Seth MacFarlane

• Born: October 26, 1973
• Place of Birth: Kent, Connecticut

Animator, voice actor, writer, producer

“The real beauty of animation is that there are no boundaries to the types of stories you can tell or rules on how you can tell them,” Seth MacFarlane told Bruce Newman for the New York Times (January 24, 1999). In the late 1990s, only three years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in animation, MacFarlane created Family Guy, an enormously popular animated TV series with several characters voiced by MacFarlane himself. The show has been lauded by many for its cultural satire and mix of highbrow and lowbrow humor, and maligned by many others, who view it as tasteless. Family Guy aired on the Fox network for three seasons before being canceled owing to comparatively low ratings, but strong DVD sales, highly rated reruns, and the show’s popularity among young males—an audience highly coveted by advertisers—persuaded Fox to bring the series back after a hiatus of three years. MacFarlane has won many honors for Family Guy, including Primetime Emmy Awards in 2000 and 2002 and multiple Emmy nominations. In 2005 MacFarlane launched a second animated show, American Dad!, which followed the exploits of a family headed by a jingoistic CIA employee and features more political humor than Family Guy. MacFarlane’s third animated series, The Cleveland Show—a Family Guy spinoff with African American main characters—debuted in the fall of 2009 and ran until 2013.

In one of the first deals of its kind, MacFarlane signed an agreement with Google in 2008 to create content directly for the Internet. He ventured into live-action sitcoms in 2007 with the short-lived The Winner, as a writer and producer; in 2013 he was co–executive producer of another live sitcom, Dads, which was panned by critics, even some generally appreciative of MacFarlane’s brand of humor. MacFarlane’s first feature film was Ted (2012); he directed the film, served as a cowriter, and not only voiced the eponymous stuffed teddy bear but acted the part as well, with motion-capture technology. (For this he was nominated for a 2013 MTV Movie Award for best shirtless performance.) In his second film, A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014), MacFarlane plays Albert, the lead character. MacFarlane has been a frequent guest on television talk shows, including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Larry King Now, and in 2012 he was a guest host on Saturday Night Live. In February 2013 he proved to be a controversial host for the 85th Annual Academy Awards, at which he was also a nominee (with Walter Murphy, a frequent collaborator), for best original song (Ted’s “Everybody Needs a Best Friend”).

Education and Early Career

Seth Woodbury MacFarlane was born on October 26, 1973, in Kent, Connecticut. His younger sister, Rachael, is an actress (she voices a character on American Dad!). MacFarlane’s father, Ronald, was a history teacher; his mother, Perry, was a guidance counselor and admissions adviser at the private Kent School, which MacFarlane attended. MacFarlane described his parents to Bruce Newman as former hippies who were “just coming out of it”; they raised him in a liberal household. “The style of humor that you’ll see in the show is the same kind of tasteless humor that you’d find around my house when I was growing up,” he told Newman. “Some of the foulest jokes that I ever heard came from my mother.” MacFarlane showed a penchant for drawing at a very young age. At age eight he began publishing a comic strip, “Walter Crouton,” in the Kent Good Times Dispatch, a local newspaper. The thought of animation, however, intimidated him, until he saw a television show about an animated film created by a college student. “I started experimenting with animation after that,” MacFarlane told Newman. As a boy he also participated with his sister in local musical theater.

MacFarlane graduated from Kent in 1991 and then enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, from which he graduated in 1995 with a BA degree in animation. MacFarlane initially wanted to work for the children’s-animation giant Disney but later decided that he would rather make cartoons geared toward adults. (By then he had become a fan of the long-running animated prime-time show The Simpsons, created by Matt Groening.) While still a student, MacFarlane had created an animated short, The Life of Larry. One of his professors sent it to executives at Hanna-Barbera, the studio responsible for many of the animated programs that have appeared on American television since 1960. Impressed, the studio’s executives invited MacFarlane to work for them, with the result that he moved to Los Angeles, California, shortly after graduating from college. Over the next few years, he worked on several Hanna-Barbera shows, including Johnny Bravo and Dexter’s Laboratory. During that time the Fox network’s program MAD TV showed an interest in airing The Life of Larry, but that deal ultimately fell through. Soon, though, executives at Fox invited MacFarlane to create and pitch an animated series. Over the course of six months, he singlehandedly wrote, animated, and did all the voices for an eight-minute presentation in 1998 that laid the groundwork for Family Guy. Fox was sold. “That the network ordered a series off of eight minutes of film is just testimony to how powerful those eight minutes were,” Sandy Grushow, president of 20th Century Fox Television, told Newman. “There are very few people in their early 20s who have ever created a television series.” At twenty-four, MacFarlane was the youngest creator and executive producer in television.

