Seth MacFarlane - 'Ted' [LIVE]

29:24And she kind of took this as like, oh, this is what he wants, and he's, let's just give it to him. So I've done a lot of thinking about that over the years, and maybe should have called, you know, Animal Services or whatever. I guess one thing I wonder is, it would be rare enough to find somebody who is a talented animator. It would be rare enough to find somebody who's a talented writer. it would be rare enough to find somebody who is a talented voice performer. When you were coming out of RISD, you were primarily getting traction out of the gate because of the animation that you were doing, right?

30:03Then you said they started to realize you were a gifted writer, maybe even more than animator. But like voice acting, which you've now done with tremendous success, Did you even kind of realize that that was a specialty of yours, or was that just sort of by necessity? If you're making your animated project, somebody has to do the voices. I knew it was something that I thought I was pretty good at. By the time I got to Hanna-Barbera, I didn't really have the confidence to sell myself as much as maybe I could have. But yeah, I know I do remember having to make a little bit of a push to do the voices of Larry and Steve in the in the Hanna-Barbera short that I did based on the student film.

30:48You know, trust me, guys, I can do this. I know what I want. You know, that voiceover career that that I suppose, you know, I wanted in some way I had to kind of build for myself with with these shows. But it's something that's been. I remember Greg Daniels, a king of the hill telling me day one, are you sure you want to do this? like you sure you want to voice these characters yourself because at some point it's going to be a pain in the ass and I'm like it's never going to be a pain in the ass I'm always going to love it 20 however many years later yeah now it's like literally like you know in my pajamas like complaining even though I'm in my own house right but yeah no it's it's it's something that was part of what I did I always kind of started with the voice first both you know Peter and Stewie and Brian are characters that all kind of began with the voice.

31:40The illustration came after. So Stewie looks the way he does because it just seemed like that was what the voice sounded like. It should look like this weird football head. It always kind of goes hand in hand with what I do in animation. I was going to say with success, you found ways to incorporate music as well. But the reality is music was there from the beginning of Family Guy, right? I mean, you, I think, put your foot down that there needed to be an opening number, right? And again, it's a way to bring in one of your passions. It wasn't just the opening number either. It was the use of an orchestra to score the show.

32:15And I mean, that was something that I was very aware of even as a kid growing up that even the worst shows, you know, the worst cartoon shows that I watched in the afternoon all used a real orchestra. I think Hasbro just released all the scores from the G.I. Joe cartoon and I listened to them about six months ago and I was like, this is crazy good. This is something that was just part of a 65-episode syndication package that you burned off in an afternoon. It's amazingly good. And so when The Simpsons came along, somebody there clearly had the good sense to say, this show's got to use an orchestra.

32:54And so once again, they really set the stage for us. So it was maybe a bit of a push, but not that much of a push because they were already doing it. And that continues to be something that I think for both Family Guy and American Dad and all the animated shows and for Ted is very important. I don't think that audiences necessarily know that what some of them do, but I don't think everyone knows that what they're hearing is live music. But I think on a visceral, on a subconscious level, it just makes the show feel maybe just a little bit more important or significant or like it matters a little bit more.

33:31that you're hearing real musicians and you're hearing that air in the room. And it's just fun. Like, to walk into that scoring session and see your show up on the big screen and this symphony playing the music is very cool. It's like one of those last vestiges of, you know, what we imagined Hollywood probably is like. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I think that it was around 2009, 2010 that you said, I'm going to step back from the day-to-day oversight of Family Guy. And I wonder how much of that was exhaustion from and whatever from related to that versus how much of it was being pulled towards doing what was sort of the next big thing to happen, I think, which was Ted, right?

34:14Ted, the movie comes out in 2012, the first one. I'm sure there's a lot of lead-up legwork with a project like that, especially nowadays, I imagine, with the TV series, you guys have maybe things have advanced with some of the technical things that make it possible. But anyway, what led you to take a step back from the day-to-day of Family Guy and to do what you did next? Yeah, part of it was that I had been doing Family Guy by then for over a decade, and I sort of felt like I had done everything that I could do with it, and it was maybe time to hand it off to the folks that I was running the show with.

