'Family Guy' Reveals Strike Impact In Announcing Season Finale

If the show being on Wednesdays weirded you out, don’t worry, it might be over soon. This season certainly will be.

It’s been a weird television season, dealing with the impacts of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Most network shows were pretty upfront about how long the seasons would be, ranging from 10 to 13 episodes because they were basically all midseason replacements. Fox’s animated shows were impacted, but other than public disclosures from the crews at Bob’s Burgers, haven’t been quite as open. This also happened to be the season where the Sunday night Animation Domination lineup ran out of room, with the premieres of Krapopolis in the fall and Grimsburg in the winter. This resulted not in an Animation Continuation situation like a couple of years ago, but instead, it was just Family Guy cast off to Wednesdays at 9:30 PM after Animal Control starting in March, its first weekday timeslot since before cancellation in the 2001-02 season. Suddenly, on Friday, the show’s socials posted sneak peeks at the season finale, using pictures attached to the press release.

The versions on Twitter and Instagram are slightly different but amount to the same, with Twitter’s going “the countdown to my season finale begins! episode drops wednesday, april 17 on foxtv” which is very weird for the fact that it’s just a simple countdown of the days to the finale, rather than counting down with a number of episodes left. The Instagram version said “Swipe for a sneak peek at my season finale. Make your predictions before the episode drops Wednesday April 17 on Foxtv” The episode is called “Faith No More” and is just the 15th episode of the season, its sixth since moving. Heck it could be its last if it moves back to Sunday in the fall. Anyway, the press release describes that Brian “takes a leap beyond belief” and becomes romantically interested in someone and it inspires him to use Stewie's time machine. Strange consequences result from their journey. Strangely, no guest stars are listed.

So, a 15 episode season. How typical is that of Family Guy? Well, the production stoppage lost them 5 episodes, as starting with season 14, the show had stabilized with 20 episode seasons. The most comparable season is definitely the one made under the most similar circumstances: season 6, which was impacted by the Writers Guild of America’s previous strike during the 2007-2008 season. Season 22 actually comes out healthier, as 6 only had 13 half hours, 11 regular episodes following the 2-part Star Wars parody “Blue Harvest” that kicked off the season. There were some holdovers for season seven, though, aside from “Love Blactually” (which explicitly says it was one) I can’t tell which because they all have production codes starting with 6. Season 7 is 16 episodes, the shortest season between the two strikes. With season 22 situated between them, these three are the shortest seasons since Family Guy’s first season back in 1999, which had 7 episodes. Coincidentally, the six following the Super Bowl premiere began regularly airing this very week of April back then. Happy 25th anniversary, Family Guy!

The trio of images below were the other three shared on the socials, however more were released with them. They are linked in sources. The 2023-2024 season was the first season covered in the show’s most recent double renewal, and thus is renewed through the end of next season.

Credit: 20th Television Animation

Source: Press release via The Futon Critic, SpoilerTV