The Griffins are a dysfunctional family consisting of the married couple Peter and Lois, their three children Meg, Chris, and Stewie, and their anthropomorphic dog Brian.

Other recurring family members include Lois's two siblings, Carol and Patrick, as well as Brian's cousin Jasper.

[4] Family Guy returned to production in 2004, making four more seasons (for a total of seven) and a straight-to-DVD special, Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story.

[8] In addition MacFarlane provides the voice of various recurring and one-time characters, most prominently those of the Griffin's neighbor Glenn Quagmire, news anchor Tom Tucker and Lois' father Carter Pewterschmidt.

[15] At the time, she was doing a stage show in Los Angeles, in which she played a redhead mother, whose voice she had based on one of her cousins.

[13][16] Green admittedly did an impression of the Buffalo Bill character from the thriller film The Silence of the Lambs during his audition.

[17] His main inspiration for Chris' voice was how "Buffalo Bill" would sound if he worked at a drive-thru in a McDonald's (speaking through a PA system).

"[22] The show revolves around the adventures and activities of the family of Peter Griffin, a bumbling, but well-intentioned, blue-collar worker.

Peter is an Irish-American Catholic born in Mexico with a prominent Rhode Island and Eastern Massachusetts accent.

[23] His wife Lois is a stay-at-home mother and piano teacher, and has a distinct New England accent from being a member of the Pewterschmidt family of wealthy socialites.

[24] Peter and Lois have three children: Meg, their teenage daughter, who is frequently the butt of Peter's jokes due to her "homeliness" and lack of popularity; Chris, their teenage son, who in many respects, appears as a younger version of his father; and Stewie, their diabolical infant son of ambiguous sexual orientation who has adult mannerisms and speaks fluently with an upper-class affected English accent and stereotypical archvillain phrases.

"[30] In the season four episode "Petarded", Peter takes an IQ test, and discovers that his low intellect places him in a category slightly below mentally retarded, but higher than a creationist.

Various episodes have hinted that Lois is an avid drug user, but this is shown most clearly in "Deep Throats", where she revealed that she smoked marijuana when she was pregnant with Stewie, a claim backed-up by series creator Seth MacFarlane on a DVD commentary.

Her numerous insecurities cause her to desperately try to be part of the "in-crowd", but this only results in her getting rebuffed by Connie D'Amico,[35] the bullying head cheerleader of her school.

Despite all this, Meg has proven in various episodes throughout the show that she is surprisingly more talented, most notably in terms of music and even sports, than her family usually bothers to realize.

Physically, he is a younger version of Peter, but intellectually, he often shows better potential, as shown from moments of articulation and coherence within his speech, and makes good points when especially talking about films, TV series, actors and actresses, etc.

Similar to Meg, Chris deals with the problems that most teenage boys face: acne, girls, and school.

On the volume 1 DVD box set, it stated that Chris "would not hurt a fly, unless it landed on his hot dog".

He, at one point, believed that he got a bad grade on a mathematics test when he tickled his brain by sticking an army man's rifle into his nose and accidentally puncturing a lobe.

Though he was originally an antagonistic child-genius sociopath, hell-bent on killing his mother and taking over the world, in more recent episodes he is a much more friendly yet flamboyant (and possibly homosexual) character, though nonetheless still rambunctious and disrespecting towards his elders and peers.