34:52I was interested to direct a live action film or TV series. I hadn't done it before, and yeah, I got together with Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wilde, the two writers that I had met between Family Guy's cancellation and its revival, and we came up with this idea for, actually, it's funny, we came up with it, we adapted it from something that I had pitched as an animated series when I was at Hanna-Barbera and just kind of shelved. It was about a family. It was about, you know, John Bennett's character was actually much more like the TV series than anything else. But we just kind of completely retooled it and turned it into something completely different, turned it into this film script about this guy that has his teddy bear when he's a kid and he grows up and the teddy bear's still with him.

35:37He hasn't gotten rid of it, but it's grown up with him. The idea came about, there was a movie called Alien Nation. I think James Kahn and Mandy Patinkin. And the movie takes place five years after aliens have landed. And people just don't care anymore. They're just, they're walking around. They're like, you know, they're, they're on the police force. They're working at the grocery store. They're like, and people just, they're just like, they take it for granted. And in some ways they're assholes about it. And so that was interesting to me. I thought like this, this is a cool idea that this fairy tale of the guy that wishes his stuffed animal would come to life, it happens, and now it's like a decade and a half later, two decades later, and he's, you know, this thing is still with him.

36:19It was a movie that no one really understood. We brought it around to the various studios and were met with a lot of blank stares, and we're like, can this be, you know, can it be PG? Does it have to be R? Can you use a puppet? You know, is there, we just don't get this. and Universal you know all it takes is one studio Universal said we think we see what you're going for here and let's try it but you got to attach a big star and that wound up being Wahlberg who was obviously fantastic but I learned as I went that was one of those situations where you arrive in the workplace and I had to kind of whisper to my DP like I have no idea what I'm doing.

36:59I was going to say it's not exactly the same skill set as making a TV or specifically you were primarily an animated TV. What was that acclimation like for you? With animation, everything is storyboarded in advance. So it's like, cut to the close-up here, cut wide here, cut to a two-shot here, and that's what you get back when the animation comes in. And I just assumed that was the way it worked in film. So I was like, okay, yeah, so I only need a close-up here because this line is going to be in close-up, and that was what I was going to do, and my team had to say to me, That's it's that's not how you do it here You shoot everything from every angle and then let the actors do the scene and I'm like well that seems inefficient Plus what about the technology like what about you had to?

37:47Also be able to I don't think you'd work much with CGI. I hadn't worked much with CGI but I had worked enough as an animator that the translation was strangely enough that was the easy part to slip into was the the animated Ted character because I knew I knew exactly what I needed that to be and exactly how I needed him to move and strangely it was the traditional filmmaking part the part that is so common that that I needed the help with I mean it was the first two weeks of trying to make sure that the crew didn't know that I was completely clueless but at the same time being comfortable enough to ask certain members quietly you gotta walk me through this because I'm completely in the dark and it didn't take I mean it's amazing like two weeks I was like oh that's how you make a movie two weeks that's nothing anybody can do it well and those next few years I mean it wasn't like you slowed down it was just a different portfolio of things you were doing so I'll just remind people TED is 2012 TED 2 was three years later but in between that was A Million Ways to Die in the West, 2014, and a whole bunch of other TV things while you're still at least keeping a toe in Family Guy.

39:04There's the Cleveland show. There's Border Town. And then there's one that I think for you was kind of a passion project that surprised a lot of other people that this was even something you would want to do, which was the Orville. and so three seasons of that from 2017 to 2019 or 2022 I think sorry three seasons spread out more than consecutive years that's right so I guess since that was the one that for a lot of people were like what this doesn't seem like Seth MacFarlane what was the driver of that one for you the Orville? I was a huge sci-fi fan when I loved Star Trek I loved the Twilight Zone.

39:49I was a huge Star Wars fan when I was a kid. And so, you know, there was a specific genre of sci-fi that I was really taken with. And, you know, certainly as a writer, there are three shows that really were so, you know, even as a kid, I was able to acknowledge there's some great unconventional writing going on. It was all in the family, Star Trek, and the Twilight Zone. I hadn't seen anything like that on TV in a long time not since the 90s and I was like well no one's really doing this right now and maybe if I still want it somebody else still wants it I've never had more fun writing than I did on the Orville you know the writers rooms are fantastic on all the shows that I do but just for me sitting down to write a script it's I've never enjoyed that process more than on the Orville.

