Stewie spin-off: How Family Guy came back from the dead — twice

For a show that was cancelled not once but twice, Family Guy has proved to be one of the most resilient works of pop culture this century.

Not only is it on its 24th season, it’s just had another spin-off picked up.

A Stewie-focused series has been ordered for two seasons, starting with the American 2027-28 broadcast season, which means anytime from September next year.

The show was co-created by Seth MacFarlane and longtime Family Guy writer Kirker Butler. MacFarlane was little to do with Family Guy day-to-day, having left its creative team more than 15 years ago, but he continues to voice many of its main characters, including Stewie.

Maggie Simpson may have staged a Great Escape-esque revolt when she was thrown into the Ayn Rand School for Tots, but Stewie Griffin’s adventures daycare adventures look to be more ambitious.

The official logline for the series says Stewie will be going to a new, more downmarket pre-school after he is thrown out of his current one — presumably for some sort of nefarious world domination scheme.

There, he finds kids he doesn’t know and a 75-year-old turtle, and everyone is miserable. So, he breaks out his various sci-fi devices and start taking everyone on excursions through time and space.

This isn’t the first Family Guy spin-off — there was also The Cleveland Show, which ran for four seasons until 2013.

Family Guy might one of the stalwarts now, but it was an unlikely success story. Albeit, not at first. In the beginning, it was a hit, having premiered in 1999 directly after the Super Bowl, which gave it a massive lead-in audience who were encouraged to sample.

Sandwiched between The Simpsons and The X-Files in its first season, it finished the year strong. But its network, Fox, moved its timeslot more than once for its second year, putting it up against the likes of Frasier and then Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

It was a death sentence, and Family Guy was canned at the end of that year. Two months later, Fox changed its mind and gave it a reprieve.

But it was another ill-fated season, now moved to the same slot as Friends and Survivor, which were both drawing over 20 million viewers each. When the axe swung, there was still an unaired episode that had been kept in a vault for over a year.

That was where the Family Guy story was supposed to end, a three-season blip from a creator who was barely 25 years old at the start.

In 2002, when the show was cancelled for the second time, MySpace and Facebook were still one and two years away. Social media wasn’t a thing. There were Geocities fan pages, and letter writing “save our show” campaigns, but no mass rallying points.

But then Cartoon Network in the US bought the syndication rights for a steal and started airing reruns in 2003, which were a particular hit among that elusive demographic of 18 to 34-year-old men.

The other factor was that DVD sales, which was really starting to catch on as a format, were through the roof. The first season box set sold 1.55 million copies and was the third highest-selling title behind Chappelle’s Show and The Simpsons. The second season also moved more than a million copies and was ranked seventh, according to the New York Times.

The numbers were hard to ignore and by 2004, the TV network’s executives commissioned a fourth season for its 2005 schedule.

By then, MacFarlane had already successfully pitched another series too: American Dad, which debuted that same year, and this makes its return to Fox after broadcasting on a different network between 2014 and last year.

When Family Guy returned in 2005, it was the little show that could, now, it’s a cultural juggernaut that has also spawned a direct-to-DVD movie, live shows, video games, books, a crossover with The Simpsons and a trio of Star Wars episodes.

During its 25th anniversary in 2024, MacFarlane told The LA Times, “There was a time when I thought, ‘it’s time to wrap it up’. At this point, we’ve reached escape velocity. I don’t know that there’s any reason to stop at this point, unless people get sick of it. Unless the numbers show that people just are, ‘eh, we don’t care about Family Guy anymore’.

“But that hasn’t happened yet.”