Why It’s Harder Than Ever to Make a Studio Comedy, With Seth MacFarlane

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2:03It is Thursday, July 31st. I went to a screening at Paramount the other night of the new Naked Gun reboot. It's very funny and it really feels like a throwback. Not just because it's a comedy coming out in theaters, albeit based on known IP, or at least IP known to my generation. Not sure how much Gen Z is familiar with Naked Gun. It's also a pure joke-driven comedy, something you really don't see anymore on film or in TV. For that reason, I feel like the stakes are higher for this movie. If it's a hit, we may see more swings from the studios in the comedy space. We talked about this subject before, but we haven't talked about with one of the major comedic voices of the past 25 years.

2:41Seth MacFarlane is here, in addition to being the creator and executive producer of Family Guy, American Dad, The Cleveland Show. He's a writer, director in film and TV, and a talented singer, produces a bunch of stuff, including the new Naked Gun movie. We're going to get into the comedy climate these days, how to push the envelope in this environment, the business end of comedy, and why he says it's so hard for even someone like him to get a studio interested in a mainstream comedy, plus what he wants to make now. No Call Sheet today. It's Seth MacFarlane from The Ringer and Puck. I'm Matt Bellany, and this is The Town.

3:19All right, we are here with Seth MacFarlane, writer, producer, actor, animator, singer. Did I miss any hyphenates there? You covered it all. You covered it all. Bartender, you are in your home bar right now. I'm in my home bar. Yes. I'm not drinking. I usually drink for interviews, but I figured let's just see what happens. So do I. All right. So I wanted you on the show because I went to a tastemaker screening, which is a word we both hate. Nobody there had taste. Awful. But went to the screening. You got up at the very beginning and you said something interesting about how this was a comedy.

4:00And you may not be familiar with this because it's a comedy that we are showing in a movie theater. And I started laughing because you're exactly right. Not only is comedy a dying breed in theaters, we've done episodes about this, but this particular style of comedy, it's almost jarring the throwback nature of the joke after joke after setup after joke. And I just, when I was watching it, I was like, are modern audiences going to even know what to do with this? Did you guys talk about that at all? the show that kind of keeps it alive, obviously, for the past 25 years, or one of them at least, is Family Guy.

4:39So if they've seen Family Guy, they're probably not going to be too unfamiliar with this rat-a-tat-tat pace of jokes. And certainly we've tried to do the same thing on our TED series. I think for people who are fans of adult animation, it won't be that unfamiliar, but it has been a minute since we've seen a comedy that is on television or in film that just seeks to be a comedy and nothing else. Right. How much of a fight was that with Paramount to even get this movie off the ground, even with the IP that they own? There was no fight to get the movie made. They really liked the idea. The only challenge that we had was the same challenge that anyone who makes this type of comedy always has, is trying to explain why you absolutely cannot cast comedians in the role.

5:36You have to cast actors. I mean, the Zucker brothers showed us how it was done with Airplane and the original Naked Gun and whatnot. And so that was the only conversation I remember that was a bit of a lengthy one, trying to sort of communicate that this, I know it seems counterintuitive, but we can't have any comedians. These have to be dramatic actors saying stupid stuff. Right. Budget,$42 million. So they're not busting the bank on this one, even though you have a legit star in Liam Neeson, Pam Anderson. Like you joked at the screening that your contribution was suggesting Liam Neeson would be good.

6:14That can't be your contribution. I just learned what our budget was just now from you. Oh, really? That's not your job. You know, you're the, I don't, you know, I'm not a numbers guy. Right. Right. But I imagine you feel a little bit of the stakes for this movie, right? You want it to succeed, not just because it's your movie, but I think you're like me. You want more of these movies. Yeah. You know, I wasn't kidding when I said that is my essentially sole contribution. I, I'm, I'm definitely someone who, who likes to delegate and empower a project to the person that I have running it a thousand percent.

6:52I figure if the buck stops with you, then you're going to give more of your time and energy to make it great. And it's worked well for me throughout my career. I mean, American Dad is a great example. That's a show that I've let exist on its own. The showrunners truly run that show. I'm not hanging over their shoulders. And this was very much the same. I mean, how involved are you on Family Guy and American Dad? Are you reading Family Guy's scripts still? Do you give little notes? Are you totally hands off? These days, I essentially do voices and that's it. So you come in and you're like, oh, that's a funny joke.

7:28Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of it. I ran that show for about 10 years and then passed it off to my co-showrunners. And American Dad, after the first week, I was out. I went back to Resurrecting Family Guy and let that show kind of evolve on its own. And Akiva Schaefer is somebody who doesn't need me hanging over his shoulder. He knows what he's doing. Director of Naked Gun, yeah. You get a great team of writers, and it's an interesting experiment because, again, Erica Huggins, who runs my company, was brought on to be able to turn this thing into, this thing being our little company over there, into something that could generate good stuff, even if I was off working 12 hours a day, which in this case I was on TED.