40:42It's kind of interesting what a tonal shift there was between the first and the second seasons, and I wonder, was that always in the plan book, or was that responding to something? There's some belief that Fox forced me to make it a comedy at the beginning. That's not true, actually. I had this thought that there's got to be a way to do something that has the depth of these great sci-fi classics but that also has jokes that's a tough thing to do in tv i think in features it's a little easier in tv to sustain that on a weekly basis it's tough because the stakes kind of go either you're funny and the stakes don't matter or you're telling a serious story and the jokes are kind of undercutting you it's it's really hard to do both and sustain it so you know as we went along i started to realize boy i really love these characters I love writing for these characters I love these actors and I kind of want to be able to dig a little deeper the second season we did this two-parter that was a big you know sci-fi action epic episode about Isaac's character I remember bracing myself if this thing works we can kind of do whatever we want with the show it can be whatever we want it to be and we don't have to be locked into this sitcom you know format and people were just they were there for it.

42:01They were like, we will accept this from you. And there was this huge sigh of relief that we weren't rejected when we put that out there. And that to me was when I really kind of relaxed. I was like, all right, I know what I want this to be. One other thing I've got to bring up before we get to sort of the current group of things that you're working on. It seems like you're open to interesting challenges. You have put out music. You've performed at, I believe, Carnegie Hall, and I think the Hollywood Bowl, and I mean, places that the greatest performers do, and you more than hold your own. You have hosted the Academy Awards.

42:43That is not something many people have done, and it's in some ways, I think, a thankless job, and I'd love to hear what your you know reflections are on that but just how much of at this point where I would think creatively you have nothing left to prove financially you're you're okay so how much of this is just looking for just crazy just treading water until death is that what you're driving at no I mean oh most of it how do you end up these are some these are some big swings in in that and kind of risky adventures that you've gone on. What's the kind of outlook that leads you to, let's say, host the Oscars?

43:24In a year, by the way, in which you were also nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars for a song from TED. Pretty rare to be hosting and nominated on the same night. Yeah, that was, again, complete surprise. It was not something I lobbied for. I think I had hosted SNL at that point to promote TED. I'd done a lot of Comedy Central roasts. I'd done a lot of things where I was kind of out there, you know, where you could see my face. I presented at the Emmys that year, and I didn't show up for rehearsal, and I was hungover. And it was live, and I walked out onto—this is also on YouTube— and I walked out to the center of the stage, and of course there's no microphone, and I started talking.

44:06And I realized, like, as I started, like, oh, I'm not—oh, yeah, I'm not mic'd. This is, like—and this is live TV. This is—this is interesting. and so they raised the floor mic next to me but I didn't see it so I was looking this way and then finally the producer comes from the back and he goes go to that one and I walk over and took the mic at the podium and I was so tired I was too tired to be nervous and so I was just this is what happens when you don't show up to rehearsal just when in doubt lean into the Stewie voice in desperation, they said to me afterwards, yeah, you were, they went south, but you didn't freak out, and so that was kind of cemented it for us.

44:53For the film academy. Yeah, for Craig and Neil, who were producing at that point. And they, you know, I got this call out of nowhere, said, do you want to host the Oscars? And I was like, sure, why not? That sounds fun. And it was, it was a blast. It was a ton of work, but every part of it was great. I mean, I remember walking out onto that stage and within a few minutes, I was like, this crowd is great. Like the crowd was so warm. They were, you know, they were so enthusiastic. You know, people were coming up during the breaks and cheering me on and I was immensely grateful for that in the moment and it was just great fun.

45:30And the year after they had called and said, do you want to do it again? And I thought long and hard about it because I was in the middle of shooting A Million Ways, and I was like, if I do this, the only reason I'm really doing it is to say ha-ha to the bad reviews. And I didn't think that was a good enough reason. Well, can I just say, because I mentioned this the last time you were on the podcast, and I really want to, I think it should be stated for anyone that's listening. I was very lucky to be in the audience that night. The reviews that came out of that show were in some cases critical because I am totally convinced of one misunderstanding.