Family Guy, which debuted in 1999, is set in Quahog, Rhode Island, and follows the adventures of the overweight, bumbling Peter Griffin, his considerably smarter and more attractive wife, and their two misfit teenage children. The family also includes Stewie, an evil toddler bent on matricide and world domination, and Brian, an Ivy League–educated, martini-swilling, talking dog. MacFarlane voiced most of the male characters, including Peter, Stewie, the lecherous neighbor Glenn Quagmire, and Brian, the last of whom, many journalists have reported, has the speaking voice closest to his creator’s. MacFarlane told People (November 29, 2004) that of all the characters he voices, he has the most in common with Brian: “We’re both liberal, enjoy a good Scotch and tend to get in awkward situations with women.” He revealed to Gloria Goodale of the Christian Science Monitor (February 12, 1999) that his inspiration for the character Peter was the father of a friend, who fell asleep and began snoring in a theater during a showing of the film Philadelphia (about the political and social implications of AIDS)—behavior that “just appalled his family.” As Goodale reported, that act of “innocent political incorrectness” appealed to MacFarlane.

Family Guy drew both praise and condemnation for its willingness to make jokes about any and all topics, often in the form of sudden asides unassociated with the plots. “MacFarlane’s pell-mell wit recalls The Simpsons’ fevered early-’90s creative peak,” Michael Krantz wrote for Time (January 11, 1999). “Punch lines spill out furiously as the show spirals into multilayered flashbacks and inventive fantasies.” The Entertainment Weekly (April 9, 1999) writer Ken Tucker, however, likened Family Guy to “The Simpsons as conceived by a singularly sophomoric mind that lacks any reference point beyond other TV shows.” MacFarlane asserted his right to pull humor from any milieu, high or low. “Hopefully, people will think of us as a smart show,” he told Jefferson Graham for the Financial Post (February 15, 1999). “If we do a penis joke, we’ll back it up with a Norman Mailer joke. We want a wide variety of humor.” MacFarlane also denied charges of being intentionally offensive. “We’re not out to simply piss people off,” he told Ray Richmond of the Hollywood Reporter (October 31, 2007). “It’s not about being as offensive as we can be. It’s about being funny.”

MacFarlane took ribbing not only from some critics but from his peers in prime-time animation. In an episode of The Simpsons in which the Simpson family travels to Italy, a shot zooms in on a police blotter that says that Peter Griffin is wanted for the crime of “plagiarismo.” Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the raunchy cartoon show South Park, devoted two full episodes to mocking MacFarlane’s work, ending with the report that Family Guy is actually written by manatees. South Park also poked fun at the seemingly random content and timing of the humorous asides on Family Guy. “If something is funny enough, we do step out of the story,” MacFarlane responded, as quoted by Alex Strachan for the Canwest News Service (November 1, 2007). “I mean, who the hell watches a sitcom for the story? You watch it because you want to laugh.” He added that he had found the South Park episodes about Family Guy to be very funny.

Family Guy impressed most critics and struck a chord with young male viewers. It has won several honors, including Primetime Emmy Awards for outstanding voice-over performance (2000, 2016, 2017, and 2019) and outstanding music and lyrics (2002), for the lyrics written by MacFarlane. The show suffered, though, from several programming missteps on the part of the network, which rescheduled the show many times—a proven way to lose viewers—and put it opposite such formidable competition as World Wrestling Entertainment offerings, the hit sitcom Friends, and the popular reality-television show Survivor. Family Guy came close to cancellation in 2000 but was revived at the last minute, only to be cut in 2002.

