YMMV / American Dad!

General examples:

#-F

• Accidental Aesop:
  • "White Rice" can be read as an example of how some ideas that work well in one form of media don't necessarily translate well to others. Francine's jokes about being the white adoptive daughter of a Chinese couple go over great in a standup routine because a live audience in the intimate setting of a theater doesn't take things at face value, and when they’re said aloud by an actual person, they are understood to be anecdotal. When those same jokes are filmed and edited into a sitcom, the personal angle is lost and they feel like they're making fun of people, which is why the show got canceled after its first episode.
  • Steve tries to hire Stelio to beat one of his bullies...only for Stelio to team up with Steve's bully to beat them up together. This seems to reconstruct Stan's message to Steve about "carrying your oranges up the stairs": having others do things for you means you'll be helpless to solve your own problems.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: There are many based on the Smiths family:
  • Is Francine a sensible mom or is she an insane Dumb Blonde?
  • Does Stan only care for himself, or is he trying to do what he thinks is best for his family, but taking it too far?
    • Speaking of Stan, he can be seen as insane due to his irrational way of thinking, which includes heavy cases of Aesop Amnesia, Insane Troll Logic, and just being Too Dumb to Live, and even many characters in-universe believe he is a lunatic. Stan's insanity might be exposed when he suffers delusions that make him believe he's fat and see an imaginary trainer named Zack in "The American Dad After School Special".
    • More of Stan, is it possible that he subconsciously hates his own family and masks this hate by "helping" them"? Stan's actions in "Hurricane" and "The Mural of the Story" where his attempts to help do the exact opposite seem to point to this direction.
    • In the episode, "Stan's Food Restaurant", Stan tells Francine that he was molested by a priest at Christian summer camp, only for him to later admit that he seduced the priest. Is this the truth, or was Stan in denial and blaming himself? It doesn't help that many real life victims of sexual assault blame themselves for what happened, and the episode "Into the Woods" shows that whenever someone bullies or abuses Stan, he created a Self-Serving Memory where he is the aggressor.
    • Is Stan a Designated Villain? While he is often presented as being in the wrong, the show doesn’t hide the fact that Stan’s actions are usually the result of the abuse he’s suffered from. For example, due to the mind games and smothering Betty used to make Stan dependent on her, he ended up kidnapping every guy she dated out of fear they'd break her heart. There is also the fact that as much as his family complain about Stan’s actions, they are repeatedly shown to be unable to function without him. It isn’t that farfetched to assume that Stan is actually a form of Laser-Guided Karma. Keep in mind that the Smiths only devolve into their Too Dumb to Live mentality when Stan leaves; they are fine when Francine does her own thing.
  • Roger:
    • Is he a full-blown psychopath that does nasty and awful things because he enjoys it? Is it simply Blue-and-Orange Morality, as he says about his species? Or is it both?
    • Does Roger have dissociative identity disorder, or is he just so committed to or obsessed with acting that he sometimes forgets who he really is?
  • Steve Smith might have multiple personalities since he has a different type of behavior from episode to episode; some episodes he really wants a girlfriend, some episodes he looks up to his dad, some episodes he's a horndog, some episodes he's a teenager with such extreme mental problems, that no therapist could help him (Roger’s words not ours), and some episodes he acts like a immature spoiled brat.
  • Many have assumed that Hayley's violent temper (as seen in episodes such as "Pulling Double Booty" and "1600 Candles") is a side effect of the brainwashing she received as part of Project Daycare (as detailed in "Haylias").
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • While it has a seemingly fantastical name, the colossal squid Francine devotes her newly-found free time to finding is a real-life cephalopod.
  • Stan gets into an argument with Dick as to whether turkeys can fly. Wild turkeys actually can fly for brief periods.
  • Given the nature of the typical American Dad! Christmas episode, it's understandable that a number of fans were surprised to learn that the Christmas demon Krampus was not a creation of the show.
  • Roger's Ortolan in "In Country...Club" is a real bird, and the means of preparing it is correct as well.
  • "Black Mystery Month" is correct in stating that George Washington Carver did not actually invent peanut butter.
  • "Shell Game" features an organization devoted to illegal egg collection - both poaching the eggs of endangered species and stealing pre-collected eggs from established collections. Which sounds absurd, but was a fad in the UK from the '50s to the '90s.