46:12So you do a song called We Saw Your Boobs, which is about actresses who had done topless scenes. The cutaways during that were canned past footage of people looking offended. The people in the room, including people who you actually were referencing, were dying laughing. but I think that viewers got offended on behalf of people who they thought were offended. I don't even think that viewers got offended. I've never like, I think it was, look, I always try to avoid getting into the rabbit hole of this topic but it's, you know, it's, the way that whole bit came about, my initial pitch for the opening was a very kind of traditional Bob Hope, Johnny Carson kind of opening.

47:01It's like, this is the Oscars, let's do something kind of classy and they were like, no, that's not why we hired you. We want this shit that you do. And so I went back and, you know, keep in mind the whole time I'd been reading, you know, press piece after press piece about, I'm so angry at him for what I bet he's going to do. You know, people who are just frothing at the mouth about the horrible offensive jokes that I was surely going to make. So I said, well, why don't we just play into that? I mean, if that's what they're expecting. and we framed in this way that, you know, using William Shatner as Captain Kirk, talking to us from the future, here's the Oscars that you do if you don't change course now.

47:44And that was the framework of that. And it worked great in the moment. But part of that too was a very good friend of mine who was a much more experienced director at the time, and I won't name him because he's a shy guy, but he said, the thing you have to remember is that Family Guy was at its peak. Ted had just come out as a big hit. You're hosting the Oscars. There's a pattern that we all know where it's like they build you up, build you up, and then they decide it's time to kick the shit out of this guy. And it's like you see it happen over and over and over, and I was like okay, that tracks.

48:20And virtually nobody comes away from hosting the Oscars with unanimous praise. People like to bitch about the Oscars. They do. They do. It gets so easy. You don't have to know math. You don't have to know history. You don't have to be athletic. You don't have to do any of those things, and you can still bitch about the Oscars. It's a central part of my job. I cover it every year, and that was one of the best Oscars I've covered, so that's the end of that topic. But okay, so in 2020, your production company, Fuzzy Door. Now, why is it called Fuzzy Door? When I was in college at RISD, I lived in a, well, I guess this was like a house that had been converted into these little apartments that had a piece of orange fuzz covering the door that had been there since the 70s.

49:07And so everybody called it the Fuzzy Door House. Okay, got it. So your production company, Fuzzy Door, which I think goes all the way back to the beginning of Family Guy, right? I think you were calling it that. At this point in 2020, you move from 20th Century Fox Television, where you'd been from the beginning, to NBC Universal. I guess first question is, this was not long after Disney had bought Fox. Was any part of this that Disney is so much of a family-friendly brand that they get a little worried about your risque nature? I remember a few of us at Family Guy thinking, this is going to be interesting.

49:43this is going to be very interesting because we've made a lot of jokes about you know even disney himself like we had made a lot of jokes at the expense of that company so we weren't sure if this was payback time but no they they said we'd rather just have the money yeah hey well so you go over to nvc universal which obviously includes peacock which is the first time that you've peacock is a streaming service by the way well i was gonna say i guess from that side of things, though, how liberating in a way must it be after years of having to deal with broadcast networks, standards and practices, and the FCC and the Parents Television Council and all these places that are kind of roping you in, in a way, to now go to streaming where you can theoretically do whatever you want?

50:32Yeah, I had had a little bit of a taste of that, well, in two ways. There was a while when Family Guy was, when DVD sales were still a thing, we were doing two versions, Like we would do the bleeped version for air and we would do the uncensored version for DVD. And I did get a taste of, you know, working without broadcast sensors when we did the Orville for Hulu in that last season. It's like, wow, you can say shit and no one will call you about it. That's great. But yeah, certainly TED for Peacock, the streaming platform. That was something that was completely new. And it's, you know, certainly I had experienced it in the two Ted movies and A Million Ways to Die in the West.

