The Guy Behind Family Guy

THE SUBVERSIVE SETH MACFARLANE FINALLY ENJOYS BEING A HERO

In the production offices of every television sitcom since time immemorial, there has always been a place where its writers gather to trade punch lines, craft jokes and flex their creative muscles. Here, free from distrac­tions and protected from the poisonous doubt of terminally unfunny suits, they make the decisions that will determine whether their script will become a classic to rival Seinfeld's "The Contest" ("master of my domain") or pass as fleetingly as an episode of According tol'im. This hallowed chamber-so sacred that it is referred to in industry parlance only as the Room-is surprisingly indistinguishable from one show to the next: a bunch of ergonomic chairs around a long oak table, laptops lined up along its perimeter, maybe a few trophies or pieces of personal memorabilia scattered about.

Should you ever find yourself in such an inner sanctum, there are two easy ways to determine if you're in the companyof Family Cuy writers: (1) One of Jennifer Love Hewitt's bras is hanging on the wall, framed and signed by the fortuitously built actress herself, and (2) hardly any writing seems to be happening there.

On a late-summer afternoon a dozen or so men ranging in age from their late 20s to their late 40s struggle to pull a laugh from a single page of script. Family Cuy centers on a lovable cartoon loudmouth and question­able role model named Peter Griffin, who in this particular scene has decided to display his patriotism by driv­ing around in an SUV and letting it leak gasoline all over the road. If that gag didn't have you bursting at the seams, don't worry; it didn't light up the Room, either, and for several silent minutes the writers sit around fiddling with a replacement.

To prove how much Peter loves his country, one writer proposes, could he force his wife to dress like Betsy Ross^1 No laughs.

Could Peter don a red. white and blue Speedo. another writer suggests, and produce a majestic pyrotechnic display by farting out fireworks? A few laughs but still not enough.

The conversation veers off to gossip about a writer who is absent from the Room today (and whose name I will graciously omit), known for his excessive flatulence and for sitting on the same afghan at every meeting

"I wouldn't smell that thing for $50,000." says Kirker Butler, author of the script supposedly being rewrit­ten on this day. Almost offhandedly. David Goodman, one of the shows executive producers, replies he would

do it for a mere $60. Within moments the other occupants of the Room circle around Goodman, watching closely as the man contractually responsible for administer­ing the Room bends his head and takes two deep whiffs of the offending blanket. Mike Henry, a veteran producer and voice actor who has been with the show since its creation, records the moment with a small digital camera. The other writers cheer, and Butler hands Goodman his promised $60. "I think I'm dizzy." Goodman says to genuine laughs.

r of the Room. I have been tchingone writer in particular, a slightly ^^ man with squinty eyes, a wide grin. cuHcark hair with a bit of gel to hold itji place and the faintest stubble outline goatee around his chin. He is dressed :lue jeans and a T-shirt bearing the football-shaped head of the show's sin­ister baby. Stewie. captioned with one of the character's quaintly endearing slogans:

GOOD NEWS-l'vE DECIDED NOT TO KILL YOU. Despite

the T-shirt's message, there's nothing intimidating about the man wearing it. and he remains an innocent bystander as the afghan pile-on dissipates a few feet from where he sits (though he laughs loudly at the gross-out wager in a booming baritone game-show-host laugh). He reminds me of at least a dozen different people I knew in college, ordinary guys who kept their head down and quietly worked their ass off for years, later emerging into the sunlight as well-compensated aerospace engineers and government intelligence officers.

That's a fairly accurate summation of how life has worked out for Seth MacFarlane. the 33-year-old creator of Family Guy and the voice of the show-actually at least a dozen of the voices in this particular epi­sode—as well as its chief writer and artist and its sharp, ironic soul. Like MacFarlane on first inspection. Family Guy is easy to underestimate. What debuted on the Fox network in the winter of 1999 as an ani­mated send-up of the American nuclear family-blue-collar New England dad. stay-at-home mom. wisecracking kids, house­hold pet that talks and drinks martinis-has since evolved gradually and stealthily into a satirical shooting gallery where every con­ceivable element of contemporary culture is used for target practice. If Seinfeld was about nothing, Family Guy is about every-thing-make that anything.

