Adored By The Network / FOX Animated Shows

• If Family Guy isn't this for FOX, all of its animated shows except for King of the Hill and American Dad! are.
  • In the early half of The New '10s, it ran 3 hours per night weekdays on TBS, until the network got rights to re-runs of The Big Bang Theory, which caused it to only air on Mondays.
    • From 2009 through 2015, TBS would play a big marathon of Family Guy showing every single episode the week after Christmas. As soon as the annual A Christmas Story marathon came to a close, TBS viewers could expect to see nothing but animation that entire week. During the last two years of the marathon, other Seth MacFarlane shows would be played alongside the Family Guy episodes.
  • In New York City during the early half of The New '10s, between the FOX, TBS, Adult Swim and syndicated airings (the CW station WPIX being a notable one, airing it three times in the morning, twice at noon and two or four times at night), the show could air anywhere from twelve to eighteen times a day, which meant it was aired more frequently than other popular shows at the time. Now it's been cut down to eight times a day, after WPIX screwed the show over for The Big Bang Theory, airing it at 2:30am in the morning.
  • [adult swim] loved Family Guy like no other network would to an acquired show, giving it constant promotion even calling the episodes that were new to the block (but already aired on Fox) as new episodes (and really they kinda were, as they often had more content not in the FOX version). It's not hard to see why as it constantly brought in high ratings for the block often competing with and sometimes surpassing Cartoon Network's own shows. Even after Rick and Morty came along and started regularly beating out Family Guy in ratings (at least with premieres), Family Guy was still one of the block's highest rated shows. Adult Swim still continued to promote it too even after it was announced they'd lose the rights to it, to the point that they even gave it a sendoff when the rights finally did expire in September 2021, something they only ever did once before with Futurama. It is quite a place of note that Adult Swim is often noted as the main reason the show came back and became a cultural phenomenon in the first place.
  • Once Disney acquired the cable syndication rights for the series starting with Season 16, they've shown their love for it:
    • FXX initially aired the show nine hours a week. At that time, FXX only had the rights to anywhere between 20-60 episodes.
    • In 2020, Freeform created a block called "Family Guy Fridays" which airs a Family Guy marathon every Friday. Beginning in 2021, the series began airing seven hours a week.
    • When Adult Swim and TBS finally lost the rights to the first 15 seasons of Family Guy in September 2021, Disney made damn sure to take advantage of it on their networks fast. FXX airs the show for four hours straight in primetime aside from Wednesdays and Thursdays, where new episodes of Archer and Cake air. In addition, Freeform's marathon block of the show on Fridays has expanded to 10 hours, at the expense of FXX not airing the show that day. The show is loved by FXX so much that sister channel FX started airing it on Saturday mornings, making it one of three acquisitions airing on the network. Also, the marathons on Sunday now have a theme to it, much like their blocks of The Simpsons on that day.
• Before FOX went in the complete opposite direction, The Cleveland Show was certainly a network favorite. While it wasn't to the same extent as The Simpsons or Family Guy, the show received two full seasons before airing a single episode and was more heavily promoted than MacFarlane's other show, American Dad!.
  • After gaining the rights to air it in 2018, Comedy Central seems to adore the show, playing it constantly on weekday afternoons whenever South Park isn't occupying the block. However, the few seasons the former show has can lead to a lot of repeats in a short span of time, with the same episode playing almost exactly a week after it was last seen.
• Chilean network Canal 13 just loves The Simpsons, to the point they will fill any spot they need with it. During the summer, the channel plays Simpsons blocks 2-3 hours long at morning, afternoon, and evening. This roughly sums up eight hours a day of a single show, never mind that they often skip episode credits to save time for adding an extra episode per block. In other words, they can air an entire season in a single day, the only reason they don't being that the episodes are randomly picked for the day. Sometimes, a small block of Futurama episodes airs before the morning Simpsons block. Still, it's not like they actually cut all the episodes in half just to accommodate for the prime time soaps. Oh wait, they totally did.
  • Some time ago, in 2009 actually, a new executive at Canal 13 (Vasco Moulián, if you're interested) developed a "flexible grid", where he would cut, extend, and change the programming according to the ratings — in real time, so if a show was running low on ratings it would be cut and replaced with something else on the spot, without a chance to tell anyone beforehand. And if there was any gap in the grid, we got The Simpsons. The backlash was so big that it cost him his job (despite getting Canal 13 from third to first place in viewership; make of that what you will). Afterward, the flexible grid was quietly put under the rug.
• Outside of reality shows, Australia's Channel Ten also loves The Simpsons. It has pretty much always kept its daily 6:00 PM slot ^note  This is when all the other networks are airing the nightly news. Ten air theirs at 5:00. since forever and will often show a couple of other episodes at other times. Mostly on Wednesdays where another two or three episodes might air after 7:30.
