After 27 Years, Family Guy's Unaired Pilot Episode Is No Longer Lost

When Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" premiered on January 31, 1999 after Super Bowl XXXIII (the one where John Elway's Denver Broncos walloped the, yikes, Chris Chandler-led Atlanta Falcons), it got an artificial ratings bump right out of the gate that was going to be difficult for the animated series to maintain. Indeed, after finishing its first season at 33rd in the Nielsen ratings (with only seven episodes), the show's viewership evaporated during its second season and fell off even more during its third season. Almost no one was watching, so Fox pulled the plug on the series in 2002. Three years later, thanks to a surge in popularity driven by Adult Swim syndication, Fox gave "Family Guy" another shot, and it appears that it is never, ever going away. This may or may not delight you.

In any event, we have gone 26 years with "Family Guy" in our lives, and while the state of the world has been in drastic decline over this period, you can't lay the blame for all of our miseries at the feet of MacFarlane's unabashedly crass and violent animated series. Sure, it's become a repository for witlessly tasteless and, worse, repetitive gags (as opposed to the far superior "The Simpsons," which is just gamely treading water), but it still, for the most part, aims at the right cultural and political targets.

After 23 seasons of "Family Guy," it's interesting to look all the way back to the start of the show to see how much it's changed. For die-hard fans of the series, it's never been enough to rewatch the pilot. Their holy grail has always been the 16-minute, roughly animated pitch that MacFarlane used to earn a greenlight from Fox. Seven minutes of this demo episode were included on the show's "Volume 2" DVD sets, but the whole shebang went unseen until recently. You can now watch the whole mini-pilot on YouTube. How does it differ from the aired 1999 pilot, and why was it under wraps for so long?

Last week, the Lost Media Wiki discovered MacFarlane's 16-minute pilot on the website of animator Robert Paulson (insert "Fight Club" jokes here). If you're wondering how it could go unfound for so long, that's because Paulson didn't upload it until 2022. As for how it differs from the official pilot, "Death Has a Shadow," the narrative is the same. It's just shorter and not quite as funny.

The episode still revolves around a hungover Peter getting fired from his quality-control gig at the toy factory for falling asleep on the job, which results in a spate of wildly dangerous toys getting shipped to stores. As in "Death Has a Shadow," he is briefly the illicit beneficiary of a welfare check processing error, which entitles him to a weekly payment of $150,000. The show's early formula is there: the kids aren't as sharply drawn, but you've got Stewie repeatedly trying to kill Lois. The biggest absence is easily the Kool-Aid Man crashing through the wall of the courthouse where Peter is being sentenced to two years in prison for gleefully misappropriating welfare funds. Basically, the punch-ups are missing.

This 16-minute episode only cost $50,000, and, well, it looks it. But if you're a big-time "Family Guy" fan, it's a must-watch. It's also a reminder that the show used to be pretty damn funny before it went overboard on a never-ending string of gory gags (and jokes stolen from "The Simpsons" and "South Park").