After promising not to, Peter gets drunk at a stag party, and ends up sleeping on the kitchen table. The next day at work, Peter is too tired to work the assembly line, and falls asleep on the job; letting some dangerous toys slip through. He gets fired, and after a few days unemployed, he files for welfare. However, his first check is for $150,000...a week. He goes on a spending binge, and tells Lois that he got a big raise. But when she finds out it’s the taxpayers money, she demands he return it. Peter chooses to do this in his own way, by dumping it out of a blimp over the Super Bowl. But when he is arrested, his family must come to the rescue.

Meg is now 16 and Peter must reluctantly give up TV-time to teach her to drive. His teaching skills aren’t exactly brushed up, and Meg unsurprisingly fails her test. On the way home Peter is too distracted by the TV in other people’s windows that he crashes the car into the local cable satellite. When angry cable-less locals confront him about it, he blames the whole thing on Meg (promising her a convertible if she keeps quiet). Meg is now the outcast of the town, and a TV-less Peter now decides to spend more time with his family; which isn’t as great for them as they had thought. Meanwhile, Stewie refuses to eat broccoli and plans to turn the broken cable satellite into a weather control device in order to wipe it all out.

When Peter loses Stewie’s 1st birthday party reservations at the hottest place in Quahog a furious Lois demands an explanation, and he tells her that he has a better party planned. Peter now has to plan a fantastic party within a couple of hours, and plans to steal the circus in order to do so. To make matters worse, Peter allows Meg to go to her new friends party, which unbeknownst to her is actually a cult mass suicide. Meanwhile, Stewie believes that the point of the birthday is for the man in white who delivered him at the hospital to come back and put him back in the womb, and plans to eliminate him first.

Peter gets a little too worked up at one of Chris’ soccer games and ends up punching a pregnant woman who appeared to be a man. He is put under house arrest, and while Lois assumes Peter will use this time to help out around the house and be with her, he decides to build a bar in their basement for all his buddies. But the plan backfires when Lois becomes a very popular (and sexy) lounge singer. Making Peter jealous. Meanwhile, Stewie composes a time machine in order to fast forward through his painful teething.

When Peter injures the star player on the company softball team he must find a replacement. While visiting the new neighbors, Joe and Bonnie, Peter learns that Joe is extremely good at baseball and asks that he play. But when Joe shows up at the game, Peter finds out that he is paralized from the waste down. Peter assumes this will mean Joe will be uncabable of doing a lot of things, and that people will feel sorry for him. But his world is shaken when Joe turns out to be very capable of doing everything in his wheelchair, and he becomes the talk of the town. This makes Peter jealous, and so he decides he must one-up him...by stopping a bank robbery. Meanwhile, Meg tries to impress the new neighbor’s son, and Stewie tries to uncover the mystery of the wheelchair.

Chris hates the Youth Scouts and decides to quit, but he is too ashamed to tell Peter why so he says that he was kicked out. A furious Peter packs up the family planning to go to New York in order to get Chris back in the scouts, but a wrong turn takes them to a Native Indian Casino where Lois becomes addicted to the slots and ends up loosing the car to the owners. In order to get it back Peter and Chris must go on a spiritual quest into the woods, where Peter gets some advice from the Fonz.

The summer heat is unbearable and Peter enters Brian in a dog show in order to win some extra money for a new air conditioner. At first Brian reluctantly agrees for the better of the family, but once at the dog show Brian can not go on with being treated like a dog, humiliating Peter and causing a rife between them. The fighting escalates so far that Brian runs away from home back out onto the street where Peter first found him. Out on the streets Brian’s dog instincts get the better of him and he gets arrested, sentenced to death. Peter puts the fighting aside and studies hard to get Brian out of jail, realizing the family needs him.