51:12Yeah, you don't have to worry about language. You can say whatever you want. So it wasn't like it was completely new. But on a week-to-week basis, certainly different. The challenge there becomes self-restraint. The challenge becomes like not saying the F word like 20 times a page. Right, right, right. Well, so Ted, the series, which debuted the first of its two seasons so far in 2024, The second, as I mentioned, was just a few months ago. Just the whole idea of bringing it to TV. I had read, I don't know if it's correct, that you at one point were looking to bring in Wahlberg, and it was not going to be necessarily a prequel.

51:50But what it's ended up being is going back to the high school years of John and Ted. I got the call from Susan Rovner, who was running NBC at the time, asking me, would you want to do a Ted TV series? So, you know, it wasn't my idea to do this. It was something that they came to me with and You know based on the size of the overall deal that they were giving me at that point I I think I better do whatever the hell they want So it wasn't like I was itching to do it, but it was interesting and I said Is this something that you guys could commit to doing with the same level of quality as the films?

52:27I'm not talking about like car chases and whatnot, but the bear himself Will you be willing to put the same resources into this so it doesn't look like you know the diet soda version of Ted? Because it's expensive. I mean people should Yeah, it's I mean look outside it's for a half-hour series Half-hour sitcom it was like ten million dollars an episode For all because of the bear because it's all the CGI and they said Yeah, we're willing to do that and I was like great then then let's give it a shot because no one's done it before We did approach Mark knowing that it was very unlikely with his film schedule, but it was kind of liberating to come up with this new set of characters.

53:10The thing that irks me to this day is that, and I thought I'd covered all my bases, is that in the movie, his mother's name is Helen, and in the series, her name is Susan. A couple of people online have pointed this out. They're upset about it. There's no reason for it other than I've just fucked up. and any fan who can come up with like a retrofitted explanation for why that might be the case, I'll be immensely grateful. But, you know, one of those things you just, a lot going on and you miss it. But the extraordinary thing for me to watch was how these animators who had, it was the same animation supervisor, Blair Clark, who had done the films and Tippett Animation Studio and then a frame store in Melbourne.

53:56And these animators were just doing this extraordinary work on a weekly basis for TV. I'd never seen anything like it. And to this day, I'm actually kind of astonished that it worked because I always figured, well, for a TV series, we're going to come up with something that we're just okay with. And honestly, I think the bear in the Peacock series, which is a streaming service, looks better than he did in the films. And it's the same process. It's not like there were any shortcuts. It's not like anything changed that much. It's still the same technical process. Totally. And we should note that, as I understand it, it's the most watched scripted comedy series on a streamer ever.

54:33Forget not just Peacock. Is that true? That's what I've seen. Original comedy series. That can't be true. Where'd you get that information? We'll chat after. Is this the end of Ted or is there going to be more? you know i mean the bear is cgi so he can you know he's he can go as long as there's an appetite for him it's up to universal it's up to peacock i mean i a third season in the near future is i don't know that there are any plans for that i've thrown the idea out that maybe we do like a direct to direct to peacock ted feature with this cast and that might be something that's kind of fun but it was what 10 years between i guess less than that about seven years between the last Ted movie and the first episode of this series, and people were still there for it.

55:23So, you know, he's a character we can bring back at any time. I should note that the other Peacock comedy series that you guys are behind you as an EP is The Burbs with Kiki Palmer, which has really found a nice following in its first season. Perfect example of delegation. I wish I could say, and The Naked Gun as well, I wish I could say I had anything to do with The Naked Gun and The Burbs. I have to give props to Erica Huggins, who runs our company. All I did was say, hey, The Burbs is a really funny movie. Remember The Burbs with Tom Hanks? That's a really funny movie. Somebody should do something with that.

56:01And then the fine folks at Fuzzy Door took that and ran with it and came up with this whole new iteration of the IP. Last few things are just big picture. curious what you think about a few things. Are you interested and open to doing things for other people in the sense that somebody says, we would love to have Seth as an actor or a voice actor in our project that's not a Fuzzy Door project. Is that something you would consider, or at this point are you exclusively interested in doing stuff that you generate? It's usually just about time. It's about fitting it into the schedule. Those things have popped up here and there.

