The 5 Worst Family Guy Episodes, Ranked

For the most part, it’s hard to have too many strong opinions about “Family Guy” on an episode-by-episode basis. Most of the show’s humor comes in the form of cutaways or otherwise self-contained jokes, meaning that so many of its best and worst moments feel completely disconnected from the episode they’re from. I for one really hate that joke where Quagmire rapes Marge from “The Simpsons,” but it barely affects my feelings towards the episode it’s part of (“Movin’ Out (Brian’s Song)”), mainly because it’s so easy to forget that this was the episode where the series did that gag.

That said, some episodes of “Family Guy” have a plot so terrible that they really do stick in viewers’ minds long after the credits roll, regardless of any funny cutaways they have to ease the blow. So, below are five of my least favorite “Family Guy” episodes in the series. Apologies to all the “Life of Brian” haters out there, but that one’s not on the list.

On paper, “Seahorse Seashell Party” should be amazing. It’s the episode where Meg finally stands up to the rest of the family, giving them some proper payback for the abuse they’ve hurled at her over the years. There were just two problems: Meg’s rants to the rest of the family weren’t that well-written, and the episode’s resolution was terrible. After Meg tears into her family for their horrible behavior, she ends up feeling guilty and decides to let them continue treating her like trash.

You could, if you really wanted to, read this resolution as an intentional commentary on the tragic cyclical nature of abuse and how victims often have a misguided need to put their abusers’ feelings above their own. You could also maybe read this ending as a purposely sad one, a marker of just how little Meg thinks of herself that she’d be willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of these monsters.

But it’s with Meg’s final conversation with Brian, where he calls her a hero for her decision, where the episode loses me. It seems like the episode genuinely believes Brian in this final moment and doesn’t have any understanding at all of just how twisted this ending is. People often rank “Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q” as one of the worst episodes of “Family Guy,” as that one has a tonal dissonance problem in its depiction of serious domestic abuse, but at least that episode has the happy ending of Brenda’s abuser getting killed. It doesn’t make Brenda return to him and try to pass it off as a happy ending.

One of my least favorite episodes of the earlier seasons is “Brian & Stewie,” a season 8 story where Brian and Stewie find themselves trapped in an empty bank vault for an entire weekend. A lot of “Family Guy” fans liked this episode since its lack of cutaways and introspective dialogue made for a unique tonal departure from the rest of the series. For me, however, it just felt agonizingly dull and empty. The premise insists upon itself, trying way too hard to convince us that these are characters with depth even though we know damn well by now that their personalities will always change depending on what the writers need to make a joke work. Also, “Brian & Stewie” has a sequence dedicated to Brian eating Stewie’s soiled diaper, and it goes on way too long.

“Send in Stewie, please,” is a spiritual successor to “Brian & Stewie,” but it was far less successful. The episode is mostly just 20 minutes straight of Stewie talking to his therapist (played by Patrick Stewart), presented with a tone that suggests this is a Very Serious Episode with a lot of deep things to say. The result is an episode that once again feels drawn out and borderline humorless. I appreciate the show’s willingness to take a big creative swing, but it didn’t work out this time. Stewie may be the best character on “Family Guy,” but that doesn’t mean he can carry an episode like this.

As someone on the cusp between Millennials and Gen Z, I’m rarely bothered by jokes at either generation’s expense, as I can simply pretend to be a member of either and no one will usually call me on it. However, I do feel the need to stand up for millennials after watching “HTTPete,” as they were done dirty here. Sure, “Family Guy” has made fun of plenty of groups of people before, priding itself on being an “equal opportunity offender,” but rarely have the show done so in a tone as weirdly mean-spirited and self-righteous as this. It feels like the writers of this episodes were genuinely fuming at millennials the entire time, and it’s made even more baffling by how the millennial stereotypes were five years out of date by the time the episode debuted.

You know how Peter will often groan after Buzz Killington comes in to kill the buzz? Well, that’s how I groaned repeatedly throughout this episode’s string of hacky, smug, clichéd jokes at millennials’ expense. It feels like the show’s creatives let Tucker Carlson write the script. What’s worse is that it’s so easy to imagine how this episode could’ve played out in the series’ golden years, with Peter misguidedly embracing millennial stereotypes only for actual millennials to treat him with annoyance and disdain; that would’ve been a far more interesting dynamic than this episode’s unironic “old man yells at cloud” vibe.

How many incest/pedophile jokes is too many incest/pedophile jokes? Whatever the number, “Fresh Heir” veers far past it. The main storyline (which admittedly takes a while to get to) is that Chris is set to inherit his grandfather’s wealth, so Peter tries to marry Chris to get ahold on it. There is technically a heart behind the grossness here; Chris just wants to spend time with his dad, and Peter eventually realizes the error of his ways and tries to make amends. Still, that doesn’t quite make up for the inherent ickiness of the premise and the lack of strong jokes surrounding it. There are worse “Family Guy” A-plots out there, but this is one of the few where none of the cutaways land either.

This episode’s guilty of a sin shared by latter-day “The Simpsons” and “Futurama,” in that there are too many awkward pauses after a joke’s told. Presumably, these pauses are designed to give the audience time to laugh without interrupting the next line of dialogue, but that doesn’t work when there is no laughter. The result in “Fresh Heir” is that the viewer has to sit through dud after dud, with the ensuing silence after each only further emphasizing how flat they landed.

I don’t want to sound like the comedy police, but I think everyone involved in “Stewie is Enciente” should go to jail. The idea of Stewie being pregnant with Brian’s baby shouldn’t have even been allowed on “Family Guy” as a one-off cutaway, let alone as the entire plot of the episode. It’s a repulsive premise that only gets grosser and weirder as it goes on. Halfway through the episode you’ll start to lose any faith you may have in God; by the end of the episode you’ll fully believe the Devil exists, because he surely was involved in this somehow.

Admittedly, “Family Guy” is no stranger to gross-out humor; there was a disgusting herpes-related storyline in season 12 that nearly landed its episode on this list too, for instance, but it was spared thanks to a somewhat amusing B-plot that saved it from the bottom tier. Still, the show’s never been this gross for this long with barely any good jokes to back it up. “Stewie is Enciente” is miserable from start to finish, and a sign that the Brian and Stewie dynamic had run out of steam.

It’s a shame, because the Brian and Stewie-focused episodes used to be consistent comedic gold. Recent “Family Guy” seasons have started experimenting with pairing Brian/Stewie up with different members of the family more often — Stewie and Chris, for instance, are far more of comedic duo now than they were 10 years ago — and there’s a good chance “Stewie is Enciente” is the reason why. After the Stewie/Brian pairing gave us an episode so heinous, it’s no surprise the show’s creatives realized they needed to change things up.