8:13So it's kind of a grand experiment. And it's a testament to her and her team and to Akiva that honestly, it's like, I realize now how extraneous I really am. That's the way to do it, man. Can you believe these South Park guys are still doing that show and writing and doing every episode? I know they only do 10 a year, but like, can you believe that? I would never trade our animation team for anything on Family Guy. But their production cycle of, what is it, like two weeks? Yeah, they're literally making tinkers to the episode the day it airs. It's kind of amazing. I know you guys have feuded in the past, but it is kind of amazing.

8:51It's pretty incredible that it's... Yeah, any show that lasts that long is pretty astounding. But we have to... You know, our shows take about 10 months to a year to produce each episode. So, you know, we have to really kind of guess what the world is going to look like, which obviously gets harder and harder. So you have to kind of treat it more like... Jeffrey Epstein jokes, you know, added at the last second. You just don't know what's going to happen. We have to treat it more like All in the Family, the way Norman Lear did. If we're going to talk about anything that's relevant, we have to kind of keep it maybe a little more general so that, you know, in 2026 or 2027, the jokes are still going to work.

9:31Do you worry about the comedy climate right now as a guy who pushes the envelope a lot? From my standpoint, it's hard to see what some other people are seeing. I've been very lucky with the way my career has progressed as far as comedy is concerned. I don't, I've never had a situation where I said, you know, damn it, I can't do this anymore. This, everybody's so sensitive now. It's like, I haven't really run across that. I feel like Family Guy. Yeah. It sort of exists in its own little bubble. It's kind of like South Park that way, where you guys do things on that show. And when you see them, you're like, oh, that's shocking.

10:07And then it's on to the next thing. And then you get away with it. Yeah. And I think it's also that these people aren't real. Peter Griffin is not somebody that you can cancel. Is that why these shows are immune? Is that they're not real? Why do the animated shows get away with what the live action stuff does? I think that that has a lot to do with it because, again, they're fictional characters and it takes so many people to get Peter Griffin to walk even two steps. You don't really know who to yell at. But there is a line. I'm sure even in your own taste, you have vetoed things. Right? Every once in a while.

10:44Every once in a while. Give us a good example of something that was over the line for Family Guy. God, I mean, it's been so long since I've worked in that writer's room. I'm sure there were things that I vetoed. But I will say that the system is pretty reliable in telling you when you've crossed the line, even if you yourself don't know that you've crossed the line. Oh, interesting. How so? Meaning just in the fans telling you? Well, it doesn't even get that far. You have the writer's room where if it gets a laugh and it's a joke that's close to the edge of the line, you have a conversation about it.

11:14If you decide to try it, it goes to the table read. A table read is pretty unforgiving if you've crossed a line. We've had jokes on Family Guy where they've just gotten dead silence in that room. Because you have the executives, you have your artists, you have your production team. Everyone's there and they're not going to be kind if something doesn't work. So you do know before it even reaches the air. And if it makes it past at that point, then you have to have the conversation with broadcast standards. And, you know, shockingly, Family Guy has had a good relationship with broadcast standards over the years.

11:47Well, I did an item on South Park last week where the Trump episode they did not only went to standards, it went all the way up to the owner of the company. Beyond the CEOs went to the owner, Sherry Redstone, who had to decide whether to depict a naked AI Trump talking to his own penis. You're like, is this why I got into this business? That's when I decided that Hollywood was for me. The climate certainly has changed, especially since when you started out and started doing Family Guy. Do you think Ted would be made for theaters today? It's possible. I mean, Ted was such a strange movie to begin with.

12:27The only thing that might hinder Ted today A is its budget, if it were being made, because it was that bear is just he has not gotten any less expensive. Right. Yeah. It's a CGI live action movie, but it's not for kids. So you got to factor that in. And luckily, it was a big success. But I'm talking both from the perspective of comedies as theatrical movies. And I'm also talking sort of the comedy climate of what's appropriate, what's not. I feel you see a lot of filmmakers say, oh, we don't see as many comedies today because you can't really be as funny as some of those comedies of the 90s and 2000s were because the climate has changed.

13:05I don't buy that. A lot of people don't. Seth Rogen, I've talked to Seth Rogen about this. He doesn't buy it either. No, I think it makes for great headlines. And, you know, it makes for a great clickbait to kind of get us all worked up about it. I have not experienced it myself. There are things that, you know, I mean, the TED series we did for Peacock, which is a streaming service. Oh, it is? Oh, thank you. I watched the TED show on Peacock. I know, you know, you've said in the past that it's hard to find. It is there on Peacock. They did promote it. Yes, they did. Yes, they did. But when we were making that show, at no point that I feel like, and that was what, 2022?

