Family Guy's Upcoming Specials Are Following A Genius Move Used By 2 Other Long-Running Animated Sitcoms

Summary Hulu has ordered exclusive Family Guy holiday specials, following South Park and The Simpsons in producing streaming-only content.

Producing for Hulu allows Family Guy creators to take bigger risks and tell deeper stories free from network constraints.

These specials offer the chance for Family Guy to break away from its stale formula and return to its boundary-pushing roots.

Hulu has ordered a pair of Family Guy holiday specials exclusively for streaming, which follows a model that two other hit adult animated shows have found success with. Hulu is already the home to new Family Guy episodes; every new Family Guy episode arrives in the streaming library of Hulu just one day after it airs on Fox. But now, Hulu is ordering Family Guy content straight to its streaming service, forgoing the show’s traditional network release format, which will ultimately allow the creators to take bigger swings and bigger risks with their storytelling.

For starters, Hulu has ordered two Family Guy holiday specials to be released in 2024. The Halloween special will star Glen Powell as the reigning champion of a pumpkin-carving contest, who Peter and his friends are hoping to dethrone. There’s no word yet on the next holiday special, but it will likely revolve around Thanksgiving or Christmas. The fact that Hulu has started ordering streaming exclusives from the Family Guy team is a really exciting sign for the show’s future – and it follows in the footsteps of two of its fellow long-running adult-oriented animated sitcoms.

Family Guy's Hulu Content Could Follow A Similar Model To South Park & The Simpsons

South Park and The Simpsons have been producing streaming-only content for years

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Family Guy is just the latest long-running adult animated sitcom to start producing content exclusively for its parent company’s streaming service. Fellow Fox alum The Simpsons has been producing shorts for Disney+ since the streamer was first launched. They’ve made shorts celebrating Disney properties like Star Wars and Marvel, a short in which Lisa meets Billie Eilish, and a short in which the Simpsons celebrate Christmas with Andrea Bocelli and his family. South Park, on the other hand, has left behind its network home of Comedy Central completely and moved exclusively to Paramount+.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone still intermittently produce new seasons of the show, with shorter episode counts, but they’ve mostly transitioned to telling South Park stories in long-form specials. This has freed Parker and Stone from their stress-inducing weekly commitment to producing new episodes and allowed them to just return to South Park whenever they have a story idea they want to explore. Joining the Panderverse satirized multiverses and diverse casting; Not Suitable for Children satirized OnlyFans and Prime energy drinks; and The End of Obesity satirized Ozempic – and did so in more depth than a regular half-hour episode could.

Hulu Ordering Family Guy Specials Is Exciting For The Show's Future

It opens the door to new possibilities for Family Guy's future

While there’s still the occasional gem hidden in new seasons of Family Guy, the show has felt like it’s on autopilot for the past few years. They’ve settled into a formula that’s stale but works: they set up one of the characters with a goal, churn out a few gags from that premise, and pretty much tread water until it’s time to roll the end credits. The writers have started relying more and more on three-part anthology episodes, because they’re basically joke machines that don’t require much character development or narrative complexity.

Producing new long-form content exclusively for Hulu could be the shot in the arm that Family Guy needs to get back to its boundary-pushing glory days. Making specials for Hulu opens the door to countless new possibilities for Family Guy. On Hulu, the writers won’t be restricted by the censorship of network television or the runtime constraints of a regular TV schedule, so they can go back to pushing the envelope the way that Seth MacFarlane did in the show’s early years. This is a really exciting development for the future of Family Guy.

Family Guy season 23 will premiere on October 14, 2024.

The Streaming Model Could Improve Family Guy's Storytelling

Longer runtimes mean more opportunities for deeper storytelling

Family Guy has often been criticized for its lazy, inconsequential storytelling. Even Family Guy itself has poked fun at the laziness of its own storytelling. The show’s penchant for cutaways made it stand out from the crowd, but it also gave the writers a get-out-of-jail-free card to avoid following the usual rules of storytelling. It can be funny and subversive if the characters never learn any lessons and the stories never resolve organically, but it can also be pretty dissatisfying to a viewer. These new specials on Hulu could allow Family Guy to finally improve its storytelling.

On the airwaves of Fox, Family Guy’s writers have to keep their episodes within the constraints of a 22-minute runtime; on the streaming-waves of Hulu, they won’t be confined by these restraints. They can make each special as long as they want. MacFarlane has certainly taken advantage of this freedom with his Ted series on Peacock, which has some episodes running over 50 minutes. Longer runtimes will allow Family Guy’s writers to include as many cutaways as they want without having to sacrifice the depth of their character work or the complexity of their stories.