Despite being canceled and brought back from the dead, Family Guy managed to make it to their tenth season after being on the air for more than a decade.
By the time the Griffin's had reached the ten-year mark, Seth MacFarlane had created an empire of animated-comedy shows that included American Dad and The Cleveland Show, and all of that success started with a regular, common family living in Quahog, Rhode Island.
Lottery Fever: Episode 1 (7.3)
Everybody dreams of winning the lottery, and the Griffins opened up the season by doing exactly that. Peter decides to take a second mortgage out on the house in order to buy hundreds of thousands of lottery tickets, and the first one Brian pulls from the pile is a winner. The family immediately becomes obnoxious and stuck-up jerks, and they start treating their friends like garbage due to their newfound wealth, but they predictably end up blowing every penny they have and go broke, relying on the friends that they treated terribly to bail them out.
Killer Queen: Episode 16 (7.4)
It was revealed in season 4 that Lois had a long-lost brother, Patrick, who turned out to be a serial killer whose primary target was fat guys. So, when Chris is shipped off to fat camp after winning a hot-dog eating contest and some of the other fat kids start getting strangled, everyone assumes that Patrick is up to his old ways.
Unfortunately, Patrick turns out to be innocent, and the actual killer is the professional competitive-eater that Chris defeated in the hot-dog eating contest.
Internal Affairs: Episode 23 (7.4)
During the final episode of the season, the story revolved around Joe and Bonnie and how their marriage had been crumbling for quite some time. Things finally come to a head when Joe gets hit on by a young rookie cop, Nora, with whom he then cheats on Bonnie—but only because Bonnie had cheated on him in Paris.
When Joe comes clean about what he has done, Bonnie reveals that she never actually had the affair, and the two split up. Luckily, Peter and Lois meddle in their friend's lives and end up reigniting the spark between Joe and Bonnie, helping them to get back together.
Cool Hand Peter: Episode 8 (7.5)
In a dark episode that's a loose adaptation of the events of the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the gang finds themselves falsely arrested in the deep south and subjected to working on a chain-gang for 30 days. However, when their 30 days are up, the Warden informs that they have another 30 days left on their sentence, implying that they're never going to get let out of the work camp.
The four of them end up escaping and making it back to Quahog, where the original Sheriff who arrested them tries to bring them back in... only to be stopped and apprehended by Joe's cop buddies who show up to save the day.
Mr. & Mrs. Stewie: Episode 19 (7.7)
Stewie was never quite as maniacal in the later seasons as he was in the era before Family Guy got canceled, but, every now and then, they'd throw in an episode like this one where Stewie's role as the mad-scientist would come back out and play.
Stewie meets a girl, Penelope, who turns out to be even more sadistic and clever than Stewie, and the two end up wreaking havoc all over town. When Brian tells them to calm down, Penelope tries to get Stewie to kill him. This makes Stewie realize how crazy Penelope is being and he refuses, which results in Penelope trying to kill Brian herself and ends with an epic sci-fi battle between Stewie, Penelope, and all their advanced-weaponry.
Leggo My Meg-O: Episode 20 (7.7)
Family Guy was never a show to shy away from doing spoof episodes, so fans were thrilled when they decided to do their own comedic-take on the action/adventure film Taken. Meg goes to France to study abroad and gets kidnapped, which results in Brian and Stewie setting off on a quest to rescue her.
The two manage to track her down right before she's sold into sex slavery, only for it to be revealed that Meg wasn't actually bought to be a sex-slave, but rather to be a wife for a rich Arab Prince. Sadly, Stewie didn't realize this when he shoots Meg's husband-to-be in the face, wipes Meg's memory, and brings her back home as if nothing ever happened.
The Blind Side: Episode 11 (7.8)
For whatever reason, the fact that Brian is a dog is almost never brought up, and it somehow never had an impact on his dating life. However, in this one specific instance, Brian's species becomes the focal point of an episode when he beings dating a blind woman in a bizarre take on that one scene from Frankenstein.
Her lack of vision didn't bother Brian at all, and they seemed to have a great time on their date... until Kate hears a dog bark and instantly lashes out about how she hates dogs. Brian then spends the rest of the episode trying to hide the fact that he's a canine from Kate, and it ends about as well as can be expected—which is to say that it ended poorly.
Family Guy Viewer Mail #2: Episode 22 (7.8)
Following up with a sequel to the first Viewer Mail episode—practically a decade later—this episode follows three separate stories based around the Griffin family, none of which have anything to do with one another.
The first story follows the bit that Family Guy was based on a British-comedy and shows the Griffins as a family in England; the second story follows Peter as he's granted the ability to turn anyone or anything in the world into Robin Williams, whereupon he eventually goes crazy from all the comedy; the third follows a story that takes place entirely from Stewie's point-of-view as he goes about his day.
Forget-Me-Not: Episode 17 (8.0)
Stewie often used his family as test-subjects for his science experiments, and this was one such episode. Brian and Stewie get into an argument about how Brian and Peter wouldn't be friends if they weren't forced to hang out all the time. The next day, Brian, Peter, Quagmire, and Joe all wake up in a hospital with no memories whatsoever and discover that they're the only people left in Quahog.\
Left to their own devices, the guys go off to live their own lives, and Brian and Peter end up befriending one another despite having no previous memories of being friends or knowing who the other one is. After a series of events, it's revealed that the entire episode was just a fabrication, and Stewie had placed Brian in a machine that played out a scenario to see if Brian would become friends with Peter despite no prior relations—and he did, proving Brian right all along.
Back to the Pilot, Episode 5 (8.8)
In lieu of a "Road To" episode during this season, the writers decided to send Brian and Stewie on a completely different adventure; they sent them back to the very first episode of Family Guy. Brian tells Stewie that he buried a tennis ball in the yard but forgets where he dug the hole, so, naturally Stewie offers to use his time machine to go back and find where Brian dug the hole, and it turns out that it occurred during the first episode that the show ever aired.
Brian and Stewie get into a mess of time-travel problems stemming from Brian telling his past-self how to stop 9/11 from happening that are too complicated, warped, and overlapping to accurately describe. But, in the end, everything goes back to normal, and Brian never retrieves his tennis ball. All's well that ends well.