Quick interview with Seth MacFarlane
Good interview with Seth MacFarlane:
The man behind the voices of Peter Griffin, Stewie Griffin, Glenn Quagmire and Brian, the intellectual, martini-drinking dog explains all…
For fans of Family Guy, that’s virtually every aorta of the beating heart of the show, and it’s the fans that MacFarlane and his team of writers owe their very existence too.
Cancelled after just a couple of seasons in 2002, high DVD sales and large viewing figures for the reruns on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim convinced FOX to resume the show in 2005: it’s one of the few television shows to be canceled and revived by the power of its fans, and is now in production on it’s sixth season.
Speaking by phone as he drove to the production offices, MacFarlane talked about Family Guy and a new live action sitcom that he is producing featuring Rob Cordrey from The Daily Show:
“It’s called The Winner, and is written by Family Guy writer Ricky Blitt. He wrote a pilot for it about three or four years ago, but the single-camera filming didn’t work with an audience. I thought it was so funny and I vowed that if I could ever resurrect the show, if I ever had some pull, then I would. Now it’s multi-camera, and a million times better.”
MacFarlane has his hands busy with Family Guy and American Dad! so he’s just a producer on this show – “a kind of overseer” – but he explained that it’s in the same tradition as his animation favorites:
“(The Winner) is an odd combination of racy and traditional. Seinfeld was sort of the mould, but this is maybe a little edgier. Cordrey is hysterically funny.”
Racy and traditional are certainly words that can be applied to Family Guy. Much stronger ones have been applied, as their battles with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) – famously parodied in song-and-dance in one episode - have proved:
“The people who get offended aren’t the ones you think, just the hardcore, right-wing Christian folks who are offended by everything. Every week we get letters saying “Jesus this, Jesus that” and “You’re all going to Hell”. We don’t single out anyone (on the show), whereas if it were, say, the Chinese and nothing else, there’d be trouble. We always poke fun at everybody, because no-one wants to be in a bad spot.”
When he was asked what the reaction had been to the show around the world and whether it differed from country to country, he was stumped for a moment:
“That’s a good question. I can’t imagine that anyone is more offended by it than people in America – mind you, we don’t show it in South Korea. There’s been good feedback from the UK, and Germany.”
MacFarlane happily admits that the humour of the show owes a lot to vaudeville: “and there’s a lot of English humor in it too, like Monty Python”.
There are also some similarities to 80s British sitcom The Young Ones, and there’s a huge nod to the parody and spoofs associated with the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker movies such as Naked Gun and the TV series Police Squad!
Tags: seth macfarlane, family guy
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POSTED IN: Family Guy in Real Life
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