Family Guy
Family Guy is an American animated sitcom created by Seth MacFarlane for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series premiered on January 31, 1999, following Super Bowl XXXIII, with the rest of the first season airing from April 11, 1999. The show centers around the Griffins, a dysfunctional family consisting of parents Peter and Lois, their children, Meg, Chris, and Stewie, and their anthropomorphic pet dog, Brian. Set in the fictional city of Quahog, Rhode Island, the show exhibits much of its humor in the form of cutaway gags that often lampoon American culture.
The family was conceived by MacFarlane after he developed two animated films, The Life of Larry and Larry & Steve. MacFarlane redesigned the films' protagonist, Larry, and his dog, Steve, and renamed them Peter and Brian, respectively. MacFarlane pitched a fifteen-minute pilot to Fox in May 1998, and the show was greenlit and began production. Family Guy cancellation was announced shortly after the third season had aired in 2002, with one unaired episode eventually premiering on Adult Swim in 2003, finishing the series' original run. Favorable DVD sales and high ratings from syndicated reruns since then convinced Fox to revive the show in 2004; a fourth season began airing the following year, on May 1, 2005.
Family Guy received generally positive reviews during its first seven seasons. Since then, the series has received criticism for a perceived decline in quality. In 2009, it was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series, the first time an animated series had been nominated for the award since The Flintstones in 1961. In 2013, TV Guide ranked Family Guy as the ninth-greatest TV cartoon. The series has drawn significant criticism for its storylines, humor, and character portrayals, including allegations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and reliance on offensive stereotypes and graphic violence.
Many tie-in media based on the show have been released, including Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, a straight-to-DVD special released in 2005; Family Guy: Live in Vegas, a soundtrack-DVD combo released in 2005, featuring music from the show as well as music created by MacFarlane and Walter Murphy; a video game and pinball machine, released in 2006 and 2007, respectively; since 2005, six books published by Harper Adult; and Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The Family Guy Trilogy, a collection of three episodes parodying the original Star Wars trilogy. A spin-off series, The Cleveland Show, featuring Cleveland Brown, aired from September 27, 2009 to May 19, 2013.
On April 2, 2025, it was announced that Family Guy would be renewed for four more seasons in what is considered a "mega deal" with parent company Disney. This renewal will take the show through the 2028–29 television season. The twenty-fourth season premiered in October 2025, with regular episodes set to premiere on February 15, 2026.
Premise
Characters
The show centers around the adventures and activities of the dysfunctional Griffin family, consisting of father Peter Griffin, a bumbling and clumsy blue-collar worker; his wife Lois, a stay-at-home mother and piano teacher who is a member of the affluent Pewterschmidt family; Meg, their often bullied teenage daughter who is constantly ridiculed or ignored by the family; Chris, their awkward teenage son, who is overweight, unintelligent, unathletic, and in many respects a younger version of his father; and Stewie, their diabolical, adult-mannered infant son of ambiguous sexual orientation who is an evil genius and uses stereotypical archvillain phrases. Living with the family is their witty, smoking, martini-swilling, sarcastic, English-speaking anthropomorphic pet dog Brian, although he is still considered a pet in many ways.Recurring characters appear alongside the Griffin family. These include the family's neighbors: sex-crazed airline pilot bachelor Glenn Quagmire; deli owner/mail carrier Cleveland Brown and his wife Loretta ; paraplegic police officer Joe Swanson, his wife Bonnie, their son Kevin and their baby daughter Susie; neurotic Jewish pharmacist Mort Goldman, his wife Muriel, and their geeky and annoying son Neil, and elderly child molester Herbert. TV news anchors Tom Tucker and Diane Simmons, Asian reporter Tricia Takanawa, and Blaccu-Weather meteorologist Ollie Williams also make frequent appearances. Actor James Woods guest stars as himself in multiple episodes, as did Adam West, prior to his death.
Setting
The primary setting of Family Guy is Quahog, a fictional city in Rhode Island that was founded by Peter's ancestor, Griffin Peterson. MacFarlane resided in Providence during his time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the show contains distinct Rhode Island landmarks similar to real-world locations. MacFarlane often borrows the names of Rhode Island locations and icons such as Pawtucket and Buddy Cianci for use in the show. MacFarlane, in an interview with Providence's Fox affiliate WNAC-TV, stated that the town is modeled after Cranston, Rhode Island.Episodes
Production
Development
MacFarlane conceived Family Guy in 1995 while studying animation at the Rhode Island School of Design. During college, he created his thesis film titled The Life of Larry, which was submitted by his professor at RISD to Hanna-Barbera. MacFarlane was hired by the company. In 1996, MacFarlane created a sequel to The Life of Larry titled Larry and Steve, which featured a middle-aged character named Larry and an intellectual dog, Steve; the short was broadcast in 1997 as one of Cartoon Network's World Premiere Toons.Executives at Fox saw the Larry shorts and contracted MacFarlane to create a series, titled Family Guy, based on the characters. Fox proposed that MacFarlane complete a 15-minute short and gave him a budget of $50,000. MacFarlane pitched the completed demo short to Fox on May 15, 1998, which featured the first appearance of the Griffin family. The first seven minutes of the pitch pilot, which had a storyline parallel to the pilot that aired on television in January 1999, would be included in Family Guy DVD sets. The full fifteen-minute pitch demo remained lost until it was uploaded to the internet by Robert Paulson on his personal website in 2022. Despite this, the pitch demo was not discovered by the public until March 2025.