The episode MacFarlane and his staff are revising. "Padre de Familia." superfi­cially tells the story of how Peter's brief, disastrous surge of patriotism leads him to discover he's actually an illegal immigrant from Mexico But the plot is just a frame-

work for the show to mock everything from post-9/11 jingoism to the imagined contents of a Jewish porn movie, along with American immigration policy and the safe, feel-good hip-hop of Will Smith.

MacFarlane's creation similarly refused to follow a traditional path in its decade-long ascent. Rescued from cancellation by rabid fans and its committed creative team, the Family Guy franchise is now a comedy colossus. One of the brightest shows in Fox's prime-time schedule that doesn't involve ice-skating celebrities or Ryan Seacrest, it draws about 8 4 million viewers (nearly half of whom are those demographically desirable 18-to-43-year-olds) on Sunday night for its first-run episodes and trounces monolithic, oxygen-sucking series like Desperate Housewives during the summer repeat seasons. Family

Cuy reruns are the top-rated show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block, reeling in close to a mil­lion viewers a night. In May Fox will broadcast the show's 100th epi­sode—a milestone sig­nifying that there are enough Family Guys to sell the show into syndication, run it in perpetuity and nudge MacFarlaneever closer to Warren Buffetts tax bracket All of which

ain't bad for a TV program that was can­celed on two previous occasions.

None of this would have been possible without MacFarlane-the quiet, unas­suming least dynamic figure in the Room. Without his idiosyncratic spirit the series would never have been born, and with­out his continued willingness to defend it against creative rivals, overzealous censors and even the network that airs it. Fam­ily Guy would have vanished years ago Since its revival MacFarlane has pro­duced a second series. American Dad. an animated show about a flag-waving CIA agent and his dysfunctional family, and just launched a third, a live-action sitcom called The Winner, starring Rob Corddry, a former Daily Show correspondent.

"When I first met him." says Chris Sher­idan, a longtime executive producer on Family Guy. "Seth was one of those guys who felt more comfortable hiding in a cor­ner. Now he's trying to live up to expecta­tions, and as anyone would, he's starting to enjoy the fact that he's a hero "

While MacFarlanes colleagues routinely regard him as Superman, my earliest

encounters with him suggested more of an introverted Clark Kent. On the first day of my visit to the Family Guy studio in Los Angeles. I was introduced to him at a morning table read-another television-industry ritual, in which the shows writers, producers and animators and anyone else blowing off more pressing work assemble for a live performance of a new script-that MacFarlane entered by unobtrusively navi­gating through the crowd, taking his cus­tomary seat near the head of a conference table and quietly nibbling on a cookie

But as soon as the table read began. MacFarlane put on a virtuoso vocal display: In the span of half an hour, he effortlessly slipped from Peters blustering New Eng­land accent (a voice he creates by puffing up his cheeks and talking entirely out of the left side of his mouth) to baby Stewies

diabolical intonations (by leaning his head back and speaking as if an invisible clothes­pin were attached to his nose) and trans­formed himself from Brian, the Griffin family dog (whose mellifluous voice is identical to MacFarlanes own), into an unctuous TV newscaster, assorted Viet­nam veterans. Christian missionaries and a talking, farting vulture

Two days later, when I sit down to speak with MacFarlane in his corner office, which is decorated with every manner of Family Guy paraphernalia imaginable, he seems to have retreated back into his shell. Whether were making small talk about his distinctive middle name. Woodbury (the name of the beloved town drunk in Gardiner. Maine, where his mothers family was raised), or the child­hood he spent in the affluent Connecticut suburb of Kent, taking piano and voice lessons and appearing in local musical theater produc­tions (which may explain the framed Sound of Music poster hanging on his office wall). MacFarlane speaks hesitatingly and rarely in complete sentences I learn he's single (but dating) and lives in a house that's at least big enough to (continued on page 146)

FAMILY GUY

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contain a piano, but otherwise he hews closely to the showbiz stereotype of the comedian who's more comfortable playing his characters than being himself. When the conversation shifts to the television show to which he has devoted the past decade of his life, however, he begins to open up.

