Director Joe Vaux, a longtime "Family Guy" hand, knows exactly what this show looks like when it is working. The visual language here is noticeably richer than the average episode - the production design of Hell borrows from everything from Dante to low-budget eighties horror, with reds that actually bleed and shadows that do some work. For a series that has spent two decades looking flat on purpose, the texture is a welcome shock.
The script is the real question mark. "Family Guy" has always been a joke-machine held together by loose plotting, and here the machinery rattles. The premise is strong enough to sustain a full half-hour, but the episode burns through it in the first act and then has to invent reasons to keep the story moving. The middle sags. A subplot involving Peter, Lois and the rest of the family back on Earth reacting to the deaths feels obligatory, as though the writers were worried audiences would miss the Quahog living room too much. Those scenes are the weakest in the episode, and they siphon time from the far more interesting afterlife material.
What rescues it is the voice work. Seth MacFarlane has been doing these characters so long that the performances are muscle memory, but he finds fresh notes of panic in Stewie and weary irritation in Brian. Culkin is the standout - he plays the Devil not as a grand villain but as a middle manager who has simply had enough, and the decision pays off comedically in nearly every scene. Patrick Warburton's Joe and Alex Borstein's Lois are used sparingly but effectively.
The horror-comedy balance is more successful than expected. The episode earns its genre tags; there are images here that would not be out of place in a network horror anthology, and the comedy comes from the tonal collision rather than from deflating every scary moment. That is a smarter approach than the show often takes.
Where it stumbles is in the ending, which resolves the Devil's abdication with a shrug rather than a punchline, and in a handful of gags that feel like they were workshopped by committee. At 22 minutes there is not much room for error, and a few dead spots are felt.
