How Family Guy Creator Seth MacFarlane Felt About The Show's Cancellation
Seth MacFarlane, star and creator of "Family Guy," thinks the show has reached such inertia that there's no real reason to cancel it. Until people get sick of "Family Guy," MacFarlane has said, it'll be on the air — and they haven't tired of the Griffin family in the 25 years since the show debuted. Speaking to the LA Times in 2024, MacFarlane explained:
"At this point, I don't see a good reason to stop. People still love it. It makes people happy and it funds some good causes. It's a lot of extraneous cash that you can donate to Rainforest Trust and you can still go out to dinner that night. There was a time when I thought, it's time to wrap it up. At this point, we've reached escape velocity."
Like one of MacFarlane's key inspirations, "The Simpsons," the animated sitcom "Family Guy" has been around so long (and has kept its cast/crew in such regular employment) that it's past the point where it can pull off a deserving grand finale. MacFarlane's vision of unending "Family Guy" is funny, though, since the show has faced cancellation — twice, even.
"Family Guy" was briefly canceled in May 2000 after its second season, reportedly due to competitive time slots that made it difficult for the show to post quality ratings. It then got a quick reprieve for a 22-episode third season, aired from 2001 to 2002. (The controversial season 3 finale, "When You Wish Upon A Weinstein," debuted on DVD in 2003.) "Family Guy" seemingly ended again after season 3, but strong DVD sales and popular reruns on Adult Swim convinced Fox to revive it. As MacFarlane noted to the LA Times, this happened because his deal with Fox was still in effect, and in fact the network renewed that deal to renew "Family Guy." Come May 2005, "Family Guy" season 4 premiered and the show has been putting out new episodes since.
How did MacFarlane feel, though, about his first show getting canned when it happened? In the aforementioned LA Times interview, he admitted he "had nothing to compare it to" and said: "It was the first show I'd ever pitched, and it got picked up. I thought, 'Oh, I guess this is normal.' Which it certainly was not. When I got canceled, I was like, 'OK, I guess this is normal too.' But it wasn't like they're kicking you to the curb. It was, 'We still want to be in business with you.'"
Little did MacFarlane and Fox know that they'd soon be back in the "Family Guy" business.
How Family Guy has referenced its own cancellation
In a January 2024 appearance on the Logically Speaking podcast, MacFarlane recalled the experience of the "Family Guy" cancellation and feeling "very excited" by the revival.
"I got called into Fox and they said, listen we kind of want to, and I quote, 'sneak ['Family Guy'] back into production.' And I was like I can't believe this is happening, I thought this was dead, I thought this was gone. I tried a couple things in between and hadn't really found anything that worked because it just felt unfinished."
While MacFarlane overall sounds pretty gracious towards Fox in recent interviews, the show itself strikes a different chord. "Family Guy" season 4 premiere "North by North Quahog" opens with Peter (voiced by MacFarlane, incidentally) informing his family they've been canceled. In Peter's words, Fox needs to empty its schedule for new shows, before listing off every show Fox had canceled recently (including "The Pitts" which MacFarlane wrote). "If all those shows go down the tubes we might have a shot," he concludes, both rubbing in how "Family Guy" came back and mocking Fox's quick trigger finger on canceling shows.
The "Family Guy" parody of "The Empire Strikes Back" ("Something, Something, Something, Dark Side") has a similar joke in its opening crawl. It goes from repeating the text in the actual film to lampooning how Fox let George Lucas keep the "Star Wars" merchandising rights because they had little faith in the movie's success.
"Are you listening, stockholders? How can you invest in a company that makes such short-sighted decisions? I mean, this is the same company that canceled 'Family Guy' twice. Who's running that joint? Monkeys?
These jokes are clearly made in good humor and with the plausible deniability of being jokes. Fox already tacitly admitted its mea culpa in canceling "Family Guy" by bringing it back, so no harm done in saying the decision was a mistake.