"I was always fascinated by the TV animation process," he says. "When I was growing up, Fred Flintstone was my favorite character. Hence Peter Griffin." When Fox first approached MacFarlane, in 1997, about creating an animated series, he was an untested talent, a 24-year-old graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who'd gone on to do solid if not outstanding work as a pro­ducer for Hanna-Barbera, the same car­toon studio that created The Flintstones in 1960. "The attitude there was, 'Well, this guy seems to be able to write funny jokes. He can't draw worth a damn,'" MacFarlane says. "By their standards, I think they were right."

MacFarlane's secret weapon was The Life of Larry, an animated film he'd written, directed, produced and voiced entirely by himself while a RISD stu­dent. Though Larry, a 10-minute short about a slovenly father and his wife, son and talking dog, owes an unmistakable creative debt to All in the Family—Larry is a two-dimensional dead ringer for Archie Bunker—it was teeming with

jokes that would form the basis of Fam­ily Guy, including frequent cutaways to random sight gags, an extended Star Trek parody and an unapologetically tasteless scene in which Larry, seated in a movie theater showing Philadel­phia, fails to realize he isn't watching a comedy and bursts out laughing when Tom Hanks announces he has AIDS.

Even in the dark ages before YouTube, the widely circulated clip was nearly enough to convince Fox executives that MacFarlane might be able to run a televi­sion series of his own. Granted a minuscule budget by the studio, he once again went to work on his own, taking half a year to hand-draw the 10,000 frames of animation that would eventually become Family Guy's rudimentary pilot episode. "I was pre­sented with an opportunity," MacFarlane explains, "and I said, 'If it kills me, I've got. to make it work because I may not get this chance again.' And it paid off. It's the best celibate six months I ever spent."

At 25 he had already achieved the dream of every schoolboy who ever filled notebooks with antisocial doodles, land­ing an animated show of his own creation on the network that gave the world The Simpsons. But some of his newly hired colleagues had no idea what to make of him. "He was just a little nerd with giant glasses," says Alex Borstein, who plays Peter's faithful wife, Lois. "He was doing his hair in a weird Caesar thing—

George Clooney had done it. so everyone was doing it. He knew exactly what he wanted with the show, but he was kind of unsure about the rest of the world.' (Another Family Guy staffer alleges that MacFarlane, today a proud whiskey afi­cionado, didn't drink his first beer until he was 23.) Kara Yallow, a producer who has worked with MacFarlane since his days at Hanna-Barbera, acknowl­edges that even to those who know him intimately MacFarlane can come oil'as "abstracted." "He's one of those guys whose parents are sort of hippieish," she says, "and his way of rebelling against them was to become very square."

Family Guy didn't catch fire immedi­ately. It was a totally unknown series—not to mention a cartoon in an environment dominated by live-action shows—and it had difficulty attracting experienced tele­vision writers to its creative team. ("We were the Bad News Bears of writing staffs," Sheridan says.) The working hours were excruciating, but the show found its sub­versive style remarkably fast, yielding story lines no traditional sitcom would dare attempt: Peter becomes jealous of his new-neighbor, a paraplegic cop; Peter learns he is an expert piano player but only when he's drunk; Peter wrecks a local produc­tion of The King and I by turning it into a musical about futuristic robots. "We said, 'Screw it, we'll just write what makes us laugh," Sheridan recalls. "And that's what the first chunk of episodes was."

Back to the afghan incident: Everyone in the Room has recovered from the sight of a highly paid television producer sniff­ing a smelly blanket for $60, and the Fam­ily Guy staff returns to the comedy-starved scene of Peter Griffin and his leaky SUV. To replace it, other writers begin pitching new jokes that would also illustrate Peter's revitalized love of the United States: Could he build his own museum of .American his­tory and curate an exhibit of old T\' Guide issues? Could he write a fawning letter to George W. Bush? ("As a fellow retard, I understand....") Could he sacrifice a goat to country musician Toby "We'll Put a Boot in Your Ass" Keith?

