American Dad! Pokes Fun At Its Return To Fox In Season Premiere, EP Calls Homecoming 'Kind Of Redeeming'

"American Dad!" came home on Sunday. After residing on TBS for more than 10 years, the Seth MacFarlane 'toon returned to Fox, the network on which it originally premiered back in 2005. And if you thought the show wouldn't take this opportunity to reference the big move on screen, you've clearly never been to this very specific rodeo before.

When "Family Guy" was revived at Fox in 2005, two years after being canceled, its first episode back opened with a segment in which Peter listed every single show Fox canceled (29 total!) since giving "Family Guy" the axe.

"American Dad!" opted for a slightly more subtle approach, working the reference into a conversation about Francine reuniting with her estranged sister. "Are you sure this is a good idea, mom?" Hayley asks. "Getting back together after so many years could be a disaster." A Fox logo then appears in the corner of the screen, prompting a despondent "...Yeah" from Francine.

"Matt Weitzman wrote this one, and he's been around since the pilot, so he remembers the sting of leaving Fox and the joy of going to TBS," co-showrunner Brian Boyle tells TVLine. "The homecoming back to Fox is kind of redeeming." And according to Boyle, the episode had "more winks and nudges about going back to Fox, but like any show that has to be 20 minutes, you have to cut out the winks and the nudges and stuff like that."

But does Francine really have anything to worry about here? Will anything change about "American Dad!" now that it's back on network television?

"I would say it's not that different," Boyle says. "But you do have more back and forth with the lawyers who want to make sure it's [up to network standards]. We used to say on TBS that we could say three s***s and an a**hole. We can't do any of that now. You should see our file of all the different words for a**hole or butt or butthole or balloon knot. Now when they want to vet our language, they just go to Urban Dictionary. If it's ever been mentioned as that thing, even if it's not in common use, they'll say no, so we have a lot of made up stuff. You'll see a lot of made up words this year."

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