Reception
In its original broadcast on September 30, 2007, "Blue Harvest" was viewed by 10.86 million viewers. The episode acquired a 5.5 Nielsen rating, the audience measurement systems developed to determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States, in the 18–49 demographic.
Reviews of this episode were mixed to positive. Common Sense Media gave the episode three out of five stars, calling it a "ribald but often hilarious satire of fantasy favorite". Brad Trechak of TV Squad also praised "Blue Harvest", stating that it "was a fun episode to watch"; he thought that "MacFarlane kept to the story pretty well, and there were enough corny jokes to make it amusing". Ahsan Haque from IGN gave it a score of seven out of ten, criticizing the selection of Herbert as Obi-Wan, but did say that the other choices were "spot-on"; he ended his review by stating, "as a tribute to Star Wars, this episode succeeds, but you can't help but wish that there was a bit more to it, considering the nature of the source material". In a later review of the season as a whole, Haque said that the episode was "generally entertaining, but certainly wasn't as great as it could have been". Daniel Fienberg of Zap2it also gave it a positive review although he stated that it was released soon after Robot Chicken's Star Wars special and it fared worst because of it.
Newsday's Diane Werts rendered a more mixed verdict, saying the episode "veer wildly from bull's-eye satire to gotta-fill-time-now exposition", and was not as enjoyable for non-Star Wars fans. Robin Pierson of The TV Critic also gave it a mixed review, criticizing the writers for using the character of Herbert and the episode's musical moment which he called an "un-amusing waste of time", although he did praise the way that the episode satirized the Star Wars universe; he ended his review by saying that "Chances are the more you like Star Wars, the more you will enjoy this. For those of us who know Family Guy better than Star Wars, there is plenty of bad material here to remind us that nothing much has changed". He gave the episode sixty-five out of a possible one-hundred.
The Parents Television Council, a group that has been a frequent critic of Family Guy, criticized the episode for a perceived frequent use of sexual dialogue, enough for the episode to have an "S" content descriptor for sexual content (the episode was rated TV-14-DLV on Fox).
Read more about this topic: Blue Harvest (Family Guy)
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