Following the show’s cancellation, Fox responded to popular demand and released the three seasons of Family Guy on DVD. It also licensed reruns to appear on the Cartoon Network as part of the channel’s late-night Adult Swim lineup. The DVD Family Guy: Volume One sold more than 2.2 million copies, and Family Guy was the highest-rated show on Adult Swim during that time. In 2005 executives at Fox approved new episodes of the series after three years—then the longest hiatus of any network show ever to be brought back to life. Family Guy returned to the airwaves in January 2005.

Family Guy branched beyond its regular network slot and into other media. In 2006 High Voltage Games/2K Games (a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.) released Family Guy Video Game!, voiced by the original Family Guy cast. A second video game, Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse, was developed by Heavy Iron Studios and published by Activision in 2012. MacFarlane has created several Family Guy specials, and his Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin … the Untold Story (2005) was the first straight-to-DVD movie ever made from a television series. MacFarlane’s well known affection for the Star Trek and Star Wars series and movies led to Blue Harvest (2007), the hour-long premiere episode of Family Guy’s sixth season, which recast Star Wars with the Griffin family and friends and used the premise of that famous science-fiction film series as a jumping-off point for numerous gags. An uncut version of Blue Harvest was released on DVD in 2008. In that year Family Guy: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side—a spoof of The Empire Strikes Back, the second film in the Star Wars series—was released on DVD. MacFarlane’s parody of the Star Wars series continued in the video Family Guy Presents: It’s a Trap (2010). Featuring MacFarlane and Alex Borstein, the actress who voices Lois Griffin, Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show, aired in the fall of 2009, sandwiched between Family Guy episodes. The assemblage of skits and Family Guy clips was sponsored by Warner Bros. after being dropped by its original sponsor, Microsoft, because of its controversial content. Entertainment Weekly writer Ken Tucker characterized it (November 8, 2009) a “nightclub set,” with an orchestra and an audience. Tucker praised MacFarlane’s singing voice and the dexterity with which he can switch in and out of character voices. The retrospective TV movie Family Guy: 200 Episodes Later was released in 2012.

The revived Family Guy arrived in May 2005 alongside American Dad!, a new show MacFarlane had created for the network during Family Guy’s hiatus. MacFarlane created American Dad! with Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman and did extensive voicing for the show, but he left much of its creative direction to Weitzman and Barker. Like Family Guy, American Dad! follows a nuclear family, headed this time by a bumbling CIA employee, Stan Smith. The more outlandish family members are a German-speaking goldfish and a junk-food-loving alien, both of whom Stan rescued from government experiments at Area 51 (the Nevada military base where some conspiracy theorists believe the US government is hiding bodies of space aliens who crash-landed on Earth). The humor on American Dad! is more overtly political than that of Family Guy, satirizing current events, such as the George W. Bush–led “war on terror.” MacFarlane told Bridget Byrne of the Associated Press (April 20, 2005) that the show’s concept “sprang from the climate during the [2004 presidential] election … a very politically charged time.” After a decade on Fox, American Dad! moved to TBS in late 2014, after the show’s 2013–14 season on Fox.

Although MacFarlane is liberal, he told Virginia Rohan for the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record (May 1, 2005), “We do try and satirize both sides—the knee-jerk flag-waving personality of Stan and the [daughter] Haley personality, the type who will burst into applause if [the liberal comedian and commentator] Bill Maher even sneezes.” American Dad! received relatively good ratings but did not come close to the popularity of Family Guy, perhaps, some suggested, because it addressed issues about which the American public was not yet ready to laugh. “Stan’s cluelessness approximates that of Peter Griffin’s, only with the potential of a body count,” David Kronke wrote for the Los Angeles Daily News (May 1, 2005).