  • "White Rice" has the titular Show Within a Show being cancelled and pulled off the air after just one joke. It sounds silly, but something similar (if not quite as quickly) happened in the '90s with the broadcast of Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos, which was a one-off special on Nine Network pulled off the air in the middle of its first broadcast (and replaced with a Cheers re-run) after the owner of the network called and yelled at them to "Get that shit off the air!". (It's worth noting that it did get a full broadcast later on in 2008.)
  • From "The Bitchin' Race." In Tunisia, Steve wants to go to the Hard Rock to buy souvenir pins. There actually is a Hard Rock Cafe at Port El Kantaoui, which opened two years before the episode aired.
• Anvilicious: Parodied in an episode where, after Francine is worried that her and Stan's new friends might get an abortion, he says...
  Stan: They won't, [looks at camera] because they're awesome! [nods]
• Arc Fatigue:
  • The Golden Turd plot was revisited sporadically since its introduction in the Season 1 episode "Homeland Insecurity". The plotline would be featured in Season 2's "Failure is Not a Factory-Installed Option" and be referenced in the non-canon Season 5 episode "Rapture's Delight", but the third part wouldn't happen until Season 10's "Blagnarst: A Love Story", which first aired over eight years after the second installment. The saga continued in the Season 13 premiere "Father's Daze", two years after the 3rd part, before finally concluding four years later, in the episode "300".
  • The Jeff's in space/part alien arc was dragged across several seasons, lasting over several years, and most of the episodes post-Jeff's A Day in the Limelight in "Lost in Space" were dedicated to pushing the Reset Button on all of its plotpoints, making it feel rather tiresome and pointless to many.
• Archive Panic: The series entered this territory in 2013, at which point it had reached its 150th episode. When the FOX network chose not to pick it up for the 2014-15 season, the show moved to TBS, and it has been renewed for additional seasons, already reaching 300 episodes as of December 2020.
• Ass Pull:
  • Francine wanting Stan to lose his wrestling record in "The Wrestler" because she hated the museum he kept over it. For the handful of times she shows up in the episode, she never hints that the museum bothered her; instead, she says she likes going there every few weeks.
  • The reveal that all the murders in "Death By Dinner Party" were staged as a way of getting back at Roger for usually acting like a childish jerk. Earlier in the episode, there are several scenes of the other characters acting scared of dying even when they have no reason to, since Roger isn't among them.
• Awesome Music: Series co-creator Mike Barker has that much of his inspiration for American Dad! episodes came through listening to music and many episodes of the show had some very memorable musical moments.
  • Good Morning, USA! I got a feeling that it's going to be a wonderful day!
  • When I Was His Alien sung by Roger.
  • "Ollie North," a song that Stan sings about Oliver North to Steve, who doesn't know who he is. It's a hilariously sarcastic Schoolhouse Rock! parody, in addition to being catchy as all hell.
  • Reginald, and he used to be nothing. Now he's a koala and he's cute as a button!
  • El perro, el perro, es mi corazón, El gato, el gato, el gato no es bueno. Cilantro es cantante, Cilantro es muy famoso, Cilantro es el hombre con el queso del diablo.
  • The music of My Morning Jacket inspired an entire episode based around their music.
  • The music in "Hot Water", including the songs performed by Cee Lo Green.
  • Pretty much any time Steve sings. Scott Grimes is a talented singer and the way he applies his singing to Steve's voice makes it even better.
  • Girl You Need a Shot (OF B12 [Boyz 12]) by Boyz 12 is so damn catchy. It sounds like a legit boy band song.
  • "Lost in Space" made magnificent use of "Majestic" by Wax Fang.
  • Krampus' two songs, "You Get the Rod" and "We've Been Bad" in "Minstrel Krampus" are powerful soul songs performed by Charles Bradley, although the latter is a duet with Steve.
• Badass Decay: Season 1 Stan? Badass hyper-competent CIA Agent who can spy with the best of 'em and manages a daring parkour-esque escape from Steve in a shopping mall. Season 7 Stan? Attempts free-running, falls and breaks his leg open, gets beaten up on a regular basis and has proven completely incompetent at protecting his family.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Steve. He's either an Adorkable nerd who idolizes his father or an unsympathetic pervert and inconsiderate brat (in later seasons anyway). Despite garning a number of detractors in the later seasons, he does still have a number of fans who enjoy the character, much like with Stan.
