Monday, May 16, 2022

DVD/TV Series Review: Family Guy: Season 17

 


This is the DVD set for the seventeenth season of Family Guy, and is, as of this writing, the last season that is available on DVD. That is a bummer for those of us who prefer physical media to streaming, but not all that surprising given that DVD and Blu-Ray sets for TV series have very low sales numbers and are pretty much going extinct, especially Fox series as Fox is notorious for wanting their stuff exclusively on their various streaming platforms. In fact, this season includes an episode, "You Can't Handle the Booth" in which the characters from the show do a DVD commentary on an episode, and joke about how a lot of people (especially young people) have no idea what DVDs are.

The episodes are split over three discs, and they are uncensored. They definitely use jokes that cannot be used on the broadcast versions and drop multiple f-bombs. The extras include deleted scenes for most of the episodes, a commentary free track of the You Can't Handle the Booth episode, and a traditional commentary track on You Can't Handle the Booth that includes the writer, producers, and editor in which they discuss the process of making the episode and the layers of doing a regular episode, having the characters do a fake commentary track, and then including dialog by the actors talking to their characters (and including Sarah Paulson as a guest commentator). The episode seems to be either loved or hated by the fans, but it was very complicated to pull off, so the "regular" commentary track is actually pretty insightful.

Realistically, the show has been on long enough now that you will know if you like it or not. The show has definitely evolved over the years, but for those of us who have been watching from season one up to now, it is actually nice that the show does some callbacks to the early episodes (including a return of Lacy Chabert, who voiced Meg for the first thirteen episodes before Mila Kunis took over the role), and making fun of how characters (especially Stewie) has changed over the years. If you are a fan of the show and have the other DVD sets, this is worth picking up to keep your collection complete. But otherwise, you may just want to stick with streaming it.

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