Though no TV show will likely ever eclipse The Simpsons in terms of delivering top-tier Halloween episodes — with this year’s excellent entry being no exception — I think second place goes to Bob’s Burgers for its annual spooky-season stories. Without ever losing its heart or going fully supernatural, Bob’s nails its Halloween vibes with both the adults and the kids, and I look forward to those (and the Christmas eps) as much as I anticipate anything else. But they sadly may be not be around much longer.
Bob’s Burgers creator Loren Bouchard talked to CinemaBlend following the animated comedy’s gobsmacking achievement of its 300th episode hitting the 2025 TV schedule. Fans know the show isn’t going away completely, given Fox renewed it and others for four additional seasons earlier this year, but when I asked Bouchard about how much importance he puts on Halloween installments, he implied that Fox may be shifting its airing schedule in the future.
He first pointed out that Halloween stories are indeed a significant part of the process at this point of the show’s run, both on a personal level and in terms of the show’s legacy. In the creator’s words:
It's a hard question to answer. I'm going to tell you two things. Both are true. Number one: we love them. It's important to me because it's been fun from the beginning, and it gives me a connection to when I was a kid and specials would come on, like the Peanuts Thanksgiving special, or the Peanuts Christmas. That pleasure of writing a holiday episode does feel like it's going even beyond — we were already in the shadow of The Simpsons in a great way, happy to be on Sunday night on Fox and and in the company of these other adult animated shows.
With classic episodes like "The Hauntening," "Nightmare on Ocean Avenue Street," and "For Whom the Doll Toes," Bob's Burgers technically has enough Halloween stories already that the show doesn't need to keep making them. That said, nobody needs ice cream or even hamburgers, but the world would be way worse off without those, too.
Loren Bouchard continued, addressing the potential shift that may impact the show in the future:
Then when you do a holiday special, you get to kind of invoke this even longer tradition of animated holiday specials, going back to the Rankin/Bass specials and, like I said, Snoopy and all that. I will add., I don't know that we'll always be on in the fall, and if we aren't, it will be sad, because we won't get to have that feeling of delivering a broadcast television show a week before, two weeks before a holiday, with a very special episode.
While he doesn't say it directly, one could infer that Fox is planning on shifting Bob's Burgers back to debuting in January or February after the midseason hiatus has concluded. Or, alternately, the show may get tapped to anchor the network's summer lineup that leads into the Fall TV season. The reasoning for that, one might speculate, could be to bring Family Guy back into the normal flow alongside The Simpsons. But for now it's unclear.
Loren Bouchard did offer up an excellent olive branch of hope to hang onto, thankfully, by saying if the show does shift away from the fall in the future, there's potential room to craft Halloween stories in other ways. As he put it:
But that's okay, and if we aren't, at some future date, on in the fall and we can't do that nice cadence that we've become used to of giving doing holiday episodes, we'll figure out a way to keep it going. Maybe straight to streaming or something like that.
That idea isn't even that much of a longshot, really, considering Family Guy dropped its own Hulu-exclusive Halloween special "A LIttle Fright Music" this year. And The Simpsons' team has been creating streaming content for Disney+ for years now. So if we as a fandom start calling for it now, then we can possibly convince the powers that be to order up a Bob's Burgers special episode before the current season has finished airing. [Rubs hands together mischievously.]
For now, though, Bob's Burgers fans can stream every past Halloween episode and beyond via Hulu subscription, and new episodes air Sunday nights on Fox at 9:30 p.m. ET.
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