  • While Stan does still have his fans, the number of detractors he has also seems to increase with each new season (mainly starting with the end of the FOX era/all of the TBS era). This being due to not only the continued increase of focus on his more unlikable qualities which is best highlighted in episodes like "Seizure Suit Stanny", "Father's Daze" and "The Mural of the Story", but also the complete Flanderization of his character devolving him from a slightly smarter Peter Griffin to just another clone of him who is just as (if not more) stupid and dangerous to everyone around him.
  • Debbie Hyman. She was originally pretty popular for being a quirky goth and very different from all the love interests Steve has ever had. The problem was, every episode about her after her introduction was them repeatedly breaking up for whatever reason. Coupled with her miniscule development as well as being used primarily for the sake of jokes about her weight, she became a source of annoyance for some. Others however remember her for who she was and still find her one of the more enjoyable characters of the early seasons. Although no one seems to care for the one-off gag with her mentioning that she shoots the eyes out of squirrels for fun.
  • Rogu. He was clearly created as a parody of the usual "new kid joins the family" premise, but didn't completely avoid the critiques associated with such a character. Some fans dislike him, considering to him to be unfunny and a pointless addition to the series. Then there are others who like him due to his Ugly Cute charm and for being the one character in the Smith clan who's treated well most of the time. What also stops Rogu from being a complete scrappy is that unlike most examples of a "Cousin Oliver", Rogu didn't join the main cast and quickly wear out his welcome, but remained a rarely-seen recurring character.
• Better on DVD: Much like Family Guy, this show has a lot of extended scenes, unbleeped-out language, and cruder lines of dialogue that only the DVD version can provide.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: One gag randomly depicts the cast as Animated Actors. When Stan walks off the set because he thinks the B-Plot he and Francine are in doesn't make any sense, he storms off past a giant version of Klaus in front of a green screen. This is promptly forgotten in the following scene.
• Broken Base:
  • Phasing out the show's political angle aside from a few occasions ^note Such as Season 9's "Honey, I'm Homeland". Was it a good decision to help further the series or did the show lose what made it special and turn it into a Family Guy clone?
  • Did "The Two Hundred" live up to its hype of being the milestone 200th episode or was it a boring letdown that shows that the series is running out of steam?
  • Is "No Weddings and a Funeral" the show's answer to Family Guy's "Seahorse Seashell Party" except done right, or is it just as terrible (if not moreso) because of how much of a carbon copy it is?
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • Principal Lewis. He gets into fistfights with dogs, his life was the basis for the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, and he was a drug trafficker years before he became a high school principal. A lot of episodes ("Iced, Iced Babies," "You Debt Your Life," and "Naked to the Limit, One More Time") infer that Principal Lewis is still a drug trafficker while serving as principal.
  • Roger can sometimes be this, like gunning down a gang like some kind of action hero after getting a faceful of cocaine.
  • Stan had moments of this originally, though his Badass Decay of later episodes diluted it, usually punctuated with others such as Roger and Francine outdoing him at the trope.
  • Bob Tod from "For Whom the Sleigh Bells Toll", a crazy mountain man who makes the strongest whiskey known to man and makes love to slain reindeer, but is more than capable of killing murderous elves and giant evil snowmen.
• Designated Villain:
  • Stan in multiple episodes. He borders a Villain Protagonist at times, but a lot of other cases those he opposes are enabled to act even worse. "Bullocks To Stan", "Stan Time" and "The Kidney Stays In The Picture" are perhaps the most ludicrous cases where he is "the bad guy" to his family's immoral actions, despite his approach, while still flawed, being at least somewhat justified. Even in some cases Stan is undisputedly being an immoral asshole, his adversary will be treated as the good guy by virtue of being a non-Stan Jerkass.
  • In cases such as "School Lies" and "Daddy Queerest", very little of what went wrong was actually down to Stan's actions; the events were down to circumstances that would have happened either way (Steve's school being fumigated in the former; Terry's dad being a homophobic Jerkass in the latter) or were actually planned by another character (in both cases, it was actually Francine who suggested the plan that set up the Disaster Dominoes ^note sending Steve to a private school and revealing Terry is gay to his father respectively). Stan is still blamed when it goes wrong, by her.
