Family Guy is one of my favorite shows. I have seen all the episodes many times but it is one of those shows that I can return to over and over again even though I already know the outcome and I still find it very entertaining. There are only a few other shows I can say this is true of and off the top of my head they would be Rick and Morty and Friends.
Unbeknownst to me, this removal of Family Guy had been announced quite some time ago and the disappearance happened sometime in late February, I only just recently noticed it though because I have been enjoying other series.
I was bored one day and as I usually do in these times I switched on Netflix to have a poke around to see if there was anything I wanted to watch. I couldn't find anything that piqued my interest so I though, I guess I'll just watch Family Guy again until I fall asleep and search as I may, it wasn't there. They had other "suggestions" over on the right but none of them appealed to me.
Initially I thought that maybe this was just a strange regional thing but as it turns out Family Guy is not on Netflix anymore and is unlikely to ever return.
I found it strange in the first place that even when the show was on Netflix, they had a really limited selection of just 8 seasons. Normally, when Netflix has a show that began somewhere else, they will have all the seasons except for the most recent ones. This is true with Rick and Morty for example as the latest season still hasn't popped up there. I can only presume that this is because before they hand it over to Netflix, the creators want the opportunity to get people to watch it on their own platforms first.
The reason why Family Guy left is because Netflix opted out of a renewed contract with Fox and that is who owns the show. To make matters worse, Disney is in the process of purchasing Fox or maybe has done so already and since they have their own streaming service, it is very unlikely that this show, and many others owned by Fox will ever come back to Netflix.
At the moment, if you are a Family Guy fan like I am you are going to have to head over to Hulu in order to stream it. Fox owns 30% of Hulu, so it is quite unlikely that the show is going to leave there unless Disney decides that they want to use this famous show to try to get more people to sign up for Disney+, a service that I have never even considered purchasing.
Of course there are a lot of other ways to get the episodes that I am sure you can figure out on your own via a wide variety of torrent sites including one of my favorites, 1337x .
If you are a fan of superhero movies (I'm not) you can bet your bottom dollar that almost all of those are going to disappear from Netflix soon as well, because by purchasing Fox, Disney now also owns a great deal of the Marvel characters and I can't really imagine a situation where they are going to be willing to allow a direct competitor like Netflix to continue to have these.
We can expect a great deal of content to disappear from Netflix in the coming year as it seems that Disney is dead set on taking over basically the entire entertainment industry. For me, I'll probably just return to piracy if this happens because I've still got a chip on my shoulder for what Disney did to the Star Wars franchise.