Seth MacFarlane’s $2 Billion Family Guy Empire

By: Josh DeanMon Oct 13, 2008 at 5:45 PM

photograph by Jill Greenberg

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane nabbed a record $100 million deal with Fox and is teaching Google new ways to exploit the Web. Could this crude frat-boy cartoonist really be a model for business in the postmodern age?

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Photo by Jill Greenberg | Clothing: Boss by Hugo Boss (henley), Joe's Jeans (pants), Jockey (T-shirt)

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Photo by Jill Greenberg

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MacFarlane doesn't argue with the notion that many of his jokes border on offensive, but the notion that the content is actually offensive irks him. Each episode is vetted by a team of Fox censors editing with the FCC in mind. But beyond that, he contends, "There's an enormous amount of self-policing that goes on and a lot of intelligent conversations about whether a show is worth doing. I would stack the ethics of one of my writers up against the average Washington bureaucrat on censorship any day." MacFarlane is mystified in particular by the two things that most upset the FCC -- two basic elements of human life that, in his view, are far less sensitive than, say, religion. "For the FCC, it's sexual references," he says. "But even more than that, shit jokes. Any time we even show somebody on a toilet, we get in trouble."

MacFarlane doesn’t argue with the notion that his jokes border on offensive. But the notion that they are actually offensive irks him.

Which brings us back to the writers room. A source of ongoing consternation is Stewie's inability to master the commode. MacFarlane assumes the child's erudite voice and says, speaking in character to his fellow children, "I'd like to make an announcement: It's the elephant in the room. I made a stool. Now let's just all go about our business as if nothing happened, and it'll take care of itself in due time."

Most everyone in the room laughs. The joke is in.

*****

Seth MacFarlane was basically fated to this life. His middle name, Woodbury, was chosen by his mother as an homage to the town drunk back in Kent, Connecticut. "Some of the foulest jokes I've ever heard," he has said, "came from my mother." MacFarlane started drawing at 2 and published his first cartoon, "Walter Crouton," in a local paper at the age of 8. At 18, he left for the Rhode Island School of Design and, after his adviser sent his thesis film, "Life of Larry" (starring a lovable schlub with a tolerant wife and a talking dog), off to Hanna-Barbera, he was hired to work as an animator and writer on shows like Dexter's Laboratory and Johnny Bravo. In 1996, he created a sequel to "Life of Larry" that aired in prime time on the Cartoon Network. Fox development executives took notice and hired him away to work on interstitials to run between sketches on Mad TV.

A few years later, Fox asked MacFarlane, then 25, to develop an animated pilot, giving him a scant $50,000 to do it. MacFarlane emerged three months later with a nearly completed pilot, for which he had drawn every frame and voiced every character.

Fox bought the show, gave MacFarlane a reported $2-million-per-season contract, and premiered Family Guy in the highest-profile slot possible, following the 1999 Super Bowl. He was the youngest person ever to be given his own primetime network show.

It drew 22 million viewers but then became a sort of network foster child. For the next two years, Fox execs moved the show all over the schedule, trying it in 11 time slots, including in the death zone opposite Friends. Despite the fact that Family Guy tracked well with young men, the show's ratings were low. Fox canceled it in 2000, revived it briefly the next year, then canceled it again.

But a funny thing happened. The show lived on over at the Cartoon Network, with even edgier versions specially edited by MacFarlane. Regard for the show was so low that Fox essentially gave the Cartoon Network the first 50 episodes for free; Fox simply asked for promotion of the show's DVD in exchange. (They were having trouble persuading retailers to stock it -- another in a list of miscalculations that seems inconceivable in retrospect.) Family Guy's audience, ignored at every turn, followed the show to the Cartoon Network, dug in, and swelled, regularly beating both Letterman and Leno in the desirable young-male demographic. When Fox released the first 28 episodes on a series of DVDs in 2003, it sold more than 2.5 million copies. (In 2005, a straight-to-DVD movie called Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story sold about 3.5 million copies, bringing in almost $80 million.)

Twentieth Century Fox TV president Gary Newman (now chairman) summoned MacFarlane to his office in 2004 and did the unthinkable: He asked him to restart production. "I had gone into the meeting not knowing why I was going in there," MacFarlane recalls. "He said, 'We'd like to put this back into production,' and I almost fell out of my chair."

David Goodman says that when Family Guy was initially canceled, MacFarlane told him Goodman's job would be safe if it ever returned. "I'd been on 14 canceled TV shows," Goodman recalls. "They never come back. It's never happened before -- ever."