  • The early episodes especially pull a Bait-and-Switch with making Stan a villain. In "American Dream Factory," Stan initially opposes illegal immigration, but then starts an illegal factory exploiting workers, with Francine using them for housework. At the end, Hayley calls immigration services, the Mexicans sing a song about America and Stan learns... something. Except the episode actually illustrates a legitimate reason people oppose illegal immigration in the first place: without legal status, migrants will mostly end up in jobs where they will be exploited anyway. If anything, Stan was in the moral right until he switched views. The closest the episode gets to pointing this out is admitting Hayley is a hypocrite for calling immigration, but because she was rejected by one of the Mexican boys and being petty, not because the workers were being exploited.
  • Done against Hayley in "Jack's Back", where Roger is giving her internship credit by working at his makeshift bar. While Roger's tasks are ridiculous, Hayley blatantly has no intention of doing any work to earn her credit. She actually outdoes Roger of all people with dress up acts and gets her way again.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Stelio Kontos, Stan's old bully, has his unpunished bullying overlooked by fans who cheered him beating up Stan who was trying to bully Steve into toughening up and proclaimed him a Memetic Badass with an awesome theme-tune. Let's face it, though; he was the reason Stan engaged in that maliciously idiotic if well-intentioned stunt in the first place, as well as part of his somewhat unfortunate childhood. There may be times to cheer Stan getting taken a peg or two, but this wasn't one of them. Stan only seemed to be proven right in Season 8 when Steve was faced with his own bully, and the strategy of pitting him off against Stelio, albeit with the circumstances slightly different due to some unwanted help from Roger, totally backfires, with Steve getting an off-screen beating from both this time.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Stelio Kontos, Stan's childhood bully, has a massive fanbase due to being perceived as a badass with a memorable Leitmotif. His popularity eventually led to him making more appearances after his debut episode, though still strictly as a supporting character.
  • Avery Bullock and Principal Lewis are two of the most popular characters for similar reasons. They are both Ax-Crazy, Cloudcuckoolander authority figures who deliver some of the funniest lines in the show.
  • Many people love the Majestic due to its theme song.
  • Ricky Spanish is by far one of Roger's most beloved disguises, due to his deranged nature and horribly cruel actions (to the point of scaring Roger himself) being absolutely hilarious. The disguise's sheer popularity eventually caused it to return in "Persona Assistant" where Stan and Rogu get to wear it, and he appeared as a playable character in Animation Throwdown: the Quest for Cards.
  • Hayley's friends Danuta and Nerfer. The former especially after the episode "Shark?!" where she expressed romantic interest in Klaus (unfortunately, Klaus' poor social skills and desire to impress her screwed everything up) and subsequent episodes show that Klaus hasn't gotten over her. There are a decent number of fans who ship Klaus and Danuta, both ironically and uninronically, though most who unironically ship them will insist on Klaus finally receiving a new human body first.

G-P

• Genius Bonus: In "Red October Sky," one of the ways Stan's old Soviet enemy Sergei shows that he's embraced American culture is wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt. If you know that the Soviet Union (now Russia) had a very popular adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh, Vinni Pukh, you'll know this is the first hint that Sergei is lying.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show is very popular in France that the French channel NRJ 12 airs eight episodes each Sunday.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Midway through Season 1, after the "Stan of Arabia" two-parter. When it first started, a lot of people thought the show was okay (while some wrote it off as a Family Guy knock off — or a knock-off of a knock-off, if they were diehard Simpsons fans who thought shows like Family Guy were weakening The Simpsons), but starting with the "Stan of Arabia" two-parter, the show got better in both animation and humor. On a broader level, the show is generally agreed to have really found its footing after it stopped focusing on being a critique of American conservatives in the George W Bush years and started leaning more and more towards bizarre and often absurdist humor.
  • There are many fans who say that the show has actually improved in quality since the move to TBS through its complete embracing of the absurd, with episodes like "Rabbit Ears" and "Persona Assistant" regularly being listed as fan favorites.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The 2005 episode "Stan Knows Best" makes fun of how inexpensive community college is (Hayley's teacher refusing to grade her paper because she doesn't have the $85.00 for tuition [after Stan announces that he's not giving Hayley any more money for school], so Hayley takes a job as a strip club waitress — and later a stripper — to pay for college). In later years, community colleges (and the regular four-year colleges and universities) have faced major cutbacks, and tuition has skyrocketed. Tuition has nearly doubled in California in just four years.
  • Whitney Houston being paid in crack to sing to Francine. Not so funny after 2012, since drugs were considered a contributing factor in her death.