MacFarlane, silent for much of the dis­cussion, suddenly perks up. He dictates a sequence, affectionately ripped off from Jurassic Park, in which Peter and Lois tie a goat to a stake in their backyard, hear a terrible roar, realize their goat is missing and turn around in time to see Toby Keith's oversize cowboy hat reced­ing into the bushes. With laughs and scattered applause the Room expresses its approval, and when Goodman declares, "Moving on." the scene offi­cially becomes part of Family (juy his­tory. (At least until the next rewrite.)

Family Guy premiered in January 1999 in an enviable post-Super Bowl time slot, but it was all downhill from there.

Ratings dwindled, and over the next two seasons Fox would shuttle the series from Sunday to Thursday to Tuesday to Wednesday nights before finally cancel­ing it. When the possibility of a writers' strike loomed over Hollywood in 2001, the network hurriedly ordered 13 epi­sodes, but ratings didn't improve, the strike was averted, and Family Guy was dropped from the schedule—again.

"I always knew it was a possibility," says MacFarlane. He claims he took the sec­ond cancellation of the show—the show he had agonized over and struggled on in solitude—in stride, but some co-workers remember it differently. "I just thought it was a complete mind fuck," says Mike Barker, a former Family (juy producer. "You think you have a glimmer of hope, that they came to their senses and this is going to work. It seemed completely illogi­cal that there was ever a shot at its coming back again." For the next several months, the ex-Family Guy staff drank a lot, hung out in karaoke bars and complained about the Bush administration. During one such postmortem binge, MacFar­lane, Barker and a third writer, Matt Weitzman, hatched the idea for American Dad as a backdoor strategy for keeping some elements of Family Guy alive.

Meanwhile, a series of events were conspiring to raise the show from the dead. Family Guy was added to Cartoon Network's lineup, where it became a massive hit. A DVD set of the show's first two seasons sold more than 3 million copies, making it the most successful TV-to-DVD release to date (until Chappelle's Show came along, bitch). Then in spring 2004 MacFarlane got an unprecedented call from Fox: It wanted to put the show back into production.

"It took me totally by surprise," he says. "I thought maybe they wanted to do a special or a direct-to-DVD some­thing or other. It just hadn't occurred to me that new episodes of the series would even be possible, because no one had done it before."

Voice actors Borstein, Mila Kunis and Seth Green all returned to the team, as did many of its writers. Chris Sheridan, who had moved on to writing for the painfully conventional CBS sitcom Yes, Dear, actually quit his job to come back as an executive producer on Family Guy. One night not long after he'd returned to the show, he was working at his computer on a Family Guy script, composing dia­logue for an anthropomorphic scrotum he had named Detective Scrotes. "When I pressed the letter D to type in 'Detec­tive Scrotes,'" Sheridan says, "I got a list of names from a previous script, and one of them was Decapitated Human Female Head. That's when I knew I was back on Family Guy."

Since its return to Fox in May 2005, Family Guy has shown an even greater confidence in its comedic voice, not only in the increasingly outrageous stories it

tells—Peter starts his own religion based on the teachings of the Fonz from Happy Days; Peter returns from being stranded on a desert island to find his dog dat­ing his wife—but in its willingness to take chances on elaborate, seemingly random jokes: a shot-for-shot re-creation of an action sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark with Peter filling in for Indiana Jones', or an animated performance of the obscure musical number "Shipoopi." from The Music Man.

Even if its anarchic pacing hasn't always made sense to the masses, Family Guy enjoys a large measure of creative independence because of its elaborate production schedule. Over a period of about nine months, an episode is writ­ten and rewritten, then turned into a rough black-and-white cartoon called an animatic (and rewritten again), then shipped off to South Korea and animated in color (and sometimes rewritten again). During this process the producers have many opportunities

to tinker with their show, but outside interlopers have few chances to screw it up. "There isn't any stage at which the powers that be can swoop in and make enormous changes," says MacFarlane.

There's no denying that the program's newfound boldness also stems from the very public manner in which Family Guy returned to Fox's schedule—a revival that tacitly acknowledged its producers (and its fans) were right and the network was wrong. "The feeling we all had was we just missed one of the great oppor­tunities as a television studio," says Gary Newman, the president of 20th Century Fox Television, who had committed to putting Family Guy back into production even before the Fox network agreed to air the new episodes. "It just felt as if the show was hitting its creative stride, and you hate to see something that vital be put to bed before its time."

