The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Family Guy – the show they couldn’t hang. Canceled twice and yet here it is, celebrating its 100th episode this week in the US (hopefully the BBC will continue to pick it up in the UK) with a story entitled “Stewie Kills Lois”. For any show, especially an animated one aimed at a late evening audience, making 100 episodes is pretty special, but when your show has been canned twice by the studio and episodes regularly draw huge criticism from all sorts of outraged groups it is even more remarkable – victory is theirs! The Hollywood Reporter has dedicated a whole slot of articles looking into the show (which I have to say I now look forward to more than the Simpsons, heresy I know, but there you go), including an interview with Seth McFarlane, where, inevitably, the question of some of the often close-to-the-bone humour came up:

“THR: But are there times, even after the fact, where you fear you’ve maybe gone too far from a moral standpoint? I mean, you’ve got a character in Herbert who is cast as a “loveable pedophile.” You had a JFK Pez dispenser where the candy came out the top of his head. You had a newborn left for dead in a dumpster on prom night singing mournfully about being abandoned.

MacFarlane: (laughing) And your point is?

Reporter: I’m wondering where your own personal line is. Does being funny trump all — the means be damned?

MacFarlane: In a word, yes. We have a very democratic process on what’s funny and what isn’t at our table reads, which each week draw a really big crowd of our writers, producers, voices and staff. They’re some of the funniest people I know. I trust their taste. They represent a pretty impressive cross-section. Anything that gets a gasp rather than a laugh probably won’t stay in the script. We’ve even done a few jokes where we kind of dance around 9/11, because they got a good response at the table read. Would we do a 9/11 joke the week after 9/11? No. You use your judgment. We’re not out to simply piss people off. It’s not about being as offensive as we can be. It’s about being funny.

THR: And so you never wrestle with your moral conscience over any of the material?

MacFarlane: Moral? No. It’s a cartoon. If a joke crosses the line, if there’s anything that’s just too crude, it means we aren’t trying hard enough. And it won’t survive the table read.”