‘Family Guy’: The Little (Big) Show That Could

One hit animated series? Two guys named “Seth”? and a legion of fiercely devoted fans.

“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane and actor Seth Green (the voice of Chris Griffin) sat down with Access Hollywood recently to talk about their beloved (and often, quite controversial) comedy.

“People are intense about the show,” said Green of their loyal fan base. “But it’s a wide variety of people too. I’m always surprised — from little kids to older people. You think it’s all college kids, but it’s little kids and big kids too. When I say ‘big kids,’ I mean like your grandma.”

It’s that kind of irreverent humor that endears the show to so many people — people who have revived the show from cancellation not once, but twice! “Family Guy” was cancelled by FOX in 2000, and then again in 2002, but strong DVD sales and high ratings for reruns on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim convinced FOX to resume the show in 2005.

But not only did DVD sales help save the show, it also opened up more possibilities for the creators to get away with things that just wouldn’t fly on network television.

“There’s the occasional joke that’s too racist or too offensive to people with a particular disease,” MacFarlane remarked. “There are things that we do now that are strictly for the show — there’s one for television, and there’s one for the DVD. We’re going through a bit of dark ages as far as FCC restrictions — there’s a lot of things we can’t do now that we used to be able to do when the show started. So to fight that, we do DVD versions in which you can kind of see the show untouched.”

MacFarlane admitted, though, that they can generally get away with more than the average sitcom can because of “Family Guy’s” format.

“The kind of [example] that I use is, ‘Peter & Lois get into a fist fight.’ Because it’s a cartoon, you can get away with that. I think if Ray punched Deborah on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ it would be kind of funny the first few blows — but then it would probably get a little offensive.”

He added, laughing: “We did actually [use ‘Raymond’] at one point — Deborah breaks a bottle and comes at Ray with the sharp end.”

MacFarlane not only produces and writes for the show, he also voices multiple characters — including Peter, Brian, Quagmire and fan-favorite Stewie. To say that he works hard is an understatement.

“It’s always an enormous amount of work,” he remarked, “but each year it gets a tiny bit easier… It’s still in many ways a 7-day-a-week job to get this thing done. It’s virtually an impossible thing to do, a primetime animated series. Yet somehow there are a bunch of people that do it. I don’t know how ‘The Simpsons’ do it for as long as they’ve been doing it, but it’s just a very intense process that in many ways gets easier when you get canceled.”