13:47We were 2023. We were making that show. So at no point did I feel like I was hamstrung in some way, in a way that I wouldn't have been 15 years ago. I just don't know that it's, I mean, what is it? Jezelnik quoted Andy Warhol, art is getting away with it. And if nobody laughs, I'm sure I'm completely butchering that quote. If nobody laughs, you didn't get away with it. And I don't think audiences are as uptight about comedy as we're led to believe. I think you could make Ted today, and I think there would be. I think, you know, to your point where we're not seeing as much of these kinds of comedies, you would know much more than I do about how much of that is the studio.

14:28I do think to some degree, us as writers, what is classified as comedy is so different than when like Cheers was on the air. You know, Cheers was winning Emmys and that was a show that was a true comedy. It was, there were jokes, there were hard jokes. It was funny. and, you know, nowadays shows that, how many actual comedies are up for best comedy each year at the Emmys or at the Oscars? Not a whole lot. Right. And so as writers, that tells us, well, I guess, you know, everybody wants to win awards. So we all kind of start to maybe think, all right, how can I kind of make this show a little more important with a capital I?

15:03Yeah. So I think it's a combination of those two things. But if you're in the market, though, you're a writer-producer, you're coming up with ideas, you're doing projects with collaborators, if you want a project to sell and get made and air, what are the things that you are tailoring your projects towards? For me, it's always been about what would I want to watch? What's going to make me laugh? What am I going to tune in for? What's not out there that I'm not seeing that I want to see? What does interest you about comedy these days? What are you into? I always like, look, my favorite comedy of all time is Defending Your Life.

15:39Good one. There's a lot of similarities as far as what I like about that film and what I like about doing Ted. I always like when there's one thing that is so outlandish and everything else has to be as grounded as you can make it. And that was the trick with Ted. It's like, how do I take this crazy idea and make it as just banal as I can? And that's what interests me about comedy. It's the same thing that interests me about sci-fi. It's like, how can I take something that is just so impossibly unfathomable and make it feel as mundane and relatable as possible? And are there aspects of comedy that you were once into and that are boring for you now?

16:22You know, sometimes when I watch an 80s comedy that I thought was great, I'm a little bit distressed that maybe it wasn't what I thought. That's really funny because my producer, Craig here, he does the Rewatchables, which is a movie podcast for The Ringer. And I was having a huge argument with him about Vacation, which is one of my favorite 80s comedies. And he was like, you know, I could take it or leave it. It's the timing and the pacing feels. I mean, like some of them, obviously, like Naked Gun and Airplane still really work. But there are some Christmas Vacation and the National Lampoon.

16:56They just feel a little slower. Christmas Vacation is a little different. But I went back and watched the original Vacation and I was like, you know what? Craig has a point. Christmas Vacation is better. The original Vacation, it feels a little bit slow. And does that happen with you when you go back and look at these? Yeah, with certain movies. I mean, I can watch The Jerk and it just holds up like it always did. Yeah. But I haven't seen Vacation in a while. And that's interesting because I remember it being hysterically funny. And I feel like the last time I saw it in full was maybe like 10 years ago and I still thought it was funny.

17:28but maybe I got to watch it again because I don't know.

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18:36Naked Gun was my only way into this. Do you remember, Ty, do you remember Top Secret? Oh, of course. Yeah, underrated movie. Val Kilmer, one of his great performances. I agree. It's like, that's a movie that gets like a 0.5 rating from every critic, but it's so underrated and so funny. And when I was seven, the jumping on the bulges from the ballerina dudes was like the funniest thing I'd ever heard. Hysterical. Hysterical. Yeah. I know. And it does make you nostalgic, though, for a time when there were shared experiences with comedies. And I think that is kind of what we're missing in movies.

19:13Or are we missing it? And it's just, it's online now. Everyone laughs at the same memes. Everyone laughs at the same instagrams or tiktoks that are all in our feeds and that's the shared experience now to some degree it's that but the the quantity is just so much greater that that it's you're you're not gonna i mean i think what what you do miss is you know everyone watched seinfeld that night and then talked about it the next day and it was a very communal experience and obviously you know the fucking roots of theater are communal it's like the greeks gathering around to watch a tragedy And so it's, what is that now?

