On May 20, 2012, Family Guy aired an unusual episode titled “Family Guy Viewer Mail #2,” broken into three short segments. One segment, “Fatman & Robin,” revolved around Peter gaining the ability to turn everything he touches into Robin Williams. Eventually, Peter gets overwhelmed with all the Robin Williamses he’s created and unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide several times. For example, at one point, he puts a gun to his head, but before he’s able to pull the trigger, it morphs into a miniature Williams.
From there, Peter tries to throw himself in front of a car, and—you guessed it—the car turns into Williams. Even jumping off of a cliff backfires as Mrs. Doubtfire ends up breaking Peter’s fall. “Time to lose some weight, dearie,” she tells him afterward. This culminates in Peter somehow cutting off both his hands, so he can’t turn anything into Williams moving forward.
BBC Aired This Robin Williams ‘Family Guy’ Episode Minutes Before His Death Was Announced
Less than two years later, on the same day that Williams died, BBC Three in the UK reran the episode just 25 minutes prior to the comedian’s death being announced. According to several sources, “Family Guy Viewer Mail #2” aired at 11:25 p.m. that night, and news of Williams’s passing broke at around 11:50. “This was a repeat that we have shown a couple times before so who could of planned that?” a BBC spokesperson said of the unfortunate timing. “It was scheduled more than two weeks ago, so it is just an uncanny coincidence.”
The spokesperson added that the episode was also supposed to air the following Friday, but those plans were ultimately abandoned out of respect for Williams. For his part, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane took to Twitter to pay homage to the late comic, writing, “The world just got a lot less funny. Robin Williams is a tragic loss.”
You can check out the full “Fatman & Robin” segment for yourself above.
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