For MacFarlane the renewal was a license for him and his writing staff to take the program in whatever off-the-

wall directions they wanted it to go. "If something scares us," he says, "we've found it's usually a good idea to go ahead with it. Some of the ideas that made us sweat the most—the ones that made us wonder. Are we shooting our­selves in the foot?—have been some of the most memorable episodes."

But the show's writers weren't the only ones second-guessing its increas­ingly daring content. The media envi­ronment Family Guy returned to in 2005 was a post-Janet Jackson Nipplegate world. Some episodes of the show open with a network-imposed parental advi­sory warning, and scenes depicting car­toon nudity—for example, baby Stewie running around without a diaper—are now inexplicably pixelated to cover up any potentially offensive canoon flesh. One notorious episode, "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," in which Peter attempts to convert his son Chris to Judaism, was pulled in its entirety by Fox executives who feared it was potentially anti-Semitic. (The episode ultimately debuted on Cartoon Network and has since been rerun on Fox.)

Though MacFarlane clashed with Fox over these attempts at censorship, he says the network has little recourse to prevent them at a time when the Federal Com­munications Commission has so much power to influence television program­ming and has been levying fines in the millions of dollars. "The idea of the pun­ishment fitting the crime is now gone. It's out the window," he says. "We're now in a realm where there's a complete absence of rational thinking, a climate in which the networks are constantly being stared down by Washington and threat­ened with fines."

MacFarlane's protests didn't stop with complaints to Fox. In an Emmy-nominated episode of Family Guy called "PTV," he made Peter the head of his own television network, whose program­ming schedule—full of shows like Dogs Humping and The Peter Griffin Side-Boob Hour ("a wonderful look back on all the partial nudity network television used to offer")—was deliberately designed to piss off the FCC. And in an origi­nal musical number. Pet it, Brian and Stewie further extend their middle fin­gers to the reactionary federal agency in such verses as this: "So they sent this little warning,/They're prepared to do their worst,/And they stuck it in your mailbox./Moping you could be coerced./1 could think of quite another place/They should have stuck it first./They may just be neurotic or possibly psychouc,/They're the fellas at the freakin' FCC."

Strangely enough, the fellas at the freakin' FCC later asked Fox to send them a copy of the "P'J'V" episode but only because they thought il was hilari­ous. "It shocked the hell out of me," says MacFarlane, "but it also made me think, Well, okay, you guys obviously have a

sense of humor down there. Why don't you back off some of this stuff? Let's all just admit we think shit jokes are funny." MacFarlane, however, isn't particularly jocular about the long-term future of network television if the major broad­casters don't grow a backbone soon. At some point, he says, "the networks are going to have to make a strong politi­cal case—stronger than they've made to date—for getting the FCC to back off. It's going to be a matter of standing up for the First Amendment. Sorry, but sometimes creativity involves swearing. It involves things that aren't comfortable for people, and cable gives writers that freedom. The networks do not."

A hit animated series on a TV net­work's prime-time schedule is a rare thing. The Simpsons debuted on Fox in 1989; eight years later King of the Hill began build­ing an audience on the same net­work. Before that you'd have to go all the way back to The Jelsons, in 1962, and before that, The Flintstones. But all the success Famih Guy and its self-effacing creator have enjoyed has been accompanied by a substantial amount of hostility from MacFarlane's industry peers. Over the years, the Simpsons writers have slipped sev­eral subtle (and not so subtle) jokes into their series, imply­ing that Family Guy has ripped them off". In a scene from

one of the show's Halloween-themed "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, a cam­era pans across a field populated with Homer Simpson clones, one of whom is clearly Peter Griffin. And in an episode in which the Simpson family travels to Italy, Peter appears again in a book of criminal mug shots, charged with the local offense of "plagiarismo."