Meanwhile, in 2008 MacFarlane had signed a deal with Google to create Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, an original series of animated shorts distributed by Google AdSense to various websites the users of which were thought to be Family Guy viewers. That project represented the first original content underwritten by Google for the purposes of online distribution. In early 2009 Priceline signed on as an additional partner, sponsoring MacFarlane’s online animated short Ted Nugent Is Visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Also in 2009 MacFarlane introduced The Cleveland Show, his third animated prime-time series. The Cleveland Show focused on Cleveland Brown, a character from Family Guy; the first episode of the new program found Cleveland and his son leaving Rhode Island for California. “Cleveland is African American, which needs to be mentioned here because the other characters in the show never stop mentioning it,” Tom Shales wrote about the show for the Washington Post (September 29, 2009). “The humor doesn’t necessarily promote racial stereotypes, but whenever a crude joke can be made out of it, Cleveland’s race is mentioned—over and over, in scene after scene. The message that young viewers receive is that racial minorities are different, separate, apart from the norm.” (The character Cleveland was voiced by a white actor, Mike Henry.) The Cleveland Show aired on Fox on Sunday nights, along with The Simpsons, American Dad!, and Family Guy, as part of Fox’s “animation domination” programming block. The Cleveland Show was canceled by Fox in 2013, after four seasons and eighty-eight episodes. MacFarlane announced that the Clevelands would be returning to Quahog.

MacFarlane’s animated shows have been highly successful both despite and because of their edgy humor. As Ray Richmond noted, gags on Family Guy have included a character identified as a “loveable pedophile”; a Pez dispenser, modeled on the slain US president John F. Kennedy, that disgorges candy from its head; and an abandoned baby singing about having been left in a Dumpster. The humor has occasionally drawn complaints, as when Chris Griffin, a character on Family Guy, went on a date in a February 2010 episode with a woman with Down syndrome, who claimed to be the daughter of “the former governor of Alaska.” The real-life former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has a young son, Trig, with Down syndrome; Palin strongly criticized the airing of the episode. As quoted by the Los Angeles Times (February 17, 2010), MacFarlane responded in a statement, “From its inception, Family Guy has used biting satire as the foundation of its humor. The show is an equal-opportunity offender.”

Later Career

The Winner, MacFarlane’s first attempt at a live sitcom—he was executive producer of some episodes and evidently the writer of others—was created by Ricky Blitt, a Family Guy writer. Its protagonist, played by Rob Corddry, looked back on his life when he was in his thirties, a “late bloomer” still living at home with his parents. The show lasted just one season. MacFarlane’s next foray into live sitcoms was Dads, written by Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild—MacFarlane’s collaborators on Family Guy—for which MacFarlane, Sulkin, and Wild served as co–executive producers. Starring Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi as successful video-game developers whose fathers (played by Peter Riegert and Martin Mull) move in with them, wreaking havoc, Dads ran into critical resistance even before its premiere. Frasier Moore, writing in the Huffington Post TV blog (September 16, 2013), commented, “Dads is a display of parental abuse.”

MacFarlane’s first feature film, Ted (2012), starred Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, and MacFarlane himself as the stuffed teddy bear of the title. It was notably successful with both audiences and critics, setting records for highest weekend gross of all time for an original R-rated comedy and then for highest-grossing R-rated comedy ever and taking in nearly $550 million worldwide. MacFarlane directed the film, cowrote the screenplay with Wild and Sulkin, and coproduced it in addition to starring as the foul-mouthed talking teddy bear who interferes with the relationship between John (played by Wahlberg), and his longtime girlfriend, Lori (Kunis). There was immediately talk of a sequel, and Wahlberg signed on for a Ted 2, which was released in June 2015. Ted 2 also proved somewhat popular, with worldwide box-office receipts reaching half those of the original, but American critics largely found it less funny than its predecessor. In 2024, MacFarlane introduced his crude teddy bear alter-ego to a TV audience with the eight-episode series Ted, which streamed on Peacock. The series was a prequal to the films, showing the adventures of Ted and his human companion John as a teenager.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios had signed on for another film with the MacFarlane team, the comedy/Western A Million Ways to Die in the West, which was released in May 2014. MacFarlane coproduced and directed from a script he wrote with Wild and Sulkin. MacFarlane also stars in the film, as a timorous sheep farmer who backs away from a gunfight and consequently loses his girlfriend, played by Amanda Seyfried. The film costars Charlize Theron, Giovanni Ribisi, Liam Neeson, Neil Patrick Harris, and Sarah Silverman, among others.

MacFarlane’s original song for Ted, “Everybody Needs a Best Friend,” written with Walter Murphy, was nominated for an Oscar in 2013 in the category of best achievement in music written for motion pictures, original song. This, however, was not his first award nomination as a composer. That came with his Grammy nomination in 2011 in the category of best song written specifically for a motion picture or for television, for Family Guy’s “Christmastime Is Killing Us,” which MacFarlane wrote with Ron Jones and Danny Smith.

