Anthony Wair Has Thoughts On Chris Griffin, But He’s Willing to Listen To Yours

Instagram's @wair18 On Family Guy And How It Changed His Life

By O.A. CARRY FOR: 65,000〡PUBLISHED: April 2nd, 2026

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Seth MacFarlane is probably in rural Connecticut somewhere, sitting in his study and reading about something like the history of opera or Star Trek, when what he should be doing is watching Anthony Wair, an amateur cartoon critic and analyst. He posts on Instagram at @wair18.

Wair has strong opinions about Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show, like arguing for Meg Griffin and against Chris Griffin in two separate videos on his channel.

Unlike other cartoon analysis video creators, Wair doesn’t adjust to the algorithm. He’s not interested in click-baiting people over the “downfall” of Family Guy (or creepily claiming, “This is not a baby,” in some YouTube thumbnails about Stewie).

Instead, Wair is authentic. His videos aren’t polished perfections. He sits in front of a brick wallpaper and iMovie-style transitions splice his dialogue with related cartoon clips. The viewer knows that his love for cartoons comes first and foremost.

And when someone says they like Chris Griffin actually, he thinks about it. Chews on it. And he’s willing to listen.

“Dude is on the Chris Griffin hate podcast,” one commenter joked.

I got to speak with Wair over the phone recently. His authenticity applies to everything. I expected to talk cartoons. Instead, Wair wasn't afraid to ditch the small talk and get into his struggles with mental health and the past he's leaving behind.

Have you ever been interviewed?

Not at all. Well, I was in the military and used to give a lot of briefings and stuff like that. But no real interview or nothing.

How long were you in the military?

Four years. It wasn't for me [laughs]. I ended up getting out after my four years were done.

And how long ago was that?

Oh shit. That was like … I got out in 2002, like over 20 years ago. But I worked on the base that I was stationed in for like 15 years afterwards.

And did cartoons intersect with that life at all or not?

I used to work a night shift when I was working for the government, and at night we had nobody in the building, so I would be on YouTube. That’s how I watched like Death Note. It’s like the only anime I like. I watched all 30 something episodes.

What do you think is the earliest cartoon you remember being obsessed with or loving?

I was born in 1980, so I've been watching cartoons all my life. I was in an era where on Saturday mornings, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox all had a lineup of cartoons starting at like seven in the morning up to one o'clock in the afternoon. And kids would wake up every Saturday morning. It was a big deal.

Wake up, watch cartoons, get a bowl of cereal and eat cereal in front of the TV all Saturday morning … That time has definitely passed [laughs].

I was a big He-Man fan. Other than that, like the regular ‘80s cartoons—G.I. Joe, Transformers, X-Men. I love the Wild C.A.T.s., which was a comic book cartoon that came out in the early ‘90s. I like all that type of- Wait, can I curse?

Yeah, of course.

All right, I was just making sure. I don't want to like- [laughs] ‘cause I curse a lot. Like I said, I was in the military, so I curse a lot.

Nowadays, how often do you watch cartoons? Like, how much time do you spend?

Not as much as I like, ‘cause I got kids and stuff like that. My girl doesn't really like cartoons, so whenever she's at work or when I'm at home, I try to spend a couple hours a day watching American Dad, Family Guy, even older cartoons on YouTube and shit.

I'm a big fan of older cartoons. I go to Disney+ and watch fucking Silver Surfer. The animation is unbelievable, and the voice acting is great.

On your Instagram, I haven't seen much Silver Surfer analysis, or content about older cartoons. You seem to focus on Family Guy and other Seth MacFarlane stuff.

I think Instagram just really likes Family Guy. On my YouTube page, I do everything. I talk about movies, sports, TV, like anything you can think of. I guess that's why the algorithm doesn't really like me on there, ‘cause I go all over the place.

One day, I did a YouTube video about why The Cleveland Show worked and why a show with Quagmire couldn't work. I grabbed a short from that video and posted it on Instagram, and the next day I woke up, it was like 10,000 views on that fucking video. It totally surprised me.

I talked to my boy and he was like, yo, you should hit on that real quick, see if you can get some traction and just do some other Family Guy shit. I didn't realize that many people love watching Family Guy, and I'm averaging like a hundred followers a day since that video.

I know that your Chris Griffin series went well, or at least, it generated discussion.

Yeah, it’s loved and hated it. I didn't realize so many people liked him. I like Seth Green in his movies—he’s super funny—but why wouldn't he use his regular voice? I don't like the Chris voice at all.

Was that the main feedback you were getting, like people saying, “I like Chris because of his voice?”