In April 2006 South Park ran a blister­ing two-part story line called "Cartoon Wars," which repeatedly lampoons Family Guy for its overreliance on cutaway gags and pop-culture references that have nothing to do with advancing a plot. In a passionate monologue, South Park mas­cot Eric Cartman seems to be speaking

for series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone when he declares, "I am nothing like Family Guy\ When I make jokes they are inherent to a story! Deep situational and emotional jokes based on what is rel­evant and has a point, not just one ran­dom interchangeable joke after another!" In Cartman's voice it is actually kind of funny—and mean. At the end of the story it is revealed to Cartman that the writers of Family Guy are nothing more than intelligent manatees who write their show by pushing colored balls representing random funny ideas into a script machine.

MacFarlane, who openly admits his debt to The Simpsons, says he isn't particu­larly bothered by the occasional razzing

from his bigger brothers at Fox. "Matt Groening is a wonderfully kind guy," says MacFarlane, "but everybody who works on his show just seems to hate our guts. I don't really know why."

Some Family Guy producers acknowl­edge that the attacks from South Park caught them off guard. "It was such a fucking left hook," says Sheridan. "It's such a shot in the gut. We felt we were all part of the same team. South Park clearly doesn't feel that way."

MacFarlane's own reaction to the "Car­toon Wars" episodes is strangely muted. He suggests that while South Park's Parker and Stone enjoy playing the role of cyni­cal bad boys in public, their savage par-

ody of Family Guy may not reflect their true opinion of his show. "I know what their persona is," says MacFarlane, "and there's certainly a projected arrogance there, but I don't know how much of it is real." Given Family Guy's own appetite for ruthless mockery, he says, it was only a matter of time before the show became the target of someone else's ridicule. "We shit on so many people and so many properties that we would be huge hypo­crites if we had a problem with it," Mac­Farlane says. "I'm flattered that they felt the need to spend two entire episodes of their show talking about Family Guy. Unfortunately, we will probably not take two half hours of our airtime to talk about South Park." (Despite playboy's

best efforts to add fuel to the fire, Parker and Stone declined to com­ment for this story.)

It is hard to be­lieve the pointed barbs aimed at MacFarlane by two other cartoon se­ries—shows equally as brilliant, willfully sophomoric and obsessed with musi­cal theater as Family Guy—could fail to get under his skin even a little bit. But if his screw-it-all view of the world wasn't altered by the circumstances that b e f e 11 him on September 1 1, 2001, then maybe nothing will.

On that morning MacFarlane, who had been a keynote speaker at a RISD graduation cer­emony a few days earlier, was sched­uled to fly back to Los Angeles from Boston's Logan Air­port, but he over-

slept and missed his flight. Only while watching the news in an airport bar did he realize the plane he had failed to board was American Airlines flight 1 1, which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

For several agonizing minutes after the crash many of MacFarlane's co-workers believed he was dead. "I started franti­cally dialing him, even though I knew, I guess, that he was dead," says Vallow. When she wasn't able to reach him, she threw her phone against a wall and broke it in two, then reassembled it with duct tape in time to receive a call from MacFarlane letting her know he had gotten her messages and was alive.

"The idea of anyone back in L.A. hear­ing about it and worrying about it didn't really occur to him," Vallow says. "At that point I don't think he had even called his parents to tell them he wasn't dead."

MacFarlane shrugs and says the expe­rience has left him largely unchanged. "It's something that could have hap­pened to anyone," he says. "I've missed so many flights for being late—this was yet another. That kind of stuff probably happens all the time and we just don't know it, those near misses. This one, obviously, I was aware of. It's just not something I will allow to affect my way of operating on a day-to-day basis." With a deep chuckle he adds, "I'm still a man of science, not God."

Some among his staff are concerned that MacFarlane is taking on workloads no mortal can handle. In addition to his Family Guy obligations he also provides voices for many of the characters on American Dad and consults on the show, though its executive producers try to rely on him as little as possible. "He's busier now than he's ever been in his entire life, and he's more stressed out than he's ever been in his entire life," says Barker. "He's a little harder to corner and talk to. but so much of that really could be that he doesn't want to talk to me."

