The intelligent design of the "Family Guy" (9/24/05)
Dismal ratings convinced Fox to boot the cartoon comedy Family Guy in 2002, but after ravenous fans devoured the DVDs of the Griffin clan's adventures, the network brought the series back–much to the surprise of creator Seth MacFarlane. Now that it's a hit on TV, MacFarlane's giving the DVD devotees a thank-you note with the straight-to-DVD Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin–the Untold Story ($30), which tells the tale of the Brit-accent baby's desire to prove that fat slob Peter Griffin is not his real father. With the cocktail-swilling family dog, Brian, in tow, Stewie flees to San Francisco to track down the man he thinks is his dad.
How are you like Stewie?
Only in my frustration with the world around me. He's a guy easily set off by the smallest thing, but–with the exception of George Bush–I'm not.
Is there a big temptation to get into political humor?
We try to stay away from it. Every once in a while we do it, but it's very easy as a Hollywood liberal to get on a soapbox. We have two stories this season. One is on the teaching of intelligent design in schools. Peter's Irish-Catholic father comes to town and gets the school to start teaching creationism. This sends Peter on a journey to find religion, and he ends up worshiping the Fonz. And we're doing one on gay marriage. Brian's gay cousin, Jasper, is getting married to his Filipino boyfriend, but Mayor Adam West is passing a law against gay marriage. We dance around the fact that one of them is a dog, and no one reacts to that [aspect], which is probably how it would actually be in this country.
Now that you're back on the air after being canceled, does Fox feel so guilty?
What people forget is that they kept the show on longer than other networks would have. It was probably the right move to cancel it at the time. And it was the right move to bring it back after it developed an audience through the DVDs.
I'm amazed you can get by with some of the stuff on the show, like calling that character "Asian reporter Trisha Takanawa."
That one came out of one of our writers noticing that the white people on broadcast news are always behind the anchor desk, and they send the minority reporters out into the field in danger.
So no one tells you what you can't do?
The FCC is more restrictive than it used to be. The trigger finger is at the ready. The message to us is it isn't sex and violence that's the problem–it's poop jokes. Public enemy No. 1 is doody. I feel like I'm living in The Twilight Zone. I want to do a mass mailing of the book Everybody Poops. It's tough for me to believe that's the real problem.
Toilet humor is getting chopped, then?
There was an episode called "Blind Ambition" last season. Peter wants to beat a world record, so he decides to eat the most nickels. We had a scene with him sitting on the john as many cartoon characters have in the past, and he's talking to Lois. But all you hear is a slot machine payout. That's benign compared to what you'd see on the local news, but it didn't make it. An example of something that did get in that episode is that [a character] is lying naked with a ceiling fan near his genitals while his friends show him pictures of women to help wean him from sex. I don't make the rules.
The nice thing about the DVD releases is that they're really financially important, so we've taken a hint from that and made them creatively important, too. So we have one edit for the DVD and another for the network airing. It's great that there's a venue for that. This release is an experiment, and if it does well, the next one might be a theatrical release.
Any idea of what that would be like?
It's something we haven't figured out yet. It's difficult to translate something that works in a half-hour to a two-hour format. Remember the Family Ties movie from the 1980s?
Unfortunately, no.
The show was a wonderfully written family comedy, but the TV movie was in Russia, and somehow [in the plot] they got possession of a microfilm. It could have been James Bond instead of the Seavers. So we don't want to do that. –Vicky Hallett
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