He is voiced by the series' creator, Seth MacFarlane, and first appeared on television, along with the rest of the Griffin family, in the episode "Death Has a Shadow" on January 31, 1999.

He has appeared in several pieces of Family Guy merchandise—including toys, T-shirts, and video games—and he has made crossover appearances in other shows, including The Simpsons, Drawn Together and South Park, in addition to fellow MacFarlane-associated series American Dad!, Bordertown and Family Guy spin-off The Cleveland Show.

Peter Griffin is a middle-class Irish American in his mid‑forties, who is a bespectacled, obese blue-collar worker with a prominent Rhode Island and Eastern Massachusetts accent.

[5][6][7] Peter primarily worked as a safety inspector at the Happy-Go-Lucky Toy Factory until his boss, Jonathan Weed, choked to death on a dinner roll while dining with Peter and Lois; he then became a fisherman on his own boat, which was known as the "S.S. More Powerful than Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and The Incredible Hulk Put Together", with the help of two Portuguese immigrants, Santos and Pasqual, until his boat was destroyed.

In several cutaway gags Peter is shown to have previously held many jobs which require higher education, despite the blue-collar nature of most of his previous jobs: for instance working as a United Nations interpreter, a sonologist, an opera singer (with a band composed of four identical-looking men who call themselves "The Four Peters"), a bomb defuser, etc.

[12] These battles parody the action film genre, with explosions, high-speed chases, and immense devastation to the town of Quahog.

[13] MacFarlane initially conceived Family Guy in 1995 while studying animation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

[14] During college, he created his thesis film entitled The Life of Larry,[14] which was submitted by his professor at RISD to Hanna-Barbera.

[14] Executives at Fox saw the Larry shorts and contracted MacFarlane to create a series, entitled Family Guy, based on the characters.

[18] While working on the series, the characters of Larry and his dog Steve slowly evolved into Peter and Brian.

[21] He noted in an interview that he voices Peter and the rest of the characters partly because they initially had a small budget, but also that he prefers to have the freedom to do it himself.

[28] In "Road to the Multiverse" (season 8, 2009), he was voiced by actor Jamison Yang, who was required for a scene where everything in the world was Japanese.

[30] Peter Griffin is a stereotypical blue-collar worker[31] who frequently goes to a local bar with his neighbors and friends Cleveland Brown, Joe Swanson and Glenn Quagmire named "The Drunken Clam," Quahog's main tavern.

[32] In the season 4 episode "Petarded", Peter discovered his low intellect falls slightly below the level for intellectual disability[33] after taking an I.Q.

Peter is known for his brash impulsiveness, which has led to several awkward situations,[34] such as attempting to molest Meg in order to adopt a redneck lifestyle.

Brian, who learns of Joe and Quagmire's plans, goes to talk to Peter to warn him, only for them to quickly bond and become great friends with each other.

Beyond Brian and his main trio of Joe, Quagmire, and Cleveland, Peter is shown to be good friends with a few other characters in the show.

"Head of the Griffin family is Irish-American Catholic Peter, an obese and bespectacled man who is just a big child – and has other roots beside his Irish ones, including African-American, Spanish, Scottish and German."

Before Peter was born, his mother Thelma went to Mexico City to have an abortion[45] but gave birth during the procedure, and smuggled him home to Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent his childhood.

MacFarlane said: "When I was growing up, my father had lots of friends: big, vocal, opinionated New England, Irish Catholics.

They were all bursting at the seams with personality, and Family Guy came out of a lot of those archetypes that I spent years observing.

Peter practically invented the "manatee joke," those signature cutaway gags that usually have nothing to do with the episode's plot but offer plenty of laughs anyway.

[50] MacFarlane has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in the Outstanding Voice-Over Performance category several times for voicing Peter and other characters; he won in 2016.

Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Peter is Homer Simpson "as conceived by a singularly sophomoric mind that lacks any reference point beyond other TV shows".

[64] In the Futurama direct to video film "Bender's Big Score", Philip J. Fry is seen nailing a "Family Guy 12 laughs a year" calendar which has Peter and Stewie on the cover.

During the stand-off, Stan accidentally shoots his wife Francine, which Peter declares as "classic American Dad!".

[75] This 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",[76] and Family Guy and Philosophy: A Cure for the Petarded (ISBN 978-1-4051-6316-3), a collection of 17 essays exploring the connections between the series and historical philosophers.

[79][80] Chief marketing officer Tony Pace commented "Peter's a good representation of the people who are interested in the Feast, and Family Guy is a show "that appeals to that target audience.