10 Family Guy Characters Killed Off For Good

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.

After Brian breaks up with his long-term girlfriend, Jillian, she quickly finds another partner in Derek Wilcox, a mild-mannered man who seems outwardly to be superior to Brian in every way - which makes it all the more difficult for Brian to try and win her back.

Described as the "best man ever", Derek is smart, funny, has his life together, and, by Brian's exclamation of "OH COME ON!" in the urinals, is even implied to be pretty well hung...

To no-one's surprise, Jillian won't take Brian back, and the next we see of the couple is in the feature-length season nine game-changer, 'And Then There Were Fewer'. As two of many people invited to a dinner party at a remote mansion, Derek and Jillian are suddenly embroiled in a huge murder mystery when several of the guests end up dead.

When Derek runs up to the balcony in the hopes of picking up more signal on his phone, the murderer creeps up after him, to which he hilariously cries, "Oh my god, it's you! The man or woman who's been killing everyone!"

Inevitably, these end up being the man's last words, as Derek is smacked over the head with actor James Woods' Golden Globe award and thrown from the balcony to his death.

Horace, the original owner of the Quahog gang's favourite haunt, The Drunken Clam, is one of those characters you never really paid attention to where he was there, but oddly felt the absence of once he was gone.

As the bar's grouchy and impatient bartender, Horace doesn't seem to care much about anything, and despite seeming to have a pretty miserable life that you only hear tiny snippets of, the man-of-few-words' jaded and world-weary attitude makes him little more than a background character in the Family Guy canon.

In the episode, 'Save the Clam', the Clam's patrons, along with Horace, take part in a fundraising softball game against Goldman's Pharmacy, and when Mort Goldman's stand-in ringer, Jerome, takes his turn, the ball ends up hitting Horace so hard that it kills him on the spot.

After Glenn Quagmire makes quite a scene at his funeral, Horace is then immortalised by the incredibly guilty Jerome, who assumes ownership of The Drunken Clam and proceeds to run it just like his predecessor did.

The Goldmans are a family of three in the town of Quahog. The son, Neil, is the first to make an appearance, and through his romantic interest in Meg Griffin and on-and-off friendship with Chris, Peter and Lois are introduced to the boy's parents - Mort and Muriel - who are both basically identical to him.

Muriel's not as much of a rich character as her husband and son, but has been known to join Lois and Bonnie Swanson for drinks while the guys are out.

Like Derek Wilcox, her demise comes in 'And Then There Were Fewer', when she stumbles upon the murderer, Diane Simmons, attempting to cover her tracks, and is silenced to make sure she doesn't rat her out.

Distraught, Mort, having discovered the body, drops to his knees and gives a hilariously 'heartfelt' send-off: "Oh my god, Muriel, my sweet Muriel! She was so you- ....she was so beauti- ...she was so gener- ...we were married!"

Before Peter found his calling in the Pawtucket Patriot brewery, his original job in the series was in the Happy-Go-Lucky toy factory, owned by the eccentric and effeminate Spaniard, Mr. Weed.

Like most of the series' characters, Mr. Weed sees Peter as nothing more than an incompetent buffoon - which is usually justified given the excitable man's destructive antics. He's even been known to fire him, but seemingly learns to tolerate Peter's behaviour after a while.

On one of the rare occasions that Peter manages to impress Mr. Weed, the flamboyant man is invited to have dinner at the Griffin household. He is intent on promoting Peter to a higher paid position, but just as he begins to do so, Brian chokes on a dinner roll, which is then heimlich'ed out of his mouth and into Mr. Weed's.

The latter isn't so lucky, and chokes to death in a matter of seconds. Shortly after, the Happy-Go-Lucky toy factory is purchased by the Pawtucket Brewery, and Peter has worked there ever since.

You might look at this father-and-son pair and think that the apple has fallen very far from the tree. As it turns out, Francis Griffin is Peter's stepfather - something that only comes to light after the man passes away.

A devout and overzealous Catholic, the Irish-born Francis is disapproving of almost everything Peter does. He's especially cruel to Lois, whom he calls a "Protestant whore" and constantly badgers to get Stewie baptised. The whole family dreads his visits, as his inability to keep his opinions to himself usually gives them a lot of unnecessary grief.

