American Dad! is an animated TV show that began in 2005 and was created by Seth MacFarlane, the mastermind behind Family Guy. Since the show’s inception, we have followed the CIA Agent, Stan Smith, and his family. We watch as Stan uses the same measures he uses at work on his family, unable to separate being a CIA agent from family life.
Stan’s two kids, Steve and Hayley, definitely bear the brunt of his crazy antics. Though he can be psycho, Stan means well and his escapades make for good TV and even better comedy. So while the kids get hurt, one can’t help but to laugh.
10 Brainwashing Hayley Since She Was A Child
A perfect example of the crazy secrets Stan keeps are shown in the episode called “Haylias”, Hayley starts having nightmares about her being zapped as a child for coloring in the American flag wrong. Soon after, she decides to move to France and start a new life, and Stan decides this isn’t her best path. He reveals she was in a top-secret project called Project Daycare and is actually a sleeper agent named Small Wonder.
When Stan decides Hayley should marry a gay man named Dill and she refuses, Stan uses his special phrase to activate her. Despite him knowing she will lose her free will in 7 days if he does this, he says the phrase, turning Hayley into a mindless drone and forcing her to marry Dill.
9 Cloned Steve And Turned Him Crazy
The lengths Stan will go to prove he is right has always been crazy. This episode shows how Stan would like to raise his son if he didn’t have Francine to stop him. In the episode titled “Son of Stan”, Francine and Stan get into an argument over who could raise Steve better. To put an end to the debate, Stan clones Steve and makes Steve-arino.
While they both do a terrible job of raising both Steve’s, Stan does so much worse than Francine. Real Steve is raised to be a spoiled brat and Steve-arino appears to be the perfect specimen. He is good at sports and school. There is one problem; Stan had raised Steve-arino with an iron fist and Steve-arino ends up turning him into a psychopath. This cloned Steve is not only crazy, but he is hell-bent on killing the real Steve and won’t stop till he does. This results in Steve being kidnapped and tortured.
8 Mutilating Hayley’s Face
Wondering how selfish of a person Stan really is? In this episode called “The Mural of the Story”, Stan and Hayley finish a meal at a restaurant together but when they leave they discover that a historical mural has been vandalized. In an attempt to rectify this issue, Stan begins to try to fix it, and in the end, makes it worse. However, the whole town ends up thinking Hayley is the culprit and Stan refuses to come clean.
In an attempt to help Hayley in private, he tries to hide her in the garage and mutilates her face to disguise her. This results in Hayley running away and being struck by a semi-truck. Maybe he isn’t as selfish as initially thought since he does try to help Hayley in his own messed up way, but he definitely could’ve prevented this debacle. He could have just come clean and avoided all of the pain Hayley endured.
7 Pretending To Be A Bully To Torture Steve
Even when trying to be a good dad, Stan somehow always manages to make things worse. In “Bully for Steve”, he finds out his son Steve is being too passive. That’s when Stan takes matters into his own hands and begins to bully Steve to toughen him up.
In the process, Stan breaks his wrists and steals his bike. Stan is a merciless bully to his son and takes it way too far, telling him he will kill him if he tells his mom Stan is his real bully. Stan’s intentions may be to help his son, but in the end, he just hurts him more.
6 Stabbing Steve In The Leg
In “Next of Pin”, Stan sees a news article where a son kills his dad for not spending time with him. To avoid this outcome, Stan decides to bond with Steve. After numerous attempts at various activities, all of which Steve fails, they join a bowling league together. Quickly it becomes obvious that Steve is actually really good and they enjoy it together. Soon, Steve is recruited to go pro, and even though Stan is happy, he is also sad. This means that Steve will eventually move away if he keeps winning.
Instead of doing the right thing and supporting his son’s talent, he decides to stop it. Stan stabs Steve in the ankle the night before a big game to prevent him from competing. Then Stan proceeds to “help” Steve find the assailant, all the while knowing it was him.
5 Making Hayley’s Boyfriend Work In A Sweatshop
When Stan opens up a sweatshop making stuffed bears, he soon realizes Hayley’s boyfriend, Paco can sew. He not only forces him to work at his sweatshop, but he also makes Paco’s whole family, too. When Paco starts slacking and skipping work to be with Hayley, Stan manipulates him into breaking up with Hayley. In response, Hayley calls the INS on Stan, and eventually, the sweatshop gets shut down.
4 Wiping His Family’s Memories
The episode “Father’s Daze” is centered around Stan wanting a perfect Father’s Day. When he goes to work and realizes his family forgot, the family offers a do-over of the day.
However, they wake up to Stan putting up post-it notes demanding what he wants to be done. He ends up wiping their memories for months so he can keep trying to get the perfect Father’s Day that he has always wanted.
3 Stealing Steve’s Best Friend
Apparently stabbing, bullying and cloning Steve isn’t enough for Stan. In this episode, Stan comes home to find Steve and his best friend, Snot, playing air guitar. Stan concludes that Snot isn’t cool enough and is holding his son back. He forbids Steve to see Snot anymore but Steve ignores him. To keep them apart permanently, Stan sets up Snot to witness a fake gang hit and sends him into a witness protection program. When Stan goes on a grocery run for Snot, he ends up having a sleepover with and bonding, deciding he wants to be best friends with Snot instead. Eventually Steve catches them and confronts Stan, but it’s still messed up.
2 Stan Tries To Kill Both Of His Children
In the episode titled “Old Stan in the Mountain’’, Stan ends up angering an old man at a camping store and he hexes him, turning him into an old man. In order to break the curse, Stan believes he must climb Mount Kilimanjaro and he takes Hayley and Steve with him. As they climb, he starts to become suspicious that they are going to kill him, so he vows to kill them first. Even though his repeated attempts to kill the kids are thwarted by his old age, if he wasn’t hexed he probably would’ve stabbed them.
1 Keeping Roger Around
The worst thing Stan did was keeping the alien, Roger. Stan took this alien in after he saved his life at Area 51. Since taking him in, Roger has done everything from convincing Steve he was adopted to just generally trying to kill them, Roger definitely made their lives harder. Even despite being a murderous ET, he is just mean to everyone around him, which allows the viewers to see some very funny schemes unfold.
NEXT: The 10 Best Family Guy Episodes, Ranked According To IMDb
