Summary
Lois goes down a slippery slope in “Customer of the Week”, a rare episode with only one plot — which doesn’t go unnoticed.
This recap of Family Guy season 19, episode 15 recap, “Customer of the Week”, contains spoilers.
Most episodes of Family Guy have at least an A and B plot, and increasingly these days both feel a little played out, just riffs on the same ideas and themes. I’m not sure “Customer of the Week” really constitutes anything new for the show either, but its single-character focus at least makes it feel like something of a novelty in comparison to the usual formula, especially since the character being focused on is Lois.
Endlessly put upon by the Griffin family, Lois, looking increasingly bedraggled, seeks solace in a coffee shop that she frequents daily. Given she’s always absurdly helpful and polite, she thinks she’s fully deserving of achieving the coveted “Customer of the Week”, which has escaped her thus far. When it escapes her again and again she becomes increasingly deranged about it, attempting to poison one of the regulars with peanuts so she can be seen to save her life, and eventually turning to kidnapping to prove her point. That’s probably the last time she follows Chris’s advice.
A woman’s self-destructive spiral is low-hanging fruit, but does Family Guy know any other kind? Besides, the audience’s longstanding familiarity with Lois is what makes the episode work; there’s an absurd montage of everyone else being annoying at the beginning that is funny precisely because there’s no context to Peter, say, demanding Lois retrieve his shoes from the roof. It’s refreshing to feel that the show isn’t trying too hard to be funny.
Sometimes that results in Family Guy season 19, episode 15 not actually being that funny, but at least it’s coherent and builds to a solid payoff of history repeating itself, even after a six-month stint in prison. A leopard can’t change its spots, after all.
