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17th April 2024
04:04pm BST
Seth MacFarlane, co-creator of the much-loved animated comedy series Family Guy has assured fans that he will continue to make new episodes of the show for the foreseeable future.
After 25 years, 22 seasons and over 400 episodes, the series has become something of a cultural phenomenon.
Many fans won't know that it wasn't an immediate success story. It had two cancellations before Cartoon Network spin-off network Adult Swim started playing reruns of its earliest seasons and the show garnered a huge cult following.
Since then, it has become the go-to place for subversive humour and social commentary, and it's characters are voiced by a team of Hollywood stars including Mila Kunis, Seth Green and Patrick Warburton.
All involved have remained loyal to the show over the last quarter of a century, despite experiencing profound success elsewhere.
That loyalty is shared by MacFarlane, who told the LA Times: "At this point, I don’t see a good reason to stop."
The 50-year-old added: "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. I don’t know that there’s any reason to stop at this point unless people get sick of it. Unless the numbers show that people just are, 'Eh, we don’t care about Family Guy anymore.' But that hasn’t happened yet."
When asked if he considered throwing in the towel following the back-to-back cancellations in the early days, MacFarlane said: "I had nothing to compare it to because 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. My deal [with 20th Television Animation] never expired over those two years. It was about to expire and then they picked up the show again. So I was like Mr. Magoo driving that jalopy."
When Kunis and Green were asked what keeps them coming back to Family Guy, they both described it as the "best job ever".
Green described his first experience of reading the script.
"When I read the script, I laughed out loud," he said. "It felt like someone had taken things that I thought were very special and funny and translated them into a show.
"And I couldn’t believe it, that someone had written this. I couldn’t believe I got to audition for it. I was like, I’m going to try to get this job."
A big part of Family Guy's success throughout the years has been it's ability to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of entertainment.
Standout moments from the episodes have frequently made their way into the viral alleyways of social media, to the point where there's almost as many memes of Family Guy as there are episodes.
If the show's writers keep it on the same trajectory, it's hard to see it ever stopping.
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