10 Family Guy Characters Killed Off For Good

Not everyone in Quahog has Chicken Fight-level resilience.

Family Guy Show Ghosts
20th Television

In animated cartoons, you rarely ever expect a character's death to be permanent - especially when it's a cartoon that subjects its populace to all sorts of gratuitous violence on the regular.

Family Guy is famously over-the-top, both in its risqué subject matter and its beyond-slapstick graphicness. With its bitty, cutaway-laden formula, many of the show's characters bite the dust fairly frequently, only for the scene to either have been a hypothetical imagined scenario, or glossed over as an example of typical cartoon logic.

Every now and then, however, certain characters who go the way of the dodo never come back, which, no matter the circumstances, is usually a huge surprise. You'd expect them to be really minor characters, too, but, even more surprisingly, that's not always the case.

While each new series of Family Guy brings more and more colourful residents to the town of Quahog, there's no longer a guarantee that they won't meet their grisly end one day in a future episode. Needless to say, many of the characters we've lost over the show's 21 years are ones that will be sorely, sorely missed.

10. Paddy Tanniger

Family Guy Show Ghosts
20th Television

The early seasons of Family Guy, while a bit sparser on the throwaway bit characters than more modern episodes, did still have the occasional unmemorable oddball running around on screen. One of these was Paddy Tanniger, a disgruntled Irish character who seemed to rub everyone the wrong way - including the writers.

An irritating pipsqueak who spits when he talks and follows up nearly everything he says with, "big whoop, wanna fight about it?", Paddy makes appearances in a handful of episodes, each time working in a different place.

The character was reportedly very unpopular among the show's writers, who chose to kill him off in the season five episode, 'Hell Comes To Quahog'. And not just in any old way, either, as Brian and Stewie, while on a crusade to blow up a monopolising Quahog supermarket, end up running him over with a tank.

For good measure, they even back over him a second time, just to be sure. You can really tell how much the writers wanted this guy gone.

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Graduate composer, on-and-off session musician, aspiring novelist, professional nerd. Where procrastination and cynicism intertwine, Lee Clarke can be found.