Seth MacFarlane: Playboy Interview

On its website, the Parents Television Council explains that Family Guy “depends heavily on oblique sexual innuendo and sexual themes such as incest, bestiality and pedophilia.” This description is meant to express disapproval, but for millions of Seth MacFarlane fans, innuendo is central to the show’s appeal, along with profanity, nudity, violence and musical numbers.

An animation phenom raised in Kent, Connecticut by two teachers and educated at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, MacFarlane, following an apprenticeship at Hanna-Barbera, signed a contract with Fox at the age of 24, making him the youngest executive producer in television. Fox, having revived prime-time animation a decade earlier with The Simpsons, debuted Family Guy after Super Bowl XXXIII in 1999, and 22 million people met the Griffins: oafish dad Peter and his wife, Lois, a rowdy former Miss Teen Rhode Island; teenagers Chris, a dim oval hated by schoolmates, and Meg, a homely blob disdained by her family; plus Brian, a cerebral dog who talks in a deep baritone and overindulges in alcohol, and baby Stewie, a devious tyrant who inexplicably has a theatrical British accent.

Three years later, with ratings for the show dropping, Fox canceled Family Guy. But repeats on the Cartoon Network drew stellar ratings compared with other cable shows, and DVD boxed sets sold more than 3 million copies. So, like the villain in a cheesy horror film, Family Guy rose again: Executives at Fox changed course, and the show returned to the air in May 2005, three years after cancellation. MacFarlane signed another contract that included a second animated show for Fox, American Dad. Last year he renewed with the network for a reported $100 million, making him the highest-paid writer-producer in television.

Fans love Family Guy for its unpredictable mix of the puerile and the surreal: In the middle of an episode, Peter may get into an extended fight with a chicken—one of the show’s signature gags—or warble a bouncy number called “You Have AIDS.” (After the show aired, the executive director of AIDS Project Los Angeles called the tune “inexcusable.”) For those who prefer waterboarding jokes, American Dad tackles political themes with a frat-boyish flavor, centering, of course, around a terrorism-obsessed CIA agent and a flamboyant extraterrestrial. MacFarlane, 35, unmarried and with a string of glamorous Hollywood ex-girlfriends, enjoys the limelight, sometimes even acting in such shows as Gilmore Girls and Star Trek: Enterprise.

This fall MacFarlane will get his third show on the air when Family Guy spins off The Cleveland Show, starring the Griffins’ African American neighbors. Contributing editor Rob Tannenbaum met MacFarlane in L.A. for three separate interviews. “His office isn’t what you’d expect,” Tannenbaum reports. “There’s a keyboard, stacks of classical CDs and film scores, movie posters—it’s almost like TV isn’t his first love. Aside from his perverse sense of humor, he’s almost anachronistic in terms of his interests and values.

“He left his office for a meeting and offered to get together again that night at a jazz club in the Valley. With a self-conscious laugh he warned he might be sweaty when I saw him because he’d be coming from a tap dance lesson—‘ As if I haven’t given you enough reason so far to think I’m gay.’ The key to MacFarlane is his resolve, whether he’s learning tap or writing a show that is, as he said admiringly about astronomer Carl Sagan, ‘an antidote to the superstition, fundamentalism and mysticism that runs rampant in this country.’ MacFarlane is a scientist and a moralist in the guise of a fearless comedian.”

PLAYBOY: This year is the 10th anniversary of Family Guy’s debut. What do you remember about that first night?
MacFARLANE: The show debuted after the 1999 Super Bowl. It was a dull game, really one-sided. I was fried from working on that first season, so I was excited to be out of my office. And I was annoyed it was such a lousy game. That was back when Fox actually spent money—when the word economy didn’t come up in every fucking sentence. Maybe that’s why Fox put George Bush in office, because it knew he would ruin the economy and Fox would have an excuse not to spend money. [laughs] Execs flew a lot of their talent to the Super Bowl on the Fox jet: Jason Priestley, Ben Stiller, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Love Hewitt. I was in awe. I couldn’t really walk up and talk to Jason Priestley. Now I would be a little less intimidated.

PLAYBOY: Did you watch that first Family Guy broadcast?
MacFARLANE: I watched on a Watchman on the bus back to the hotel. I was sick of it by then. I knew every joke by heart.

PLAYBOY: Having the Super Bowl as a lead-in is a pretty safe bet.
MacFARLANE: I was prepped that the show was going to be huge. The next day we got a call from the network that the show had done huge numbers. The following week the ratings dropped off a bit, as we expected, but it still did great. It continued to do extremely well airing after The Simpsons. Then Fox got overconfident and moved it to Thursday night, and that’s when all the trouble started. That was the beginning of the end of the show.

PLAYBOY: What shows were you up against on Thursday nights?
MacFARLANE: A lot of stiff competition. It was up against Friends, Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at the height of its popularity, the moon landing, the Olympics, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11.

PLAYBOY: It’s almost as though the network hated you.
MacFARLANE: The strange thing was the network liked the show. It pulled it off the air because nobody was watching the damn thing—when nobody’s watching a TV show, it generally doesn’t stay on the air. But it stayed on longer than it would otherwise have, partly because we went out of our way to be respectful and to be team players, and I think that was rewarded.

PLAYBOY: The first episode—which you wrote—has a pretty shocking scene: Peter Griffin is watching Philadelphia, and he thinks it’s a comedy. When Tom Hanks says “I have AIDS,” Peter laughs. Was the AIDS joke a deliberate way of setting a tone for the show?
MacFARLANE: I think that was a way to really stick it to those arrogant bastards with HIV. No, that was a gag from my student film in college, which was sort of a rough version of Family Guy. It got a huge laugh at the senior screening. It wasn’t a conscious decision to shock; I just thought it was funny. And you know, that’s certainly not a joke you would see on The Simpsons. That show had taken edginess in prime-time animation to a certain level. I was trying to take it to the next level. The AIDS joke is one instance.
There was one joke we had to cut out of the pilot. When Peter is taking communion at church, he takes a sip of wine and says, “This is the blood of Christ? Man, that guy must have been wasted 24/7.” Fox made us take that out, so we put it in another episode. Then we found out the network wanted to take it out just for the premiere and was going to put it back in for reruns. So that gag is now in two episodes.