The family dog, Brian (McFarlane), talks
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and acts like a human being. A former attendee of Brown University, he is highly cultured and intelligent, given to sipping martinis while listening to classical music. He is a complex and interesting character, so much so that he is actually the central character in numerous episodes—as in the season three two-parter “The Thin White Line” (July 11, 2001) and “Brian Does Hollywood” (July 18, 2001), in which a bored Brian seeks fulfillment by becoming a drug-sniffing police dog, which leads to a cocaine habit that he then breaks in a rehab center. Still unhappy with his life in Quahog, he heads to Hollywood to try to make it in show business and ends up becoming an award-winning director of adult films.
If Brian thus has dimensions that go far beyond those of the family dogs in The Flintstones, The Jetsons, King of the Hill, or The Simpsons, the abilities of Baby Stewie (McFarlane) are just as remarkable. The Griffin baby is about the same age as Maggie Simpson, but there the similarities end. Stewie (whose middle name is Gilligan, indicating his parents’ devotion to TV) is, in fact, the real star of Family Guy, despite the fact that Peter is ostensibly the title character. Stewie, at least in the beginning, is a diabolical genius bent on world domination—or at least on killing Lois, whom he despises with misogynistic zeal. Distinguished by his striking, football-shaped head and his snide, British intonation, Stewie is constantly concocting evil schemes and designing super weapons, somewhat in the mold of a Bond villain. He even drew a map of Europe and began planning conquest of the continent while still in the womb.
Such unrealistic, exaggerated characters as Brian and Stewie have numerous cartoon precedents, of course, though their completely over-the-top portrayal takes them well beyond any of the characters in The Simpsons.
However, the true secret to the success of both of these characters is that they still retain realistic components. He may like reading the Wall Street Journal and watching PBS, but Brian also likes to sniff other dogs’ butts and is sometimes unable to resist dragging his ass across the carpet or peeing on the rug. Stewie, however diabolical and ingenious, still wears diapers, needs to be burped, and finds certain elements of infant culture (like watching The Teletubbies on television) absolutely irresistible. Thus, Brian is in many ways a normal dog and Stewie a normal infant, which combines with their otherwise over-the-top portrayals to create a tremendous space for irony and incongruity.
Family Guy gains additional richness from the fact that it features a large cast of characters in addition to the Griffins, many of whom play important roles in episodes of the series. For example, the show’s extensive satire of the media includes frequent references to the programming of Quahog’s
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local station, channel 5, especially the local news, featuring co-anchors Tom Tucker (McFarlane) and Dianne Simmons (Lori Alan), supported by
the on-the-scene reporting of “Asian reporter Tricia Takanawa” (Borstein).
Tucker and Simmons frequently appear off the air as well, though they are most notable for their on-the-air antics. The other men of the Griffins’
neighborhood are also important characters, somewhat in the vein of King of the Hill. Much risqué humor is gained, for example, from the appearances of bachelor neighbor Glenn Quagmire (McFarlane), an over-the-top sex
maniac who works as a pilot but devotes his life to the pursuit of sex—the kinkier the better. Something of a low-key foil to the hyperactive Quagmire is Cleveland Brown (Mike Henry), an African American delicatessen owner who sometimes provides the show with a voice of reason—or at least calm.
He is so calm in fact, that he sometimes seems almost catatonic, while his slow, monotone speaking style does not signal a lack of intelligence so much as a lack of emotional energy. Cleveland and Quagmire are often at odds, no more so than in “The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire” (June 12, 2005), in which Peter catches Quagmire having sex with Cleveland’s wife Loretta (Borstein), then virtually has to jump-start Cleveland to get him angry about it—eventually leading to the Browns’ divorce.
The other important neighbor is he-man paraplegic Joe Swanson (Patrick Warburton), a policeman injured in the line of duty when he fell after a rooftop battle in which he attempted to prevent the Grinch from stealing Christmas. Despite having lost the use of his legs and being confined to a wheelchair, Swanson is a highly capable macho man whose wife Bonnie
(Jennifer Tilly), in an apparent allusion to the unchanging nature of characters in animated programs, is perpetually pregnant without ever actually giving birth. Indeed, Swanson is so capable and so much admired for having overcome his disability that Peter envies him greatly. In “A Hero Sits Next Door” (May 2, 1999), when the Swansons first move into the neighborhood, Peter doesn’t realize that Joe is crippled and recruits him for his company softball team. But Joe comes through, winning the game wheelchair and all.
Eventually, Peter grows so jealous of Joe’s hero status that he tries to foil a bank robbery so that he can compete—but then of course Joe ends up having to save Peter from the bank robbers.