19:51Maybe it's memes. Maybe it's... Yeah, it's the Coldplay video. It's stuff like that. Yeah, it is the Coldplay couple. It's a little darker, though. Now we kind of gather around and enjoy things like that, which are, you know, the roots of them are a little less bright. Well, I open up my account sometimes, and friends of mine have sent me clips of Family Guy. And it's always the most outrageous, like over-the-top, ridiculous quotes and clips from Family Guy. And that is how I primarily experience the show now. I apologize to you and your back-end conversation. No, I get it. But that is how a lot of us experience comedy now.

20:30And it's really tough to compete with this. When you're talking to producers and other peers of yours, do you guys blame the studios for the kind of tougher climate out there? Or do you blame the creatives? Who is to blame for the situation we see ourselves in with comedies and film and TV? I do think that it's layered. I think there is, you know, I don't read a lot of sitcom specs. For example, like when we were staffing Ted, the kind of sitcom spec that I read was so different than what I was reading when we were staffing Family Guy. There were a lot fewer hard jokes. Yeah. Everyone's brother has committed suicide and they're dealing with trauma.

21:11Yes. It was like everyone was begging for an Emmy. And I think, you know, you can't really blame the studios for that. That's on us. It's like, okay, well, you know, unfortunately, the landscape is such that you can either win your awards or you can make people laugh. And sometimes it intersects. Sometimes you get like a, you know, a curbing enthusiasm where it's managing to do both, but it's increasingly rare. And I think we as writers at times have to make that very difficult decision. I tend to opt for the laughs. I'd rather have the audience than the Emmys, just because that's why we're all doing this in the first place.

21:46It's like you're not putting on a puppet show for your parents. You're creating work for the world. Yeah. By the way, this is apropos of nothing. I was sitting in the sixth row of the Oscars when you hosted. And I will swear to my grave, everyone was laughing. Everyone in the room was laughing at those jokes, at the song, at the whole thing. and it was only when they saw that people were complaining on Twitter about stuff that they freaked out about it. So there. Much appreciated, Matt. Appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, that was my experience as well. I loved that room. It was a great room. I had a blast.

22:25That was also a point, as my friend Jon Favreau pointed out, if you reach this point of your career where you've had a couple successes in a row and the family guy was at its peak and Ted had just come out and I was hosting the Oscars, like you're kind of ready to get the shit kicked out of you. Yeah. And that's kind of, you know, they build you up to knock you down. I do think that was a factor with the Oscars because I was, I mean, it was just, it was a blast. And, you know, look, hey, the ratings were up. Come on. What was the problem? I've never... Oh, they would kill for those ratings now.

22:57I've never gotten a clear answer from any reviewer as to exactly why did you classify that as something that didn't go well? It was, I think it went pretty well. Yeah, I know. I never sat in seats as good as that for the Oscars after that show. I don't know what happened. Maybe they're cleaning the slate. I don't know what. All right. So Naked Gun comes out. It does fine. It's not a huge hit. It's not a bomb. They make their money back. You guys are happy with it. People like it. Does it impact the comedy landscape at all? No idea. I mean, I think it's going to do well because I think people are starved.

23:31I think it's a little bit of water in the desert right now. it's always a little bit of hubris to say your movie that's has yet to come out yet is going to do well but i was hands off enough on this that i think i have an objective viewpoint and i i see it doing really well i think it's exactly what people are looking for right now yeah do you think it's harder than it's been in your career in the business to get a movie made yes yeah yes i would think so a thousand percent tell us your experience there like why do you say that there's a movie that i'm i'm pitching right now that's a little outside the box from what i do but is still very mainstream and and i think 10 years ago would have been maybe a little bit of an easier sell i think there's just a kind of gun-shy attitude mainly because of economics as far as what's going on right now that the industry is changing we don't know how things are going to look in 10 years we don't know what role ai is going to play or any of us going to have jobs.

24:28You know, there's, there's just a, there's always a little bit of fear that comes into play when you're pitching a movie, but I think it's sort of on steroids right now because of all these other things. Yeah. Rogan said on this show that all it will take is one big success and theatrical comedies will be back. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. I mean, that's what old school did for our radio comedies. Or hangover. Yeah. Hangover. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, that's always true. It's like suddenly this is what everybody wants. And I think that's perennially true. Yeah. We got to find some young stars as well.

24:59Some sort of next generation of comedy stars. Yeah. I mean, I, the next time I have to staff a show, I hope that I read more scripts with hard jokes. Cause it's, it's, that's really when you're doing a comedy, that's kind of what you're looking for in the room. It's like, is this, can I rely on this person to be funny in a room with, uh, with eight other people? Yeah. Are you still excited about what you do? Do you get charged up or is it sort of, this is your job now? It's a little of both. I always get the most excited when there's the possibility of failure. Oh, really? Yeah. When I was doing, the original Ted was really exhilarating because it was such a weird movie and Bridesmaids had just come out and it was a huge hit.