  • Remember the two-part episode "Stan of Arabia" when Steve goes bonkers after seeing Angelina Jolie's boobs? Not so funny now that Jolie got a preemptive double mastectomy after finding out that her mother's side of the family has a history of contracting breast cancer.
  • Bullock expressing the desire in "Roger Codger" to 'track down the bastards that have been harboring (Roger) and punish them brutally. I mean, really brutally. Weird stuff. Butt stuff.' This became much darker after the Feinstein report on torture revealed that 'rectal feeding' and similar methods were part of the CIA interrogation arsenal at the time the episode was aired.
  • Stan's line about how Terry's dad being an Armored Closet Gay, similar to Kevin Spacey...'s character in K-PAX. Since 2017, the K-Pax reference to Kevin Spacey being unable to deal with his homosexuality wouldn't be needed (and not just because that movie is all but forgotten).
  • One of the characters killed in the "100 A.D." bus crash was Beauregard LaFontaine. His voice actor, Leslie Jordan, died in a car crash in 2022.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In "Joint Custody", Hayley says that one day, she and Jeff might get married. This eventually happened during Season 6's opener, "100 A.D.".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Daddy Queerest," a drunken Stan mistakes Nelson Mandela for Morgan Freeman. It is somewhat funny due to Mandela's and Freeman's similarities in appearance, but it really becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when you realize that the episode came on seven months before the release of the movie Invictus, who — surprise! — had Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela.
  • In "Homeland Insecurity", the Iranian couple Stan is paranoid of are named Bob and Linda. Flash forward six years...
  • A minor plot point in Smooshed: A Love Story was Reese Witherspoon testing if she could still pass as a teenager in order to sell a sequel to Election to Warner Bros. Just a few months later, a sequel was announced, with Witherspoon reprising her role, although it's set to follow the character as a middle-aged woman rather than a teenager.
  • In 2019, someone made a version of the opening sequence in which Stan doesn't get out of bed. Four years later, there'd be a canon episode where the same thing happens.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Numerous gags throughout the series imply that Hayley is heavier than she looks.
• Incest Yay Shipping: Many adult-rated fanfics have paired Steve up with Hayley or Francine. It doesn't help that Steve has canonically expressed incestuous attraction to both. Hayley also gets paired with Stan. After all, she did date his body-double Bill and according to "The Kidney Stays in the Picture", Stan might not be Hayley's biological father.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Part of why some fans hated "Family Plan" was due to the episode abruptly throwing away its original plot of Francine reconnecting with her birth family the Dawsons for Nicholas (her birth father) ordering everyone in the family to fight each other to the death essentially turning the last act into a gorier rehash of "Familyland".
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Roger. He is so evil because his species releases a bile that kills them if they don't "let their evilness out". Made worse when it is revealed the reason he is trapped on Earth is that the others of his species wanted to get rid of him. In addition, there are moments where he really seems to care about his adoptive family. It is implied that Roger only acts that way because he was made to be evil, and not by choice, and if you stop to think about it, it's terrible being him.
  • Stan. His father abandoned him as a child, his mother made him grow up too soon and he was even unluckier than Steve was as a teenager with girls. Since then, no matter how hard he tries, he's at a dead end in his career, he can never make a long term connection with his kids (it's a mix between his general disinterest in the stuff they say and their having an incredibly low opinion of him most of the time), his only friend is a sociopathic alien and anytime he has a chance of making his own life better, he has to give it up for Francine or his kids.
  • Klaus. He fucks with the Smiths (namely Steve and Roger) at every turn mostly because It Amused Me, but he Was Once a Man who was put in a goldfish body just so Germany wouldn't win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics, and it's not like the Smiths treat him much better than he treats them.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Steve's been paired with a surprising number of characters. Along with all of his canon love interests (particularly Debbie and Akiko), he's also been paired with his best friends Snot and Roger, Jeff, the other Smith family members, and even characters from other Seth MacFarlane shows like Meg Griffin and Roberta Tubbs.
• Love to Hate: Roger is a petty, murderous sociopath, and yet he remains one of the most hilarious characters in the series.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • A popular gif to find online is Stan screaming "DIE, CALORIES, DIE!" from The American Dad After School Special.
  • "DAMN YOU, HASBRO!" is a much used clip among the Brony fandom.
  • An edit of the show's theme song with Stan sleeping throughout is used commonly as a reply to something that someone doesn't care about. This eventually evolved into other edits of the theme song, such as editing it to the tune of other Seth MacFarlane theme songs, or editing other characters to sing it.
