Glenn Quagmire

A college acquaintance of MacFarlane's chose the name. MacFarlane arrived at the voice by listening to fast talking radio presenters of the 1950s, and has summed the result up as a radio host of that decade on cocaine. The catchphrase itself came from an impression of Jerry Lewis by the writer Steve Marmel.

Quagmire is a bachelor who flies for a commercial airline. His house on Spooner Street sits among those of Joe Swanson, Cleveland Brown and Peter Griffin, the three men he counts as his closest friends. He has had two wives: Joan, who had worked as a maid for the Griffins and later died, and Charmise, a prostitute he later divorced. MacFarlane has identified "I Take Thee Quagmire" as the first episode whose plot was built around the character. While stationed at Busan in South Korea, Quagmire acted in a soap opera under the name "American Johnny" and was involved with his co-star, Sujin. He speaks no Korean and says he was told to pronounce the lines phonetically. He also picked up French on stopovers in Montreal.

In "Quagmire's Baby" he learns that he has a daughter, Anna Lee, and gives her up for adoption; other episodes imply further children. His father, a naval veteran of the Vietnam War, is introduced in "Quagmire's Dad" and, after gender reassignment surgery, takes the name Ida. His sister Brenda first appears in "Jerome Is the New Black" and is the subject of "Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q". Both episodes turn on the violence of her partner Jeff, whom Quagmire kills to protect her. "Quagmire's Mom" sets out a strained and damaging relationship with his mother, who had behaved sexually towards him.

The programme gives Quagmire a relationship in the early 1980s with its version of the model Cheryl Tiegs, which the character ended over his jealousy and his sex addiction. He regards her as the love he lost. She returns to his life twice, on both occasions through Brian Griffin's interference: first when Brian invited him to a dinner on the pretence that she would be there, and again when Brian took up with her purely to needle him. Quagmire answered that by dating Brian's former girlfriend Jillian. The dislike runs both ways and the quarrel carries across several episodes.

The writing gives Quagmire a wide range of sexual fetishes, along with an interest in young women, Peter's daughter Meg among them once she turns 18. After "Family Goy" he acquires an addiction to internet pornography. His catchphrase has been printed on tie-in merchandise, keyrings included. Fox has cut some material involving him, among it a scene in "Airport '07" implying sex with a dead woman during her own funeral. A long-standing critic of the programme, the Parents Television Council, has singled out his scenes as among its most sordid.