"The American Dad After School Special" is the second episode of the third season and the twenty-fifth overall episode of the animated comedy series American Dad! It aired on Fox in the United States on September 17, 2006, and is written by Dan Vebber and directed by Pam Cooke.^[1]

In the episode, Steve falls for an overweight girl, and the appearance-obsessed Stan is so appalled by the way she looks that he develops anorexia. Roger, however, falls for her, too, and attempts to sabotage her relationship with Steve.

Plot

Steve, while attempting to escape from gym class, finds a hideout used by a gothic, overweight girl named Debbie, whom he finds fascinating and on whom he develops a crush. When Steve tells his father about his new girlfriend, Stan is delighted to hear the news and he even helps Steve to build up the courage to ask her out by using an explosive collar that will kill him within twenty-four hours if he doesn't. However, Stan messes up the programming while activating the device, accidentally setting it to kill Steve in just twenty-four minutes instead.

Eventually, Steve manages to ask Debbie out, and the two begin dating each other while making plans to invite Debbie to meet Steve's family. However, when Stan sees Debbie for the first time via security camera, he becomes appalled by the fact that she's fat, and he forces the family to hide in the safe room of their house until Debbie leaves. Francine and Hayley then berate Stan for his behavior, and they (along with Klaus) are even able to point out his hypocrisy in which he himself is somewhat overweight after letting himself go over time. When Stan realizes they're right after checking himself in the mirror, he decides to go on a crazy exercise program and starts to gain an unhealthy obsession with his weight. While working out, Stan is able to meet a personal trainer named Zack, who is depicted as being verbally abusive while also wearing a trucker's cap, and he's able to help him with his constant workout routine.

Steve continues dating Debbie, not realizing that Roger is secretly in love with her, especially while watching them kissing each other. Meanwhile, Stan becomes surprised to learn that the more he exercises and the less he eats, the fatter and fatter he gets; he then suspects that Francine and Hayley are tampering with his vegetables to make him fatter, which turns out to be true. Shortly after, he is eventually suspended from the CIA for his "weight problem" when he passes out during a physical after taking just a couple of steps past the starting line. Upon coming home, Stan's family is able to engage in an intervention with him over his weight problem, to which we realize that Stan wasn't getting fatter at all; Instead, he was actually getting thinner to the point where he was almost becoming like a skeleton, and the reason for him thinking that he was getting fatter was because of it being a symptom of anorexia. We also discover that Stan's personal trainer, Zack, isn't a real person at all, but rather a figment of Stan's delusional imagination.

Francine, Hayley, and Steve are then able to force Stan to attend an anorexia support group, which is mostly populated by teenage girls (and run by a man who either doesn't notice or care that Stan is actually a grown man). During the meeting, Stan is able to befriend an anorexic girl named Veronica, who teaches Stan how to consume food without actually eating it, which he's able to do when his family is able to feed him, and he's even able to get rid of some of his food by feeding it to Klaus, who starts to become so big that he outgrows his fishbowl shortly after. Steve then decides to dump Debbie due to him thinking that it will help make his father feel better after believing that she was the source of Stan's weight problem. Stan then decides to set Steve up on a date with Veronica, thinking that she is much more suitable for his son due to her not being fat like Debbie.

Meanwhile, as Francine is able to take out the garbage and drops an empty bottle onto the swimming pool cover, she accidentally falls into the pool while trying to get the bottle, to which she and Hayley both shockingly discover all the uneaten food that Stan had gotten rid of, realizing that he never actually ate any of it when they tried to feed him.

During Steve's date with Veronica, Roger ends up going out with Debbie in the same restaurant at the same time while pretending to be part of an Anne Rice fan club. After realizing that Steve is also in the restaurant with them, he decides to try to make Steve jealous by trying to make out with Debbie. Just then, Francine and Hayley both show up to confront Stan after they discovered his secret, and Steve becomes quite upset with his father after realizing that breaking up with Debbie didn't help him in any way. Steve then explains to Stan how much he loved Debbie, and that he didn't care if she was fat or thin while also expressing his displeasure of Stan's beliefs about how people look. Debbie, who was in the same room as Steve, is able to hear everything and the two are happily reunited again, much to Roger's unhappiness. When Stan realizes how happy the two of them are together, he starts to feel bad on both the inside and the outside, and he decides to start eating for real by dining on some rolls in the restaurant, which also causes Zack to physically disappear, ending Stan's anorexia while he is being reunited with his family.

Reception

The episode was watched by a total of 7.71 million people; this made it the third most-watched show on Animation Domination that night, losing to The Simpsons and Family Guy which had 9.23 million viewers.^[2] Daniel Solomon of Cinema Blend gave the episode a positive review, saying "The best of the season is early, in an episode entitled “The American Dad After-School Special.” Steve's new girlfriend is fat, and Stan hates that so much that he becomes anorexic. The device that the writers use to display Stan's problem is both a visual metaphor for the distorted self-image of people with anorexia, as well as a narrative twist for the audience. At the end of the episode the best of the throwaway celebrity quips is made, when Stan says he doesn't mind who Steve dates, even if she has “Kirsten Dunst teeth.""^[3]