What To Know
- American Dad! returned Sunday night to Fox for the first time in over a decade.
- Here, showrunner Brian Boyle breaks down the premiere, what it means to be back on the Animation Domination circuit, and what’s ahead.
Oh boy it’s swell to say … that American Dad! is back on broadcast.
Yes, the Animation Domination block original rejoined Fox’s Sunday night lineup this weekend, kicking off Season 22 on the network for the first time in over a decade.
The premiere episode, titled “Aw Rats, a Pool Party,” reunites Francine and her sister under inauspicious circumstances; just as the family is set to throw a pool party, with Stan’s boss and coworkers in tow, a dead rat is found in the water, leading Francine to take extreme measures to keep people out of the pool.
What results is a silly — and somewhat chaotic — little escapade, but the fan service of reintroducing long-lost characters was part of what made it just right for this moment of grand reintroduction, according to showrunner Brian Boyle.
“It pulled in a lot of stuff that we haven’t seen for a long time. We haven’t seen Gwen, Francine’s sister. We haven’t seen Debbie, Steve’s girlfriend from Season 2… It’s like we’re coming back with a host of characters that you have to kind of be an expert at the show to remember. So I don’t know if it’s too challenging; hopefully, the jokes will still be gettable.”
Almost no adult animation fan will miss the other reason it works: The Simpsons references, like the Ned Flanders impression by Roger and Rogu’s version of Bart’s “Have a cow, man” phrase, which could only happen with a shared parent network.
“Since Matt [Weitzman, writer] was one of the creators — he wrote the first episode — he felt the sting the most of having been taken off Fox and then the redemption of coming back. So, he’s super happy to be involved with Fox again and reach a way bigger audience and grow this show,” Boyle said. “He took the opportunity to do all these little elbow-elbow-nudge-nudges to the audience to talk about being back on Fox.”
American Dad! spent over 10 years and a dozen seasons over at TBS but was yoinked back into the Fox fold with a three-season renewal deal last year, and Boyle thinks that could summon back some of the original viewers … and their viewing patterns.
20th Television
“The people who used to watch on Fox — millennials, basically — were in high school when it was on Fox, and now it’s back, and they’re grown up, and they may even have kids,” Boyle said. “When I talk to people about the show, most of them watch the show on their phone, and they might not watch a whole episode… TBS had a really great web page that was ‘Roger the Alien’ [hosted] on Instagram, and I was like, ‘Is this how people are getting the show now, in 20-second memes, or even shorter?” Coming back to Fox, it’s basically a whole audience that, I don’t know the demographics of how people watch the show, but in my mind, Fox is a place where you tune in at a certain time and watch, which is kind of cool. It’s retro in a way. It’s like appointment television is what we used to say when I worked on Friends. It’s like, ‘Oh, gather around the box and watch Ross and Rachel.’ So I think it’s good to be back on Fox….”
Going forward, Season 22 will continue to usher in similarly nostalgia-inducing character returns — including Francine’s parents.
“We do a really fun episode with Mama and Baba,” Boyle teased. “Baba and Francine used to bond by going treasure hunting, but she just thought he was taking her to gamble — he would go to these gambling parlors. I think this came out of a story about San Francisco having some cave-ins because of all these Chinese underground gambling places, and they’re having cave-ins in the city. And so one of our writers, Nick Wegener, he put together a story where, basically, you think that it’s just an excuse to go gamble, but it turns out there is a treasure map. And they do go in kind of a Goonies or Indiana Jones-style adventure. It brings back Francine’s family, and Steve comes along, because it’s three-generational, and it’s really fun.”
Francine will also be at the center of another travel adventure this season as she becomes convinced John Mayer is talking to her in his music since his songs say “you” so often. “First, Francine falls out of a helicopter and gets a brain injury, and Stan feels guilty because it was 100% his fault, and so they start going to therapy, and it comes out that Francine thinks that John Mayer is trying to contact her and to make himself feel better. Stan accepts her version of reality and goes with her to Vegas to try to meet John Mayer,” Boyle teased. “That’s a super funny one that was written by one writer, Nicole Shabtai, who always has some great episodes.”
In other words, buckle up for more hilarity as the sun in the sky (read: Fox) shines on the face of this series once again.
American Dad, Sundays, 9/8c, Fox
– Reporting by Erin Maxwell
