ALF follows an amateur radio signal to Earth and crash-lands into the garage of the Tanners. The Tanners are a suburban middle class family consisting of the social worker Willie, his wife Kate, their teenage daughter Lynn, younger son Brian, and the cat Lucky.
Unsure what to do, the Tanners take ALF into their home and hide him from the Alien Task Force (a part of the U.S. military) and their nosy neighbors (the Ochmoneks), until he can repair his spacecraft. He generally hid in the kitchen. It was eventually revealed that ALF's home planet Melmac exploded because of a catastrophe involving nuclear bombs. ALF in Episode four of season one is trying to convince the president of USA to stop the nuclear program as he is scared that Earth might share Melmac's fate. ALF was off the planet because he was part of the Melmac Orbit Guard. Gordon Shumway (AKA ALF) is homeless, but he isn't the last survivor of his species. He became a permanent member of the family, although his culture shock, survivor guilt, general boredom, despair, and loneliness frequently caused difficulty for the Tanners.
Gordon Shumway is an alien nicknamed ALF (for Alien Life Form) by William Tanner in the pilot episode. ALF was born on October 28, 1756, though he mentions that his birthday is in August in Episode 7 ("Help Me Rhonda") on the Lower East Side of the planet Melmac. Melmac was located six parsecs past the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster and had a green sky, pink grass and a purple sun. The commonly-used currency is Wernicks, and the substance we call lint is as precious on Melmac as gold is on Earth.
ALF's body is covered with rust-colored fur (he once described his color as burnt sienna). He has a rippled snout, facial moles, eight stomachs, his heart is apparently located in his head, and he likes to eat cats and had a best friend on his home planet named Malhar Naik. He attended high school for 122 years and was captain of a Bouillabaisseball team (which is played on ice using shellfish as a ball).
ALF is troublesome, sarcastic and cynical, and sometimes he puts himself at the risk of being discovered while doing some of his often unintentional pranks. However, if things have gone too far, he does as much as possible to make up for his mistakes, generally with good results. In one episode, he tried to help Brian to gain confidence during a school show, because he was too afraid to perform. In another occasion, he helped Dorothy to deal with Sparky's death and move on, and accept Whizzer's friendship. And he also helped Rachel Ochmonek with a depression she suffered, because she became the laughing stock in a TV program. He has at least two cousins "Pretty Boy Shumway" and "Blinky", and has had liposuction. During a bout of amnesia, he believed he was an insurance salesman named Wayne Schlagel.
