Summary
“Cutawayland” disappears inside Family Guy’s own trademark cutaways for an excuse to flex the animators’ imaginations and play on the show’s storied history.
This recap of Family Guy season 19, episode 4, “Cutawayland”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
The Griffins are at the beach, and you know what those trips are like when you’ve got three kids and a talking dog. All the fun you used to have on getaways has dried up like the little raisin where your heart used to be, and it mostly becomes an exercise in keeping your offspring alive and/or out of prison. Though maybe that’s just me.
This is frustrating for parents, obviously, to realize that the days in which you could have sex under a boardwalk are long gone. It’s no better at home, either. But when Peter and Lois express their frustrations at the same time, in the same way, they’re transported into a typical Family Guy cutaway scene – one based on a joke made earlier about selling Australian men suits. They both set up the cutaway at the same time, and that somehow trapped them both inside it. And it keeps happening.
This is obviously the gimmick of “Cutawayland”. The rules are established in obvious terms: It takes both of them to get in or out of Cutawayland, but only one to move around within it. Naturally, both Peter and Lois see this as their opportunity for a romantic getaway, and it’s also an opportunity for the show’s writers and animators to show off by cooking up a litany of farcical, isolated visual gags that Peter and Lois get to interact with.
Back in the real world, the kids are equally happy to find themselves without adult supervision. Naturally, they throw a party. It isn’t difficult to see where all this is going; Lois quickly decides she’s had enough of a break and wants to go home, but their attempts to leave bring the rest of the family inside Cutawayland and the rest of the episode is a fourth-wall-breaking escape attempt that delves into the show’s own storied cutaway history.
The only way back to reality is to kill the first-ever cutaway’s depiction of Hitler, which Meg accomplishes easily enough. But the twist, so to speak, is that it was all a dream, just Peter’s sleepy imaginings on the beach. What did I tell you about those trips? They’re a nightmare.
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