Lois Patrice Griffin (née Pewterschmidt) is a fictional character from the American animated television series Family Guy.

Writer Seth MacFarlane created and designed Lois after his 1995 student film, The Life of Larry, was picked up by 20th Century Fox for a series order.

It is revealed in the episode "Family Goy" that her mother is actually a Jewish American Holocaust survivor who concealed her Judaism,[1][2] though Lois was raised a Protestant.

While still in college, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane created a cartoon short called The Life of Larry.

[8] The short centered around a middle-aged man named Larry and his anthropomorphic dog Steve; other characters are his patient wife Lois and his overweight teenage son Milt.

[10] In 1999, MacFarlane was working for Hanna-Barbera Studios, writing for shows such as Johnny Bravo, Dexter's Laboratory, and Cow and Chicken.

[11] The short caught the eye of 20th Century Fox representatives, who asked him to create a TV series revolving around the characters.

[12] Several premises were also carried over from several 1980s Saturday morning cartoons he watched as a child, namely The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, and Rubik, the Amazing Cube.

[16] The network executives were impressed with the pilot and ordered thirteen episodes, giving MacFarlane a $2 million per-season contract.

[19][20] 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 from Long Island, New York.

She is commonly the voice of reason to Peter's tomfoolery and shenanigans, but in some episodes she can act darker than normal and sometimes shows a taste for sadomasochism.

However, in "Sibling Rivalry", just the opposite happens where Lois gains a ton of weight after Peter has a vasectomy and loses his sex drive.

In an interview, Borstein stated that Lois became "a little more snarky and sassy and sexual" since the first season, to challenge "those sitcom rules that a woman is supposed to be a total wet blanket and not like sex and is no fun".

Lois Griffin ranked number 12 spot on "IGN's Top 25 Family Guy Characters".

She along with the family appeared in The Simpsons episode, "Homerland" and the short film May the 12th Be with You along with his sons Meg, Chris, and Stewie.

[36] These include Family Guy: It Takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One (ISBN 978-0-7528-7593-4), which covers the entire events of the episode "It Takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One",[37] and Family Guy and Philosophy: A Cure for the Petarded (ISBN 978-1-4051-6316-3), a collection of seventeen essays exploring the connections between the series and historical philosophers which include Lois as a character.