the limit of the kind of uncomfortable lines the show crosses all the time.
Brian and Meg episodes tend to usually skew more into the deeper side of each character as they have bonded over the fact that Brian usually is the only one to care about Meg in certain situations. He gets into this one by being a total scumbag, so it’s a fun start to the idea where he and Meg believe she has terminal breast cancer. Deciding to then do everything that Meg wants to do, it eventually does reach its point where Meg does get a bit selfish at the end of it all. Brian’s anger over the situation doesn’t entirely work in this case, but it’s still an episode that brings the two together. It’s one of the better Meg uses this season.
Serving as the 450th episode milestone for the franchise, Family Guy did go all in for the occasion with an episode seeing Lois and Stewie have some deep and connecting conversations for the first real time. It was an episode that saw the two of them addressing some long held fan theories, and even had Stewie reveal how he wanted to kill Lois for a good portion of the early show. It was a fun enough experiment in its own right that immediately wipes all progress away when the episode ends. But in terms of actual enjoyment and full entertainment, there are episodes that are a bit more fun.
There aren’t too many episodes that feature a main focus on whatever Brian and Stewie are doing that week, and two of the ones we get are some of the better episodes of the season. “Friend’s Best Man” sees Stewie going all in on a marriage to Rupert, and brings Chris in as a chaotic third element that further pushes Brian out of the picture. It does all eventually lead to Brian realizing he’s been afraid of losing his friend the whole time (and Stewie pushing him out of his inner circle to do so), but it does then lead back to their central dynamic at the end. Also Peter and Lois’ side plot about their terrible sex tape does lead to some of the best gags of the season.
“Tall Stewie” is one of those episodes that feel like neither running plot has enough meat on the bone to be the full A storyline, but that’s what makes it work as well as it does. There’s just enough of a focus on Brian and Stewie’s shenanigans as they realize being on stilts makes them look much taller and more appealing, and Peter and Lois both joining a dating app in order to get more attention. Both smaller stories get enough attention to just focus on the funniest moments, and aren’t there too long to overstay their welcome. It’s a balance to keep from viewers realizing how weak both stories are, but it works well.
There are three major anthologies in this season, but they each take a different route to get there. “Play Time” is the loosest of the three as it sees Quahog’s citizens perform famous stories (like The Odd Couple, hilariously) over the course of a single evening, and thus there’s a lot of retooling to those stories. It’s not as faithful to each story as some of the anthologies seen in the past, but this play format allows the episode to have more fun with the idea. Peter and the others constantly break the reality of each story with small asides that are pretty funny, but it does lose the impact of fully committing to each idea as we see with the other better done anthologies.
One such example is the Family Guy Season 24 finale, “High School History.” It’s got a great framing device as Brian openly teaches the viewer about history as part of some community service for a crime that’s alluded to through the episode. It’s more in line with Family Guy’s much tighter anthologies of the past such as the fact you’ll see the same running joke brought up in all three stories. It covers quite a bit of ground for the French Revolution, Civil War era, and World War II, and does have a loose interpretation of its events. But it importantly covers all the important stuff you’d think, and puts a fun spin on it all.
“Viewer DMs” is a return to the decade old idea of the “Viewer Mail” seen back in Family Guy‘s earliest seasons. Being that this was one of the first anthology formats for the series, the return to it does allow for some pretty great ideas. You get a sped through Lord of the Rings parody, the Griffins on the Oregon Trail, and a Quagmire spinoff. The Quagmire section is the weakest, and unfortunately a weaker note to go out. But it’s still a great package, and hopefully a return of this classic idea in full. It’s clear that the team has a lot of fun when they don’t have to thematically tie all of the separate ideas together for an anthology.
Joe has become the standout character of the last decade or so as Family Guy has evolved him beyond his usual pathetic nature. Rather than always joke about his depression, the latest episodes are honing in on the fact that he’s just an “Average Joe” with average kinds of hobbies that aren’t that interesting. Sleeping pills help him become “Joey Goodtimes” who everyone else loves, but soon it’s revealed that Peter and the guys miss the old dynamic with Joe. The series needs a lot more Joe focused episodes if they’re all going to be as good as this one.
Seth MacFarlane has been trying to make a Western work for a very long time, and we’ve seen many of the projects under his umbrella already take on the genre. But “A Few More Ways to Die in the West” goes for full commitment with an alternate universe take, and allowing for a lot more humor to be mind from the makeover. Peter is “Quiet Burp,” someone who’s after a train robber who stole all his money (that turns out to be Lois), and all the while Brian and Stewie are trying to get rich. It’s just a fun adventure that seems like it had the most attention paid to it in the entire season overall, and it would be cool to see something like this at least once each season going forward.
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