7. The Turlington Detectives
You will no doubt have started to notice that the character pictures on each page get grainier as we venture further into the unknown realms of the AD cast. You may sleep easy in the knowledge that the Turlington Detectives are about as grainy as we are going to get, having appeared only thrice in the history of the show. The first Turlington appears in 'Meter Made' - and unfortunately for me, is given no first name, so I will refer to him simply as Turlington I/A/1/Alpha. Working in Parking Internal Affairs (which I hugely doubt is a real department) the wonderfully contradictory nature of Turlington I/A/1/Alpha leads him to reassure Stan that he's not a suspect in the missing quarters case, only to end the conversation by saying "Oh and Smith - I'm on to you ..." Our second Turlington is named Ron, and appears in 'Chimdale'. He's more or less an exact replica of Turlington I/A/1/Alpha, and so it'll just be easier to refer to him as Turlington II/B/2/Beta (I joke). Ron (a spa detective) continues the outlandishly preposterous themes laid down by his predecessor, spending the majority of the episode searching for a pistachio thief. After having gone about the case "every which way" he realises the thief is the only other person with a key to the pistachio closet, and is therefore declared the greatest spa detective since his father ... Outstanding. The third brother Turlington appears in 'Live And Let Fry' and identifies himself as Daniel. Just as slow-witted as his two relations, Daniel engages in the remarkably unnecessary occupation of protecting the Langley Falls boarder from trans-fat smuggling. Daniel is also responsible for the best Turlington scene, in which he crawls on the ground and ends up praying to his mother to help him find a nickel so that he can buy a turkey sandwich off of Steve (you had to be there). All in all, the Turlington Brothers (are they brothers?) have provided some magnificently comic moments in their brief American Dad history, and the sheer fact that they're voiced by Forest Whitaker automatically qualifies them to sit comfortably at number 7 in the list.