Hulu To Premiere Two Exclusive 'Family Guy' Holiday Specials This Season
Hulu To Premiere Two Exclusive 'Family Guy' Holiday Specials This Season
PaleyFest sure sounded like a blast, including a performance of a third episode of next season.
It seems today that all you see is streaming taking episodes from linear TV. This year, it’s Hulu who gets to say “Buddy boy I got your Christmas right here!” Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane revealed at PaleyFest’s celebration Friday of the show’s 25th anniversary that the streamer will premiere two holiday specials of the show later this year when seasonally appropriate. MacFarlane, presumably going by knowing what episodes have been produced, expects them to be Halloween and Christmas.
Family Guy is fresh off the end of its strikes-truncated 22nd season Wednesday with the episode “Faith No More”, and while the 23rd is expected to be a full-sized 20 (or so has been the settled size for much of a decade), this shakes up and raises questions of what to expect of the season. Are these specials in addition to 20 Fox-aired episodes or is Fox getting just 18? Are they regular-length episodes, or are they actually specials like the double-length “Road to the North Pole” from season 9? Is this Hulu’s answer to South Park’s Paramount+ specials, or a complement to The Simpsons’s plethora of shorts for Disney+, now that Hulu has been integrated into Disney+? Answers will likely come with the specials’ synopses as the season comes closer.
In addition to the announcement of the two specials, the night featured MacFarlane and fellow cast members Alex Borstein, Seth Green, Mila Kunis, Arif Zahir, Patrick Warburton, and Jennifer Tilly and showrunners Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin. The orchestra was led by the show’s composer, Walter Murphy. Beginning with a performance of the show’s theme song, they held a table read for a very 420-appropriate upcoming episode written by Travis Bowe “The Edible Arrangement”. It’s centered on Lois and Stewie bonding after consuming a few of Brian’s weed-infused gummies. It breaks the communication barrier between them as far as Stewie’s full capabilities, as prior she’s only really heard him say “Mommy”, its variations and “fuck”. It’s so perfectly broken that Stewie gets to tell her all about his long-standing homicidal desires toward her, as much as it’s been sidelined in recent (and not-as-recent) seasons. In between each act, the cast dipped into the show’s song catalog, including Seth reprising “Shipoopi” from “Patriot Games” (via The Music Man) with Danny Smith, followed by season 5’s “Prom Night Dumpster Baby” and “My Drunken Irish Dad”. Strangely, it seems “A Bag of Weed” was nowhere to be found.
Family Guy’s first holiday episode was season 3’s “A Very Special Family Guy Freakin' Christmas” in 2001, not having another until the aforementioned Emmy-winning and Grammy-nominated “Road to the North Pole”, which led to far greater regularity with Christmas episodes. It was only a few episodes prior that the show had, to date, its only Halloween episode “Halloween on Spooner Street”. The subsequent Christmas episodes were Nativity retelling “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” in 2012, “Christmas Guy” in 2013 with the third act that resurrected Brian, 2014’s “The 2,000 Year-Old Virgin” where Jesus tries to sleep with Lois, 2016’s “How the Griffin Stole Christmas” where Peter becomes Mall Santa, 2017’s “Don't Be a Dickens at Christmas” where Peter has his Patrick Swayze Christmas Carol experience, 2019 brings Meg a sexually thrilling “Christmas is Coming”, “The First No L” saw Lois abandon the family due to in appreciation, and then there was “Christmas Crime” in 2021, and arguably the least Christmasy episode of all of their Christmas episodes “The Return of the King (of Queens)”.
It’s also worth noting that MacFarlane has never let go of Family Guy getting a movie, saying “I have known what that movie will be for the past 15 years and I just haven’t had the time to get to it, but I do know what it will be.” Universal acquired the rights to Ted in April 2010, at a time where The Cleveland Show was in its first season. He left his Family Guy creative capacities around then (season 10), and with everything that’s happened since, it makes all the sense, whether it's rounding or not. You can watch the Los Angeles Times feature on the occasion below.
Sources: The Wrap