Now MacFarlane has assumed the role of co-creator and executive producer of The Winner; on which Rob Corddry plays a down-on-his-luck bachelor who lives with his parents. And no one—not even the Family Guy producers in awe of his talents—are certain MacFarlane can juggle three shows at once. "He works every day, seven days a week, and I'm worried about him being spread too thin," says Goodman. "I've got kids I have to send to college. If something happens to him, I'm screwed."

In fairness to MacFarlane, American Dad and The Winner have their own

producing teams that don't require his constant supervision, and he'd prob­ably let go of both shows in a heartbeat if he felt the quality of Family Guy. his first television child, was slipping. What concerns him more is that all his accom­plishments in the television industry could disappear just as quickly as he's accumulated them—an irrational fear that, in four years' time, MacFarlane says, "I could be completely back where I was four years ago. I always take that view of things. Creative neuroses and crippling self-doubt are things that should never be abandoned."

It's hard for an outside observer to see how this insecurity impedes MacFarlane as he oversees every detail of Family Guy's production process—from rewriting the scripts to redrawing the storyboards to directing the show's voice-recording ses­sions. He says he's careful to keep his personal demons hidden from his co-workers. "When it's late and 1 get har­ried and frazzled, it emerges a little bit," he says. "It's not something that is par­ticularly productive to have out in the open." Of course, it's harder for people to notice these qualities when you never leave your office, but MacFarlane says he's doing much better at bringing his workaholism under control. "I used to be a lot worse," he says. "Until four a.m. every night—including weekends—all I was doing was working. I'm not ready to do that again."

Hanging on a wall at the Family Guy offices, amid dozens of Polaroids of the current staff members, is a copy of one of MacFarlane's old childhood photos—a Dorian Gray portrait that is eerily identi­cal to the way he looks today. Well, he has since grown several inches and gained a few pounds, and there may now be a cou­ple of gray strands in his hair (and more gel), but he's still got the same guileless look in his eyes, the same earnest smile

and the same peculiar cultural tastes. The Seth MacFarlane of the present still laughs at fart jokes and still worships the hopelessly dorky Star Trek reruns he spent his adolescence obsessing over not just because they distracted him from the fact that he was a terrible athlete but because they taught him at a formative age how versatile and surprising a television pro­gram could be. "I have so much trouble with these cop shows and lawyer shows and medical shows where you basically know what you're going to see," he savs. "With Star Trek I would never watch the previews, because I didn't even want to know. It could be a dramatic character story; it could be a science-fiction story; it could be a romantic story; it could be a political story. It always just surprised the hell out of me."

Most of the Family Guy staff members can barely summon a fraction of this enthusiasm for the current state of tele­vision programming, particularly when they talk about the slowly dying art form known as the half-hour sitcom. "It's scary," says Goodman, who got his start in the industry more than 15 years ago as a writer on The Golden Girls. "Twenty fewer comedies are on the air this year than last year. I think the networks rec­ognize they've got to do something about developing comedy, but they don't know what's going on." But Goodman, like his colleagues, sees himself protected from this chaos as long as he remains with Family Guy. "I've been here for two years, and as the comedy town burns, I'm safe in this citadel."

MacFarlane somehow never lost his idealistic zeal for the genre. He may not be comfortable talking about himself, but get him started on the subject of TV comedy and he won't shut up. He remembers a night not that long ago when he was able to get home from work early enough to catch a rerun of Seinfeld. and he was suddenly reminded of why he got into the medium in the first place. "It had been a long time since I'd seen an episode of that show," he says, "and I was struck by how much I was laughing, genuinely laughing. I was sitting there by myself, and it was the same thing that used to happen when I would watch old episodes of All in the Family—I laughed out loud. That just doesn't happen with sitcoms anymore."

For a moment it sounds as if he's about to launch into another pessimistic tirade about the decline and fall of broadcast television. "The state of TV comedy now is just hideous," MacFarlane says, but then he laughs and corrects himself. "It's been pretty good to me. I think it's doing fine." If he can make it home in time tonight, there may just be a classic Seinfeld rerun and a glass of whiskey with his name on it and maybe even a talking cartoon dog to enjoy it with.

"/ was presented with an opportunity," MacFarlane says. "It's the best celibate six months I ever spent."