Love him or hate him, Seth MacFarlane is one of the most successful writer-producers working in television, and has been for decades now. Family Guy is undeniably the crown jewel of the MacFarlane empire, and its successor American Dad! was initially dismissed as a pale imitation, which has caused it to struggle in the ratings for years, despite the fact the comparison wasn’t warranted. After its first couple of seasons, the latter show evolved into a beast of its own.
Renewed up to season 19, American Dad! has been MacFarlane’s strongest show for years. Where Family Guy’s quality has markedly declined in the years since its heyday, American Dad! keeps moving from strength to strength as it digs deeper and deeper into its own quirky niche.
Ironically, American Dad! became MacFarlane’s strongest show when he stepped down from writing duties and left the series in the hands of his co-creators Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman. While MacFarlane stayed on as the show’s star, voicing Stan, Roger, and various other characters, Barker and Weitzman took control of the creative direction of the series. They ditched the soft political satire of the first couple of seasons and leaned into the weirdness. Instead of telling story after story of Stan’s conservative ideologies being challenged, Barker and Weitzman focused on aspects like Stan’s psychotic stubbornness and Roger’s ability to seamlessly immerse himself into any persona. These elements opened up endless story possibilities. Now, American Dad! has become one of the most delightfully surreal comedies on the air.
Family Guy is often offensive for the sake of offending. American Dad! has a similarly dark comedic sensibility, but it uses shock value more sparingly than Family Guy, so its shock moments are much more effective. Family Guy is wall-to-wall shock, so nothing actually shocks; American Dad!’s well-placed shock-factor scenes like Roger diving elbow-first onto a crooked cop’s head have been etched into viewers’ brains.
The storytelling in American Dad! is much more focused than the storytelling in Family Guy, which sometimes doesn’t even bother to tell a story at all. As South Park’s “Cartoon Wars” episode pointed out, Family Guy’s cutaway-based humor doesn’t serve a story. While most Family Guy episodes provide plenty of laughs, few of them provide a satisfying plot with engaging stakes and real consequences. If the show tackles a premise like Lois becoming a stunt driver, it’s because the writers have a bunch of jokes about stunt drivers – it’s not based on any specific established characteristic. In American Dad!, the storytelling is much more character-driven. Like all the best sitcoms, American Dad! deals with situations that only its characters could find themselves in.
As a result of most of the show’s humor deriving from character moments, the characters in American Dad! are much better defined than the one-note archetypes found in Family Guy. Whereas Peter Griffin is a blatant copy of Homer Simpson, Stan Smith is a unique kind of well-meaning but narrow-minded sociopath who always tries to do what’s best, unwittingly does a lot of things horribly wrong, and only ever realizes the error of his ways when it’s way too late. Roger has stolen the show; being an alien with an infinite roster of personas to disguise him from humans has opened him up to infinite story premises. Francine was originally set up as yet another voice-of-reason housewife, but quickly revealed her drug-addled wild side. Steve is a nerd, but he’s also bi-curious, mild-mannered, musically gifted, and filled with childlike wonder – there’s a lot more to his characterization. Hayley offers a left-wing counterpoint to Stan’s staunch conservativism.
American Dad!’s breakout character is obviously Roger, a pansexual alien with an unlimited roster of disguises and a complete disregard for human life. Family Guy’s breakout character Stewie is certainly iconic, but Roger is an even more impressive creation. In early seasons, Roger was characterized as a sensitive alcoholic who sat around the house because he’s the alien from Area 51 and therefore couldn’t show his face in public. Since his personas were created to allow him to leave the house, he’s become the star of the show – a strangely lovable sociopath.
The relationships between the family members are much stronger in American Dad! than Family Guy, too. Where the Griffin family dynamic was never properly established (and it changes from episode to episode to facilitate certain gags and premises), the Smith family dynamic is clear as day. Stan is deeply disappointed in his kids, which Steve repays by trying to bond with him and Hayley repays with rebellion. Francine is mostly oblivious to Roger’s sociopathy despite being a common target. Jeff desperately seeks Stan’s approval as a father-in-law, and as a father figure in general after being abandoned by his own parents. Steve is often used as a foil for Roger, as his sweet-natured naivety pairs hysterically with Roger’s nonstop barrage of evil.
On the whole, American Dad! is a much stronger series than Family Guy – or any of MacFarlane’s other shows for that matter, from The Cleveland Show to The Orville. Since it dropped its Bush-era political overtones and focused on its more absurdist elements and its pitch-black comic sensibility, it’s been one of the funniest shows on TV. And now that the show has moved to TBS where it enjoys more lenient censorship, it’s darker and weirder than ever.