Roger from American Dad!: The Area 51 Alien in the Attic and His Personas

American Dad! premiered on Fox on February 6, 2005, in the slot after Super Bowl XXXIX, and its alien was in the first scene. Roger, voiced by co-creator Seth MacFarlane in a drawl he has described as an impression of Paul Lynde, lives in the attic of the Smith house in Langley Falls, Virginia, drinks wine from breakfast, reads magazines, and is not allowed outside. Stan Smith, the CIA agent whose house it is, freed him from Area 51 four years earlier and took him in out of obligation; the rest of the family, Francine, Hayley, Steve and the goldfish Klaus, treat him as a relative who cannot be asked to leave. The show was created by MacFarlane with Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman, ran on Fox for nine seasons, and moved to TBS in 2014, where it has continued past three hundred episodes; Roger has been the character the writers reach for most, because he can be anyone.

His design is the Grey of the abduction books with the dignity removed. He has the enlarged bald head, the large black eyes and the slight frame of the being on the cover of Communion, drawn grey-green, with a belly, a slouch and no clothes, and the contrast between that face and the character's behaviour is the joke: the alien who was supposed to be the silent examiner on the table is a vain, drunk, petty, self-dramatizing lodger who steals from the family and cries when a soap opera ends.

Roger's origin is told in pieces that do not agree, and the show is happy about that. The pilot establishes the Area 51 rescue and the debt to Stan; later episodes tie his arrival to the Roswell crash of 1947 and give him sixty years in government custody before Stan found him, a stretch he describes as mostly boredom. Members of his species appear in a few episodes, in ships, and one storyline sends the family's neighbour Jeff off Earth on one of them; the accounts of why Roger was sent here, or whether he was sent at all, change from episode to episode, and the writers have said in interviews that continuity is not the point of a character who is a different person every week.

Two facts about the species do stay fixed. Roger is very old by human standards, having been on Earth since the 1940s without visibly ageing, and, in a 2007 episode, the show establishes that his kind must be unpleasant to survive: when Roger tries to be nice for a stretch he sickens, because his species stores bile that has to be released as cruelty. It is the show's explanation for its own character, a biological excuse for the worst person in the house, and it is also the point at which a Grey stops being a Grey. The real Greys of the abduction literature are described as emotionless; Roger is nothing but emotion, all of it about himself.

The disguises began as a plot necessity, an alien needing a wig to buy groceries, and became the character's whole identity. Roger keeps a closet of costumes and a filing system of personas, each with a name, a job and a backstory, and the series has run through hundreds: Jeannie Gold the wedding planner, Sidney Huffman the churchgoer who believes he is a separate person, Max Jets the millionaire, Kevin Ramage, Dr. Penguin, a whole police department's worth of detectives. The personas can be so complete that Roger forgets he is playing them, and several episodes turn on a persona having committed crimes Roger does not remember. Ricky Spanish, introduced in 2012, is the extreme case: a persona so despised that the entire town has a grievance, and Roger, retrying the role, discovers why one enemy at a time.

The device lets the show do something no other sitcom alien could. ALF was one character and Mork was one character; Roger is a repertory company, and the alien body under the wig is the only constant. It also inverts the old trope of the alien hiding in plain sight. Roger is not passing as human to survive; he passes as human because human beings are more interesting to be than an alien in an attic, and the show, over twenty seasons, has let him be nearly all of them.

Roger is the Roswell alien with a drinking problem, and the show assumes its audience knows the reference. The Roswell incident of July 1947 produced, in the retellings of the 1980s and 1990s, a recovered craft and recovered bodies; the claim that at least one occupant survived and was held by the government appears in the Majestic 12 papers, in the 1995 Alien Autopsy film and in a long tradition of stories about a living alien kept at a Nevada base. Area 51 entered that tradition through Bob Lazar's 1989 television interviews about reverse-engineering saucers at a site he called S-4, and by 2005 a Grey in a government cage was a stock image. American Dad! took the stock image, gave it a wine glass and put it in an attic in the CIA's home town.

The design descends from the same source as every other television Grey. The Greys in fiction article follows the face from the Hill abduction to the Communion cover to The X-Files, and Roger belongs to the generation of parodies that face produced once it was familiar enough to be funny: Paul (2011), the Kang and Kodos of The Simpsons, the aliens of South Park. The Grey aliens article covers the reports the design came from, and ALF is the sitcom ancestor, the alien lodger hidden from a military task force twenty years before Roger was hidden from Stan's own employer.