Libertines on Animated TV Shows

At least two popular animated TV shows geared to adult viewers have regular libertine characters.

“Family Guy“, has a libertine character, Glen Quagmire, who is a friend of the main character, Peter Griffin.

A profile of him that I found on a “Family Guy” website describes this character:

Quagmire is the next door neighbor of the Griffins and a bachelor. He spends most of his free time chatting up women and then sleeping with them in his love nest. He works at the Quahog Airport as a pilot, and has secret feelings for Lois, the wife of his best friend.

“King of the Hill” is unique in that it has two different libertine characters:

The first is the mush-mouthed Boomhauer, who is quite similar to Quagmire from “Family Guy”. A “King of the Hill” website describes him as:

Boomhauer is known for liking fast cars and fast women.

I remember one episode where we see Boomhauer’s house, which is decorated in stereotypical bachelor pad style down to the leopard print bedspread. In this same episode, the main character, Hank Hill, is worried that Boomhauer will seduce Hank’s impressionable young adult niece, Luann, who had a crush on Boomhauer. (He didn’t, as I recall.)

The second libertine on “King of the Hill” is John Redcorn, whom the same website described as:

John Redcorn is Nancy Gribble’s Native American masseur; he is also her ex-lover from a 14 year affair and the biological father of her son, Joseph Gribble. Nancy's husband, Dale, and Joseph are both completely unaware of this, although this fact is obvious to everyone else in the series. John Redcorn is a Native American rights activist of the Anasazi tribe, and "licensed new age healer". He tries to reach out to Joseph and instill a sense of pride in him, even though Joseph often rejects him.

Up until the episode where they have John and Nancy break up, this had been a relationship both had been totally satisfied and happy with, with her husband in oblivious bliss. I suspect that the episode was written in response to viewer complaints; people who couldn’t abide seeing a functional, successful long-term non-monogamous relationship without those involved having to “pay the piper”.

In this episode, Hank Hill’s naïve wife, Peggy, who is Nancy’s friend, finally caught on to the true nature of Nancy’s relationship with John. Peggy confronts Nancy, who admits that she’s just not monogamous, and that she cares for both men, but in different ways. It’s too bad that it couldn’t have simply ended with Peggy learning how to mind her own business and by maybe learning something about different strokes for different folks, but the show had the predictable ending of breaking John and Nancy up. However, it didn’t cover whether Joseph would ever learn who his true father was.

Redcorn’s libertinism is underscored elsewhere, when Peggy goes to see him in a professional capacity as a massage therapist. Hank is frantic when he finds out where Peggy has gone, as John’s reputation for seducing women is well known in their small town (Well known, that is, to everyone but Peggy Hill and Dale Gribble).

To sum up, Quagmire and Boomhauer are allowed to be libertines, but they are presented as faintly ludicrous and pathetic. And John Redcorn ended up having to pay the piper.

We now are commonly seeing gay characters on TV portrayed in a realistic fashion, perhaps we’ll one see libertine characters on TV also presented in a matter of fact way, without there always having to be the a moral to the story.