  • Edits of the theme song created a joke speedrun community for it, with known "exploits" such as the floor skip and the newspaper skip to see who can get to the end of the song in the fastest time.
  • "Well, there you have it. That's our story. (Main Character) is dead. Good night!" is occasionally used in response to sudden main character deaths in other series.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Furries tend to have a very good sense of humor about the "furry convention" gag from "One Little Word"^note In which Bullock holds secret meetings with Stan in increasingly bizarre places, eventually winding up in a furry convention where one guy in a squirrel suit tries and fails to flirt with him. Immediately after, a guy in a car costume pantomimes hitting the squirrel, who proceeds to lie on the floor while the car costume guy gyrates over him and suggestively whispers "Vroom vroom.", as they recognize that it's meant to be exaggerated beyond any resemblance to actual furries and, if anything, make them look normal by comparison. A few fursuiters went so far as to recreate the scene at a con.
• Misblamed: While Stan is often accused of being just another Homer Simpson rip-off, since Seth MacFarlane's previous show (Family Guy) has been branded a Simpsons knock-off. In reality, Stan has very little in common with Homer other than being a father who occasionally does stupid things and contends with his daughter, who is a bleeding-heart liberal. If anything, Stan has more in common with Zapp Brannigan or Archie Bunker than he does Homer.
• Moe: Francine's cheerful, perky attitude and sugary-sweet voice make her come off as utterly adorable.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: "The Mural of the Story" is mostly remembered for its infamous Gorn scene, and to a lesser degree how the scene in question was first previewed seven months before the episode aired at SDCC 2017 in a room full of kids who reacted to the scene mostly through crying and horrified screams of terror.
• Paranoia Fuel: The Christmas Episode's exact continuity and canonicity be damned, "Dreaming of a White Porsche Christmas" has the idea that sometimes, who you think might be your real family could actually be fakes.

R-Z

• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • "The American Dad After School Special" displays a realistic portrayal of anorexia. When Stan becomes insecure about his weight, he skips meals for weeks until he is nothing but skin and bones, and even then, he still views himself as obese. Stan even goes so far as to invent an imaginary trainer in Zack, fueled purely by his insecurities and ego; many people have done similar things to tell themselves they're justified in the way they act.
  • "A.T. the Abusive Terrestrial" has Roger move in with a nine-year-old boy named Henry, who repeatedly beats and insults him, constantly makes fake apologies, uses Crocodile Tears, and even resorts to threatening the lives of him and his loved ones if he tries to escape or they try to help him. The subject of Domestic Abuse is played completely straight here even if it's only a child because people like Henry do exist in real life and use the same tactics on their victims.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Klaus was not liked much by fans during the early episodes, due to him having little characterization beyond being a jerkass pervert who fawned over Francine and treated everyone like garbage. Later seasons rectified this by dropping his crush on Francine and having him face consequences for his jerkassery by turning him into the show's Butt-Monkey, and when he does act like a jerk to the other Smiths, it usually in retaliation for something they did.
  • Hayley and Jeff due to the both of them being portrayed more sympathetically after Jeff was abducted as well as being the few still consistently likable characters in the main cast following the show's switch to TBS.
• The Scrappy:
  • Francine's parents. They often come over to the Smith household uninvited, and repay Stan by belittling him, using his property without permission, and enforcing their rules despite being under his roof, with all of this meant to be swept aside and forgiven just because Francine's biological parents are worse.
  • Fung Wah from "American Fung", for whom the plot repeatedly stopped just to obnoxiously gush over, leaving a Bizarro Episode in his wake.
  • Billy has a notorious hatedom due to his grotesque character and annoying voice as well as adding little to the episodes (of which he has received many since his debut) outside of cheap shock value.
• Seasonal Rot: The TBS seasons tend to get this a fair bit, with frequent complaints including the Comedic Sociopathy getting amped up too far from its already high levels (with the infamous "The Mural of the Story" getting the most flack), sloppier and overly wacky storytelling compared to the more focused and intricate plotlines of previous seasons, and a general sense that the show's Family Guy influence is creeping in more and more and affecting the show negatively. That said, the seasons do still have their fans and are home to some acclaimed, well-loved episodes like "Rabbit Ears", "Persona Assistant", "Gold Top Nuts", "The Unincludeds", and "The Two Hundred."