No, the main feedback I was, I’m a dumbass because Chris is the best character on the fucking show [laughs].

I feel like a main marker is that Chris couldn't carry his own show. But if you were to imagine a way that he could do that, what would The Chris Griffin Show look like?

Like I said, I'm trying to figure out why people like Chris, and I've been going through a lot of fucking Chris shit. I’m working on a new video that will come out in the next month about my top five Chris moments in Family Guy.

One of the moments that I love was when he was working for Quagmire—that episode when he was like his secretary. I thought that shit was hilarious. The whole episode was super funny, and I think their dynamic works. I might be wrong about that, but in my opinion, that whole episode worked.

You can see a Chris and Quagmire show?

Yeah, and I did a whole video on how Quagmire couldn't carry his own show, but I think those two characters could actually work. I doubt that would ever happen because you would have to have a lot of Quagmire-centric episodes, and I don't think his jokes could carry a full show overall.

So you like Meg better?

I love Meg. I think Mila Kunis is an amazing voice actor, and I think the character has totally developed over the series. She went from being a regular teenage girl to still being a teenage girl but having a voice.

And then when they started giving her scenes, I’m watching the show, and I'm like, she's really carrying this fucking whole scene! She’s definitely in my top five characters on the show.

I was watching your video series on Meg, and you were saying how she’s the backbone of the Griffin family, that she's strong for taking all of their crap because they need someone to crap on. There was even one point where you kind of hinted that you see yourself in Meg. Is that true?

As far as being a person that has to be there to hold the family together, I'm number three out of five kids, but my two older brothers are … What’s the word I want to say? They're not disabled, they’re like slow or whatever. I was considered the big brother in the family, even though we had two older brothers.

I was always the centerpiece of the family—I was always the one picked to make it out of the family—and I see Meg as me growing up, keeping the family together.

But not being the punching bag?

No, definitely not the punching bag. But I was bullied in elementary school growing up, and I like the way she take the bullying. I do love when she fights back, like the fighting back part is what I liked the most, because being bullied fucking sucks.

Where did you grow up?

I'm from the West Side of Chicago. One of the worst areas to ever grow up in. I grew up in poverty. My mom had me when she was 16. She had my two older brothers when she was 14. And by the time she was what, 20, 23, she had five kids. So she was raising five kids on her own.

It was a pretty tough childhood. And I was fairly smart. I always had good grades in school. I was in an honor society and all that bullshit. But when I graduated high school, I didn't want to stay in Chicago. I knew bad things would happen if I stayed.

So I joined the military. Like one week after I graduated high school, I was in the Air Force. It was probably the best decision that I ever made in my life. It helped me a lot. It gave me a job at 18, gave me the ability to send money home to help my family when they needed help, and I ended up getting my degree. I was the first one in my family to get a bachelor’s degree and a master's degree. Everything's been uphill from that time I joined the military.

Before you left home, can you paint me a picture of what those Saturday mornings were like as a kid watching cartoons? Who were you with? What were you watching? Where were you sitting?

We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and all the kids were in one room, and we had a living room, which had the TV. I was usually watching TV by myself because, for some reason, my other siblings weren't into TV. I grew up watching a lot of TV, though, and Saturday mornings were the best for me.

I loved waking up. I used to be the first one up at seven o'clock in the morning to watch the first cartoon on ABC, which was probably like Looney Tunes or something. It's one of those moments in time where you … It's like a good moment out of all the moments growing up.

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You have kids, right? What's been the experience of watching cartoons with them?

Yeah, I got six kids. I was married before, so my first four kids are with my ex-wife and are all grown. And then I have two younger kids. They’re six and seven.

My older girls didn't really like to watch cartoons. They liked the Disney movies. But my son, we used to watch that Ninja Turtles cartoon on Cartoon Network. The animation was super good.

Did you ever try showing your kids Family Guy or other adult cartoons?

It's funny you ask that because they like Rick and Morty. I've watched Rick and Morty, but that's not my type of cartoon. Their love for animation don't go as deep as mine.

What was your dream job as a kid?

I actually have my dream job. My dream job was to work in the video game industry. I worked on one of the games I love, NBA 2K, for five years. After that, I worked for Microsoft Games. So I was working on Halo. I did that for a year.

I think working in the video game industry burned me out from video games. It made me lose my love for them, which I hate. I can't get into a game because I'm always looking at what's wrong with it now [laughs]. It sucks.

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Did you ever dream about making a cartoon?

No, I have no artistic skills at all [laughs]. I can't draw. I don't think I would have the ability to create stories and stuff like that. That wasn’t my calling in life.