Several aspects of Family Guy were inspired by the Larry shorts. While MacFarlane worked on the series, the characters of Larry and his dog Steve slowly evolved into Peter and Brian Griffin. MacFarlane stated that the difference between The Life of Larry and Family Guy was that "Life of Larry was shown primarily in my dorm room and Family Guy was shown after the Super Bowl."
Family Guy was originally planned to start out as short movies for the sketch show Mad TV, but the plan changed, because MADtvs budget was not large enough to support animation production. MacFarlane noted that he then wanted to pitch it to Fox, as he thought that it was the place to create a prime-time animation show. Family Guy was originally pitched to Fox in the same year as King of the Hill, but the show was not bought until years later, when King of the Hill became successful.
After the pilot episode of Family Guy aired, the series was given the greenlight. MacFarlane drew inspiration from several sitcoms such as The Simpsons and All in the Family. Premises were drawn from several 1980s Saturday-morning cartoons he watched as a child, such as The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang and Rubik, the Amazing Cube.
Renewals
On January 26, 2023, Fox announced that the series had been renewed for seasons 22 and 23, taking the show through the 2024–25 television season. Season 22 premiered on October 1, 2023. Season 23 premiered on February 16, 2025.On April 2, 2025, it was announced that Family Guy would be renewed for four more seasons in what is considered a "mega deal" with parent company Disney. This renewal will take the show through the 2028–2029 television season, which coincides with the 30th anniversary of the shows' launch in January 1999. Additionally, each season will consist of 15 episodes.
Executive producers
MacFarlane has served as an executive producer throughout the show's entire history. The first executive producers were David Zuckerman, Lolee Aries, David Pritchard, and Mike Wolf. Family Guy has had many executive producers in its history, including Daniel Palladino, Kara Vallow, and Danny Smith. David A. Goodman joined the show as a co-executive producer in season three and eventually became an executive producer.Writing
The first team of writers assembled for the show consisted of Chris Sheridan, Danny Smith, Gary Janetti, Ricky Blitt, Neil Goldman, Garrett Donovan, Matt Weitzman, and Mike Barker. The writing process of Family Guy typically starts with 14 writers that take turns writing the scripts; when a script is finished it is given to the rest of the writers to read.File:Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman by Gage Skidmore.jpg|thumb|left|alt=A man with a bald head and a brown sweater, and a man with spiked brown hair and glasses, speaking into a microphone.|Matt Weitzman is a former staff writer, and Mike Barker is a former producer and writer of the show. Both left the series to create the ongoing adult animated sitcom American Dad! with Seth MacFarlane. Barker later left American Dad! as well following production of the show's 10th season.
These scripts generally include cutaway gags. Various gags are pitched to MacFarlane and the rest of the staff, and those deemed the funniest are included in the episode. MacFarlane has explained that it normally takes 10 months to produce an episode because the show uses hand-drawn animation. The show rarely comments on current events for this reason. The show's initial writers had never written for an animated show, and most came from live-action sitcoms.
MacFarlane explained that he is a fan of 1930s and 1940s radio programs, particularly the radio thriller anthology Suspense, which led him to give early episodes ominous titles like "Death Has a Shadow" and "Mind Over Murder." MacFarlane said that the team dropped the naming convention after individual episodes became hard to identify, and the novelty wore off. For the first few months of production, the writers shared one office, lent to them by the King of the Hill production crew.
Credited with 19 episodes, Steve Callaghan is the most prolific writer on the Family Guy staff. Many of the writers that have left the show have gone on to create or produce other successful series. Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan co-wrote 13 episodes for the NBC sitcom Scrubs during their eight-year run on the show, while also serving as co-producers and working their way up to executive producers. Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman left the show and went on to create the long-running and still ongoing adult animated series American Dad!. On November 4, 2013, it was announced that Barker had departed American Dad! during its run as well, after 10 seasons of serving as producer and co-showrunner over the series.
During the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike, official production of the show halted for most of December 2007 and for various periods afterward. Fox continued producing episodes without MacFarlane's final approval, which he termed "a colossal dick move" in an interview with Variety. Though MacFarlane refused to work on the show, his contract under Fox required him to contribute to any episodes it would subsequently produce. Production officially resumed after the end of the strike, with regularly airing episodes recommencing on February 17, 2008. According to MacFarlane, in 2009, it cost about $2 million to make an episode of Family Guy.
During his September 2017 AMA on Reddit, MacFarlane revealed that he had not written for the show since 2010, choosing instead to focus on production and voice acting.
On May 12, 2023, it was announced that the showrunners of Family Guy, including Seth MacFarlane, would temporarily leave the show as a result of the 2023 Writers Guild of America Strike. They returned to the show on September 27, 2023, once the strike was declared to be over.