When Meg turns 17, Francis attends her birthday party at the Griffins' house, and Peter, misreading the room completely and showing up dressed as a clown, somehow ends up crushing his father to death by riding a unicycle down the stairs.

Nobody seems particularly torn up about Francis's passing; in fact, Lois and Brian even excuse themselves to cheer and jump for joy outside.

Quahog's Channel 5 News has been anchored by Tom Tucker ever since Family Guy's inception. Though he's had a number of co-anchors over the course of the series, his first and longest-serving was Diane Simmons, a woman he very clearly dislikes (and the feeling is more than mutual).

In the early seasons, Diane Simmons was rarely seen outside of the news booth, serving as a foil for the eccentric and antagonistic Tucker. Her later appearances gave her a role of her own, most notably when she played the lead role of Anna in Brian's production of The King and I.

However, it's the episode, 'And Then There Were Fewer', that really puts the cynical newsreader in the spotlight - and shows off her true colours while it's at it. After turning 40, being dumped by James Woods and set to be replaced by a younger co-anchor all around the same time, Diane cracks, luring Woods, Tucker and all the others to one place so she can murder them all.

Lois eventually discovers the truth, but just as Diane is about to shoot her, she herself is shot by an unknown sniper in the distance (revealed at the end to be Stewie), plummeting to her death in the waters below.

Stewie Griffin has never been faced with a more worthy opponent than Bertram, his paternal half-brother who had previously formed an alliance with Stewie in Lois's womb.

The character, voiced hilariously by Wallace Shawn, is Stewie's equal in almost every way: intelligence, psychopathy, and technical proficiency. When he is finally born, Bertram wages war on Stewie over ownership of a Quahog playground. After this, their rivalry grows fierce, and looks set to be quite the recurring thing in later series.

Weirdly, though, that's not the case. Bertram's final appearance is in the season nine episode, 'The Big Bang Theory', as he travels back in time to kill Leonardo da Vinci, Stewie's ancestor, and thereby stop Stewie from ever having been born.

He succeeds in doing away with da Vinci, but Stewie is able to prevent his erasure by taking the painter and inventor's place in Renaissance Italy. And to do this, he shoots Bertram in the head with a crossbow, killing him instantly.

Ever since the closing of the Happy-Go-Lucky toy factory, Peter has worked at the Pawtucket Patriot brewery (in the same building, conveniently), where he is supervised by a joyless and short-tempered woman named Angela.

Like most characters, Angela has no time for Peter's shenanigans, and here she has the added difficulty of having to get him to do some actual work done. She constantly denies him promotions and makes no bones about favouring Opie, to whom Peter is subordinate.

Despite this, Angela has shown to hold a certain fondness for Peter on occasion, which eventually turns outright sexual. And while Peter is married and has no interest in the woman, it turns out that he can't even fob her off on the sex-crazed Quagmire, as she's too ugly even for him!

Her death in the series was an unfortunate by-product of the real-life death of her voice actress, Carrie Fisher, in 2016. Rather than simply write her out of the show, the writers of Family Guy decided to kill Angela for real off-screen, her role in the series taken over thereafter by the saccharine young couple, Bert and Sheila.

A death of a long-running Family Guy character is never more permanent than when the voice behind them leaves the real world. And in the case of Adam West, a fictionalised version of the classic 1960s Batman TV star, there was absolutely no justifiable way to let this character survive after the death of his legendary voice actor.

Introduced in season two, Adam West is the mayor of Quahog, a position he holds onto right up until his untimely off-screen death. Wacky and eccentric to the extreme, almost everything he comes out with is pure gold, and his regular bouts of absurdity often create quite a bit of inconvenience for his townspeople.

He even goes on to marry Lois's sister, Carol, making him an extended member of the Griffin family - something that gives that much more weight to his departure from the show.

From seasons two all the way to 16, we bust our gusts laughing at this incorrigible mayor's outrageous remarks, mad misadventures and total abuse of his mayoral powers. In 'No Giggity, No Doubt', he, along with Angela and Muriel Goldman, appears one last time as a "show ghost", forever immortalising him as a key figure in the Family Guy pantheon that was taken from us way too soon.