There aren’t many television shows that can convincingly send their characters to Hell after more than two decades on the air and still make it feel like business as usual. But for Family Guy, that’s just another day in Quahog. After years of pushing its characters into increasingly bizarre situations, the long-running animated comedy is preparing to take Brian and Stewie (both voiced by Seth McFarlane) somewhere they’ve arguably deserved to visit for a very long time.
Holiday specials have become one of the series’ newest traditions, giving Family Guy the chance to tell stories that go even further than its weekly adventures on Fox. The Hulu-exclusive events have embraced everything fans love about the show, from outrageous premises to celebrity guest stars willing to poke fun at themselves. It looks like this year’s specials will continue that trend in a big way.
During the Family Guy panel at San Diego Comic-Con, executive producer and showrunner Rich Appel confirmed that the series’ Halloween and Holiday specials will return exclusively to Hulu later this year. The panel also unveiled a first look at the Devil, voiced by Academy Award-winner Kieran Culkin.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Brian and Stewie Are Finally Going to Hell
The Devil, Brian, and Stewie in “Happy Hell-o-ween.”Image via Hulu
The Halloween special, titled “Happy Hell-o-ween,” finds Brian and Stewie paying the price for “24 seasons’ worth of bad behavior” after winding up in the actual underworld. Unfortunately for Hell’s ruler, the pair prove to be just as irritating below as they are on Earth. After managing to annoy the Devil himself, Brian and Stewie somehow end up running Hell, setting the stage for what sounds like one of the show’s most outrageous Halloween stories yet. Culkin will voice the Devil in the special, marking his first appearance on Family Guy. The casting comes after the actor’s acclaimed run on Succession and his recent Academy Award win, giving the Halloween episode an appropriately high-profile guest star following last year’s guest, Glen Powell. Culkin is also set to join the Hunger Games universe later this year as a young Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
The holiday fun won’t end with Halloween. This year’s Christmas special, “The Peter Clause,” follows Peter Griffin (McFarlane) as he competes with the guys to become Quahog’s official Santa Claus. When Peter inevitably loses, he responds in the only way Peter knows how, abandoning any chance at handling the situation like a mature adult in favor of creating another unforgettable holiday disaster. Both specials will stream exclusively on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in most international markets. Meanwhile, Family Guy Season 25 is scheduled to return to Fox in 2027 before becoming available to stream on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for subscribers in the United States.
Stay tuned with Collider for more news from San Diego Comic-Con throughout the weekend.
Release Date
January 31, 1999
Network
FOX
Seth MacFarlane
Peter Griffin / Brian Griffin / Stewie Griffin / Glenn Quagmire / Tom Tucker (voice)
Alex Borstein
Lois Griffin / Tricia Takanawa / Loretta Brown / Barbara Pewterschmidt (voice)