56:39There was a Logan Lucky, the Steven Soderbergh movie from a few years back that I did a role in. There was The Loudest Voice, which was the Showtime miniseries with Russell Crowe. It pops up now and then. Honestly, I don't get those calls often, either because they just think I'm terrible or they just figure he's not going to have the time, he's not going to, you know, let's not bother. I don't know which it is, but it doesn't pop up all that often. Like, I'm never completely opposed to it. It's just the commitment that it takes when you have a bunch of other projects going at the same time. It oftentimes is tough to work in.

57:14Sure. Okay, as we mentioned, Family Guy has been on for 24 seasons over 27 years. Over the years since it debuted, it seems that two kind of conflicting things have happened in the real world. First of all, prominent public figures behavior has maybe gotten more shocking and unimaginable than it would have been back in 1990. Well, there was some stuff going on in 1999, too. But I mean, that sort of thing of what's acceptable from leaders, et cetera, or acceptable to some people, that's gone in one direction. On the other direction, maybe as a reaction to that, people's hunger to regulate or cancel those who they can kind of influence has grown.

57:59And we've seen that in a lot of different places. So I wonder for you, have your concerns about content on something like Family Guy or other things you do, are you more concerned now than you used to be that something could lead to a show being canceled or a person being canceled than you used to be? We haven't experienced that directly. It's funny. I have been hearing for years people say, like, it's so much harder to make jokes now than it used to be and everybody's so sensitive. I haven't really run into that when it comes to the animated shows and maybe because their animation Anthony Jeselnik the comedian.

58:37There's so funny who you know said look it's it's I guess he was quoting Warhol like it's Comedy is the art of getting away with it. I'm butchering that quote whatever it is and it's it's getting away with it So it's like if the joke is funny and it's Potentially offensive, but people are laughing then you're getting away with it if it's not then they'll tell you and And there have been jokes here and there from Family Guy that have made it under the air that I've thought, I kind of wish we hadn't done that. But it's not often because there is a real process that keeps you honest. You're in the writer's room and if somebody pitches a joke that gets dead silence, it doesn't go in.

59:14If everyone laughs, we try it. You get to the table read and people there might not like it. It gets a gasp and they will tell you. There are no kind laughs at those table reads. We have had many, many jokes that we thought were hilarious in the writer's room that are just met with, like, gasps of horror when we get to the table read. And if it makes it past that checkpoint, then you have broadcast standards and practices who, believe it or not, we've had a wonderful relationship with over the years. They really have not, you know, they've gone out of their way in most cases to keep the show what it is and to find a way to let us have this joke or that joke without butchering it.

59:55So people might be surprised to hear that, and they might also be surprised to hear that you have sort of reached an understanding, if not a friendship from what I understand, with the head of the Parents Television Council, which is the place that made its bones by crapping on Family Guy in the early years for being the destruction, going to lead to the destruction of society. Yeah, it's one of those things that, as I recall, it came about, you're probably going to remember this better than me, and correct me if I'm wrong, but we wrote a letter to the Parents Television Council saying, you know, essentially, do you want to do this?

1:00:37Then you come right on up here and you do it. You know, basically offering them the opportunity to write a Family Guy script. Yeah. To write an episode. Yeah. And we thought, well, either they're going to say no or they're going to say yes. And it's going to be so bad that they just leave us alone from here on out because because they'll they'll you know, they'll see how difficult it is. And we got a very, very nice letter back from Tim Winter, who was running the parents, children and counsel at the time. It was so kind. And so the tone of it was just so affable that I either we reached out to him or he reached out to us again.

1:01:12check it check on which it is let me know but however it happened we ended up doing this la times interview together and and remain friendly to this day and yeah it's it's again not surprising it's what they say it's very hard to hate from up close yeah right and it would something like that there were things that were alluded to in in the coverage of that that you might not find things even that you used to find funny funny now would you say that over the years your sense of humor has changed? I don't know that it's... I mean, yeah, in some ways. In some ways, it's changed, it's evolved. I mean, it's things that I will write for Family Guy are different than things that I write for The Orville.

