Herbert

Herbert lives in Quahog and wears a pale blue dressing gown. Age has left him leaning on a walking frame, and his dog cannot use its hind legs. On his first appearance he tries to draw Chris down to his basement with the promise of an ice lolly, and Chris declines. "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Cheater" establishes that he is on the sex offenders register. Later episodes set him beside the family as an employer of odd jobs and, in "Play It Again, Brian", as a babysitter. "Movin' Out (Brian's Song)" shows that Chris understands the attraction and confronts him over it. He approaches other boys of about the same age, and Stewie rebuffs him during a spell delivering newspapers.

"Padre de Familia" presents Herbert as a veteran of the Second World War, singing at a Veterans Day parade in dress uniform. He says he holds a Purple Heart, a claim the article records as uncertain. "German Guy" adds that he was taken prisoner by German forces. By his account they intended a prisoner of war camp, then sent him to Dachau instead after finding photographs of boys in his wallet, and an SS lieutenant put him to work sorting the camp's recyclable waste.

Mike Henry joined Family Guy as a writer once the series was commissioned, having met Seth MacFarlane through his brother Patrick, a fellow student of MacFarlane at the Rhode Island School of Design. Cleveland Brown was the first character he devised and Herbert came later. The predatory streak was not in the original conception: Henry put the idea to the writing staff, and they took it up. He voices the part himself. Both the sound and the look came from an elderly man he encountered while working in a grocery store as a teenager, someone he has since described as kind.

IGN has written warmly about the character, placing him and his dog sixteenth in a ranking of twenty-five Family Guy characters and crediting the thin, breathy delivery for much of the effect. The same site objected to casting him as Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Blue Harvest" and to how often the series returns to him. Hanh Nguyen of TV Guide, in February 2015, counted paedophilia among twelve taboo subjects the programme has handled and singled Herbert out. Rowan Kaiser of The A.V. Club treated him as a case of the deliberately offensive humour failing, and said his appearances bring an episode to a stop.