Family Guy is heading back to Adult Swim, over three years after it stopped airing on the network and 20 years after the Warner Bros. Discovery helped revive it.
The cable network has struck a non-exclusive licensing deal for the rights to old episodes of Seth Macfarlane’s Fox animated series and will launch it in the new year.
This comes after Comedy Central struck a similar deal earlier this year and launched it in a primetime block. The series also airs library episodes on FX and FXX and Hulu is the exclusive streaming home for the series.
Adult Swim is part of the reason that Family Guy still exists; the show was canceled by Fox after its second season. Cartoon Network subsequently acquired the library rights to the show, reportedly for a very low fee, and aired it on its Adult Swim strand, where alongside DVD sales, it started to attract a cult following and was then revived by Fox, where it still airs, and will return midseason.
Adult Swim stopped airing reruns in September 2021 after its license expired and Disney had acquired Fox assets including Family Guy producer 20th Television.
It will now return to airing reruns, starting with a three-day marathon of episodes every evening from 7pm to 5am ET/PT beginning Wednesday, January 1. It will then air in the network’s primetime weekday lineup between 10pm and 11:30pm.
“Adult Swim is a huge part of Family Guy’s early history, and we’re excited for the series to return to our lineup in 2025,” said Michael Ouweleen, President of Adult Swim. “Having Family Guy back on our air is a great complement to the amazing slate of animated originals we also have planned for next year.”
Family Guy is produced by Disney’s 20th Television Animation. MacFarlane is creator and exec producer, Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin serve as executive producers and showrunners, while Steve Callaghan, Tom Devanney, Danny Smith, Kara Vallow, Mark Hentemann, Patrick Meighan and Alex Carter also exec produce.
From Deadline.com
