SURPRISE DEATH

‘Family Guy’ Officially Kills Off Recurring Character After 23 Seasons

Peter Griffin’s chief antagonist is no more.

It’s official, Ernie the Giant Chicken is finally, truly, definitely and definitively dead. Show producer Alec Sulkin said the beloved recurring Family Guy character, and chief antagonist of the Griffin family patriarch, has gone “the way of all flesh.” Despite his well-known fight scenes with Peter Griffin, it would appear to have in fact been Peter’s daughter, Meg, who shunted him off into the small screen’s great beyond more than 25 years after his first appearance in the animated series. Sulkin clarified that while the creators felt they’d given Ernie as solid a run as he might ever have hoped for, there were also practical reasons behind his evidently brutal final goodbye. “Honestly, I feel like we got so many great set pieces out of the giant chicken fighting with Peter that they became hard to top,” Sulkin explained. “It’s a lot to ask of our production crew, and we may have just gotten the best out of that character.”