But you obviously think very deeply about these cartoons. Why do you think they're worth talking about and analyzing?

Because they're not just for kids. They have so many adult jokes, so many adult things. They have episodes that make you think about shit, like that Stewie vault episode. That was an amazing episode. Like in totality.

I watched that shit so many times because I felt that so—what’s the word?—in tune to the episode, because I went through depression before. It was like the episode was speaking to me.

Have you made an analysis video about the vault episode?

I did like a 10-part series. I broke down pretty much the whole episode.

And did you talk about your depression in that video?

I did. Yeah, it's a very eye-opening episode. For people who have been through depression, I think it's a very helpful episode because I've had friends that ... I was in the military, like I said, and I've had friends that had PTSD. One of my good friends, he killed himself a couple of years ago.

You just don't know what somebody is going through, because he would send me messages on Facebook like, you're a good father, you guys are everything to me, and then one day he just ... I get a phone call that he killed himself, like what the fuck?

Nobody knew he was depressed because that's how depression works. You keep that shit on the inside, and then all of a sudden, it just bubbles out, and I thought that episode really showed that in some weird way.

I'm sorry to hear about your friend.

Appreciate that.

When did this idea come to you, like did you watch the episode before your friend took his life, or did you watch the episode a long time ago and then you remembered it in hindsight?

It was actually well after he had killed himself. That's probably why it resonated more with me.

Have you ever used a lesson you learned in Family Guy or another cartoon in a real-life situation?

Hmm … There’s an episode of Thundercats where the premise is that the Thundercats go to a forest, and there's this group of creatures whose whole life spans in one day. And so you see this one character being born, being a child, reaching adolescence, growing into an adult, growing old, and dying at the end of the episode.

And throughout the whole episode, you can see that he sees the world differently than the Thundercats. For him, that 24 hours is a lifetime.

There's a part in the episode where he gets lost for like two minutes, and he comes back as a grown man. He says, Lionel, do you remember me? And Lionel’s like, oh, shit, and Lionel realizes that their whole life is one day.

The lesson in that episode was, life is fleeting—it can come and go in a heartbeat—and that shit has always stayed with me. Life is short. Live your life to the fullest, that kind of shit.

Have you ever imparted similar wisdom to your kids?

Oh, of course. My son just turned 18 last week. So I'm trying to prepare him for life. You know how kids grow up—they want to make their own money, go to work, or whatever. I'm like, live your life right now because once you start working, you never stop working. And I'm always instilling to my kids to slow down, don't try to speed up life.

Kids are like, I'm six years, I can't wait ‘til I'm seven years old! Calm down, live your life right now. You'll soon enough be seven or eight years old. Live for right now. Don't worry, because once you lose that childhood, everything changes.

I think nobody really told me that as a kid. I was trying to, you know, rush through fucking life, trying to get to it. And then you realize, damn, you missed so much by not being a kid.

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And what do you have planned for the coming years? How will you spend them?

I have no clue, to tell you the truth. Just working, watching my kids grow up, I guess. Trying to do better videos.

The videos that I do, I did because I was stuck in a place. I stopped playing video games. I used to play basketball a lot, like all the time—I stopped playing because I don't want to fucking blow out an Achilles.

When I first started my YouTube channel, I was super depressed. My girl had just broken up with me and I was just looking for something to do. One of my friends was like, you should start a YouTube channel.

I did my first video talking about depression or something. I can't remember exactly what it was. And I started posting videos talking about like serious topics.

I can talk about serious shit, like I got videos talking about bullies and how I was bullied. And I used to be fucking heavy into gambling because I live in Vegas. I was like, I'm going to get off of that serious shit. I want to talk about stuff that makes me happy.

And did your girl get back with you because she saw your YouTube channel?

No, we just, um, we had to have our time apart, I guess. And now we're getting married. We went to New York last year, and I proposed to her. We just bought a house for the first time. So everything's good right now.

Doing these videos gave me some thinking time, you know? I like doing this. It's my activity. I haven't made one penny off of doing these videos, and I still enjoy doing it.

That's why when somebody leaves me a message, I always respond. Even if it's a negative comment, I try to turn it into a positive thing, because you never know how somebody is feeling that day.

It’s a moment where somebody could use a, I hope you have a good day, or, I understand where you're coming from. I get your opinion. I try to, at least in my little world, give them that bright spot of the day, because you never know—somebody might not hear something positive all day.

Yeah, average Chris Griffin fan.

Yeah [laughs]. It's a lot of those.