• So Okay, It's Average: While most people will agree that the show went through Seasonal Rot after the Channel Hop to TBS, it's also generally agreed that the show did not go downhill to anywhere near the extent that Family Guy did.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: In "Virtual In-Stanity", the music that plays when Roger begins his massacre is inspired by "Cross the Tracks (We Better Go Back)" by Maceo & the Macks.
• Theme Pairing: Meg Griffin from Family Guy, Roberta Tubbs from The Cleveland Show, and Hayley Smith are all the unappreciated daughters on Seth MacFarlane shows.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Debbie Hyman, for she was the first girlfriend Steve had for more than one episode. Unfortunately, she was never really given much development beyond that; most of her appearances ended with her and Steve breaking up and she was often used as a target for cheap jokes regarding her weight or monstrous appetite.
  • Akiko Yoshida, yet another romantic interest for Steve who appeared more than once. Like Debbie, she never received any significant development beyond being Toshi's translator (initially) and a girl that Steve happened to have a crush on. She finally gets more development in "Spelling Bee My Baby", which sees the two officially becoming a couple, only for her to abruptly disappear in the following episodes, leading Steve to become single once more.
  • Linda Memari, who was written to be Francine's friend. Additionally, she has a secret crush on Francine (although her husband Bob is aware of it), leading to an Unresolved Sexual Tension. This was never brought up again, since she's pushed to the background through the rest of the series. And in one episode, Roger claims that she died.
• Ugly Cute: Despite being Roger's tumor spawn, Rogu is surprisingly cute.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Episodes from the first two seasons before the show shifted from politics to outlandish plots are very clearly a product of both the mid-to-late 2000s and the Bush administration, with the constant bashing on Bush, his administration's policies and events that occurred during the time like the War on Terror. Beside that, the earlier episodes also had contemporary references like jokes about the NBC sitcom Scrubs not being funny (as seen on "Helping Handis").
  • "Kung Pao Turkey" has Stan spending most of the episode going through Native American allegories while wandering the city in a Washington Redskins outfit before settling down for Thanksgiving dinner with a group of Dallas Cowboys fans. After years of controversy, the organization would drop the "Redskins" nickname in 2020.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Stan's status as the show's Designated Villain leads to a "Stan acts like a jerk and must learn a lesson" formula. However, most of Stan's flaws have been given very understandable Freudian Excuses, something that in a lot of cases those he opposes don’t have.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Smiths in "Family Affair". The episode treats Roger hanging out with different families as if it's cheating but instead it makes the Smiths come off as possessive and clingy because Roger has other friends.
• The Woobie:
  • Sidney Huffman, one of Roger's personas that took a life of its own because Roger couldn't deal with the emotion of guilt. Due to this, his and Roger's credit cards are identical, so when Roger found out someone else was using his credit card, he destroys his life, not knowing they are one and the same. Once he finds out, he and Sidney embrace in order to become one again. Except Roger quickly stabs him in the back, saying Sidney's Nice Guy attitude is 'cramping his style'.
  • Hayley has become this as time has gone on with her becoming something of the Butt-Monkey. It really wasn't helped by the events of "Naked to The Limit, One More Time" where Hayley basically lost the love of her life because of Roger's actions. Most of the time after that episode, she was seen mourning Jeff or trying to move on from him. Just as she was preparing to move from Jeff after he told her to, Roger again screws this up by killing her new love interest who would have most likely made her life better.
  • Jeff was a lazy stoner in the beginning of the show, but has become more of the woobie after he married Hayley. He is separated from Hayley and almost never gets to see her again. And just when he is reunited with her, everything goes wrong and he decides to let her get with her other love interest so he leaves and tells her to move on. All of these bad events that happen to him are Roger's fault.
  • Klaus Heisler used to be an Olympic skier whose life was going great. Then, on the night he planned to propose to his girlfriend Elsa, he caught her cheating on him with the entire East German bobsled team. Some time later, in 1986, the CIA switched his brain with the brain of a goldfish to prevent him from winning the gold medal for East Germany. Now, as a fish, he's confined to a small bowl nearly 24 hours a day, gets little respect from anyone in the Smith household, and is often depicted as lonely and depressed. Hayley possibly sums up his woobie status with this quote from the episode "Man in the Moonbounce":
    Klaus: You know what I miss most about being human?
    Hayley: ... mattering?

YMMV tropes with their own pages:

• Crosses the Line Twice
• Bizarro Episode
• Squick
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot

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