American Dad is about a Republican CIA agent who lives in Langley with his perky housewife Francine, wanna-be hippy daughter Hayley, dork son Steve, stoner son-in-law Jeff, German skier trapped in a fish Klaus, and alien Roger. Roger’s favorite thing is creating personas to hide himself in plain sight.
Roger’s new persona is Professor Dickens LongBottom, a creative writing instructor at Hayley’s college. He greatly inspires her (“Me writers?”) and she decides to help him finish is novel. First, they try going to a coffee shop, but Roger finds faults with everything they do.
He confesses to being scared of his novel not being “universally beloved”, a both unrealistic and very truthful fear/goal. In order to avoid his block, Roger double dips with a second campus persona, the new football coach. Hayley keeps trying to push Roger to write because Longbottom is her favorite of his personas and she believes in him (the professor not Roger himself). Roger’s avoidance is so strong that he turns the coffee shop he he writes at into a sports bar.
Hayley insists that Roger needs to stop sabotaging himself to avoid failure. She tells him that all he needs is pen, paper, and adderall. However, the book is poorly reviewed and Roger instead writes a playbook/cookbook as the coach. Then, the coach reads the professor’s book and is touched by it. Therefore Roger decides art is worth it as long as it touches one person… even though the person touched in this case was himself. Okay, American Dad has gotten weirder over the years, but I’m sure there’s a lesson in there someplace.
In the words of Prof. Longbottom, “Writing is hard.”