  • That is, until they decided to try a two and a half hour news block consisting of their aforementioned 5pm broadcast, followed by two new half-hour news based programs, and concluding with the already established 7pm Project. The Simpsons have been shunted onto Ten's secondary channel, Eleven (now 10 Peach), where it is shown at least twice during primetime, often being split/followed/alternated by episodes of Futurama as part of their 'animation fixation' block. In 2012, the show was brought back to Ten for first-run screenings at 6pm, before the third Australian version of Family Feud launched in 2014.
    • In 2017, the license expired, so rights were shifted to 7mate, who air at least a few episodes every Wednesday.
  • Channel 4 also has The Simpsons at 6:00 PM over here in the UK, when BBC One and ITV are showing the news.
• FOX8, the Australian cable version of FOX, shows The Simpsons several times a day and airs nothing but The Simpsons on Saturday and Sunday mornings. To add to that, they show up to 6 hour marathons all the time. School holidays, summer holidays, back to school, Christmas, Easter... pretty much any excuse to show Simpsons marathons.
  • During the 2000 Summer Olympics, FOX8 aired nothing but The Simpsons for 16 days. A similar thing happened to 2006 for the Commonwealth Games, but lasting 10 days.
  • The irony of all this is that, over in the US, there were rumors of a Simpsons channel in the works. Today, that channel exists: it's called FXX.
• Back when they had Fox Kids, Tiny Toon Adventures counted as this trope. It was promoted heavily when it came over from First-Run Syndication for one season, and given a spin-off of sorts (the Plucky Duck show). Even after new episodes were no longer airing, Tiny Toons clips were included prominently among clips from other newer shows in Fox Kids promos (such as this one).
  • They also loved Bobby's World, as it stayed on the longest out of the shows on the initial line-up.
• Spanish channel Antena 3 has been broadcasting two episodes of The Simpsons everyday for almost fifteen years. There was a time that they broadcasted three daily episodes on weekdays and four or even five on weekends. Its sister channel Neox currently broadcasts three episodes every night plus a marathon running every Tuesday, but two years ago broadcasted five episodes every day. It's so Adored by the Network that Antena 3 has bought the rights to broadcast The Simpsons FOREVER. If that isn't dedication to an acquired series, we don't know what is.
• The FXX channel decided to run an "Every Simpsons Ever" marathon in late August 2014. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, they aired a non-stop twelve and a half day marathon of every episode that had aired at that point and the movie. After it ended, the network decided to program 4 hour blocks of The Simpsons for Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday nights during the primetime slots. They advertised it by saying "the Every Simpsons Ever marathon continues... forever". Entirely justified, as not only did the network's ratings skyrocket during those 12 days but unlike most shows that get this kind of treatment, The Simpsons has more than enough episodes to sustain such a thing.
  • In digital terms, the FXNow app also had the "Every Simpsons Ever" marathon on it, so you could have watched the whole thing anytime. To watch it these days, you'll have to get yourself a Disney+ subscription to watch every episode save for the most recent season, which you can watch on Hulu.
  • History repeated itself on Thanksgiving of 2016, when FXX decided to start another marathon of every episode aired up to that point, which ran for 13 days.
  • And it happened again, as FXX aired yet another marathon consisting of every episode of the show up to that point beginning on December 17, 2019, to coincide with the Christmas season and to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the show, and ran for 15 days.
• One TV station in California (Los Angeles area) aired The Simpsons every day for at least four hours in 2012 until The Big Bang Theory came along.
• Russian channel 2x2 loves airing Family Guy, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show & The Simpsons more than any other animated show that aired on that channel.
• Australian cable channel Fox8 has its own Animation Domination block, which is comprised ENTIRELY of Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, The Cleveland Show and Futurama.
  • The former FTA version, "Animation Fixation", was usually composed of The Simpsons, Futurama, The Cleveland Show, King Of The Hill, and Bob's Burgers, with whatever new show that was airing in the US block mixed in.
• When they aren't airing a movie, Freeform's weekday schedule is basically nothing but The Simpsons from 3PM until midnight...or at least that's how it was before they acquired rights to The Office (US).
• The Great North is already starting to become this, having already been renewed for a second season during Season 1, and then getting renewed for a third season once Season 1 had wrapped up. There were also two previews (which were full episodes) and repeats every week since those previews aired, all before the official premiere. It helps that it was created by the Molyneux twins, known for their involvement in Bob's Burgers. Only time will tell if this level of adoration lasts.
  • When the show officially premiered with the third episode, episodes 4 and 5 were put up on Hulu on the same day as the premiere.
• The Canadian version of FX plays almost nothing but The Simpsons, with the occasional episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine thrown in (it used to be Modern Family before station owner Rogers lost the rights to the show) and maybe some episodes of the K-9 themed drama Hudson and Rex for Canadian content. However, on the weekends, FX original shows play.

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