MacFarlane has established himself as a fine baritone, having appeared with the John Wilson Orchestra at the BBC Proms concerts in 2009 in the program That’s Entertainment: A Celebration of Classic MGM Film Musicals. MacFarlane again joined the John Wilson Orchestra in a 2012 Proms celebration of Broadway musicals, singing the music of Meredith Wilson (The Music Man), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (The Pajama Game), and Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella). MacFarlane’s debut studio album,Music Is Better Than Words, a big band/standards album released in 2011, was nominated in the best traditional pop vocal album category at the 54th Grammy Awards in February 2012. Seth MacFarlane: Swingin’ in Concert ran on the Epix Channel in September 2011, with MacFarlane singing the pop standards included on Music Is Better Than Words with a thirty-nine-piece big band, conducted by Joel McNeely.

A resident of Los Angeles, MacFarlane in 2008 signed a four-year, $100-million deal with Fox, making him the highest-paid writer-producer working in television. “I get a lot of pleasure out of making shows,” MacFarlane told Nellie Andreeva for the Reuters News Service (May 5, 2008). “It’s a bonus to be getting paid well for it, and it’s a double bonus to be getting paid exorbitantly for it.”

In 2014, MacFarlane recorded Holiday for Swing! and, the following year, released No One Ever Tells You, which spanned the genres of jazz, American pop, and showtunes. That album, which featured songs like Cole Porter's "It's All Right with Me" and Sammy Cahn and James Van Heusen's "Only the Lonely," was nominated for the 2015 Grammy Award for best traditional pop vocal album. In 2017, MacFarlane recorded his fourth studio album, In Full Swing, an upbeat follow-up.

MacFarlane has also lent his voice and acting abilities to projects created by others. He voiced the part of Johann Kraus in Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and went on to play Ziggy in 2010's family comedy Tooth Fairy, a movie reviewers panned. Later MacFarlane voiced Mike the mouse in Sing (2016), a smash animated jukebox musical that grossed some $634 million worldwide but met with tepid critical reception. He followed that up with the role of Max Chilblain in director Steven Soderbergh's heist dramedy Logan Lucky (2017), a relative flop.

In a departure from his usual focus on satire and other forms of fiction, MacFarlane served as an executive producer for the 2015 documentary This Changes Everything. The film took inspiration from Naomi Klein's nonfiction book of the same name about climate change and its effects.

MacFarlane and Jon Favreau launched The Orville, a live-action space dramedy series, on Fox in September 2017. The show ran on fox for two seasons before it was picked up by the streaming service Hulu for a third season in 2022.

Selected Television Shows

as writer

Dexter’s Laboratory, 1997–98

Johnny Bravo, 1997–2003

special material, 85th Annual Academy Awards, 2013

as creator, writer, and producer

Family Guy, 1999–

American Dad!, 2005–

The Cleveland Show, 2009–2013

Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, 2009

Ted, 2024

Selected Films

Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin … The Untold Story, 2005

Family Guy Presents: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side, 2009

Family Guy Presents: It’s a Trap (2010)

Family Guy: 200 Episodes Later, 2012

Feature Films

Ted, 2012

A Million Ways to Die in the West, 2014

Ted 2, 2015

Bibliography

(Canada) National Post Arts & Life p9 Nov. 1, 2007

Christian Science Monitor Features p18 Feb. 12, 1999

Hoffman, Claire. "No. 1 Offender." The New Yorker, 18 June 2012, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/no-1-offender. Accessed 24 June 2024.

New York Times II p38 Jan. 24, 1999, Sep. 3, 2000, Sep. 11, 2009, Sep. 29, 2011, June 19, 2012, Feb. 25, 2013

Accessed 24 June 2024.

"Seth MacFarlane." AllMovie, www.allmovie.com/artist/seth-macfarlane-p367500. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017.

Thomas, Carly. "Seth MacFarlane on Why He Doesn’t “See a Good Reason to Stop” Making ‘Family Guy’." The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Apr. 2024, www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/seth-macfarlane-no-plans-end-family-guy-1235875699/. Accessed 24 June 2024.