1:01:54There's a different piece of my brain that's active when I'm writing for this show or that show. The Orville's jokes tend to be a little softer, a little gentler. So, yeah, you kind of flip certain switches, different switches when you're writing different shows. But When I look back at Family Guy episodes from 15, 20 years ago, many of which I don't remember, that I've completely forgotten. And that's what's so strange is at some point in the past, this particular episode, episode five of season seven, was the single most important thing in my life. I was sitting in an edit bay frame fucking this thing to exactly where it needed to be to be funny.

1:02:35And now I'm watching and I don't even remember what happens. So it's a very strange experience, but there's enough of those Encounters with earlier episodes in which I find I'm laughing out loud because I've just forgotten That it is encouraging so it tells me yeah, maybe my sense of humor has not changed that much Got it last two brief ones. How long do you see Family Guy going? Can it go forever or as long as your your voice vocal cords are working or or what? I think I think we're long past the point where Let's walk into the sunset with dignity

1:03:09I think that's gone. That being the case, yeah, I think it can go as long as there's an appetite for it. I'm consistently shocked at the numbers for the show, that they continue to be very, very high. And I don't know why that is. It's been so long. It's been a quarter of a century that this thing has been on the air. The Family Guy feature film is something that's still always in the back of my head I've always had a pretty clear idea of what it's gonna be and It's that arrow in the quiver that I keep for when everything else goes to shit It's like would that ever happen while the show was still on TV.

1:03:49Yeah, it could yeah, yeah Yeah, it's just I always kind of assumed like if I have like a really dismal professional failure like I produce a movie or a show that just fails so badly that the only thing that can cleanse the palate of the audience is the Family Guy movie, that's when I'll do it. That's great. Well, hopefully we don't have to wait for that to happen. It could just happen. Okay, last question. What is it, outside of things that are fuzzy door endeavors, that makes you laugh the most these days? That's a good question. I just finally did a binge watch of All in the Family. For as much as I talk about it, I had never seen the whole thing start to finish, from season one to season nine.

1:04:35And the number of times I was sitting alone in my house watching an episode of this show, just laughing out loud, you know, like taking a clip and texting it to somebody, like, you gotta see, this is so funny. It's staggering how something that was made so long ago can feel so much more immediate than so much comedy that's on the air now. I mean, it's like watching a stage play in a lot of ways. And I guess that's how they did that show. They would do a live performance start to finish, no stopping and starting at 5 p.m., and then another one at 7 p.m., and that was it. And they'd cut together the best of them.

1:05:12And you can see, like, the actors are sweating, so, like, nobody's there dabbing them. Like, you're going. It's a play. I was shocked at how genuinely hilarious I thought those shows were, seeing them with a fresh eye. There's a lot of, and it's no secret, you can see it, there's a lot of the influence of that show in Ted as a result. We really tried to kind of inject sort of a modern-day all-in-the-family sensibility. It's tough. I mean, comedy's in a weird place right now. There's not a lot out there that's hysterically funny. Tim Robinson's sketch show, I think, is hilarious. That's the chair company one?

1:05:46I think he should leave. Oh, I see. I see that one. Yeah, yeah. But there's these bursts of people like that who are just completely reinventing the wheel. But it's a strange time. There's not a lot of comedy out there that really is comedy, period. I mean, it's like you look at the Emmy entrance for best comedy. It's like there's a lot of comedy writers who get prickly about this. Come on, the bear. That's the best comedy. It's weird because it's... I mean, look, we all know in some cases it's, well, our show's kind of somewhere in between and Succession's going to eat us for breakfast. So let's enter in the comedy category and we'll be fine.

1:06:24But what it does is it edges out shows with hard jokes. And I think it's been a while since something like 30 Rock or something like Cheers, which are shows with hard jokes. That's legit joke writing. And I don't know whether that's the criteria have changed or comedy itself has changed. I don't know. Smarter people than me can answer that. Well, 17 years after Family Guy was nominated for Best Comedy Series, you know, maybe Ted. There's some good jokes in there. So we'll see. Believe it when I see it. Yeah, right. All right. Well, thank you for this, Seth. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

1:07:16Thanks for listening to Awards Chatter. We really appreciate it and would really appreciate you taking just a minute more to subscribe to the podcast and to leave us a rating and review on your podcast app. And to follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.

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