Hating Seth MacFarlane: A Timeline

He was one of the youngest TV executive producers in the medium’s history, created not one but two successful animated programs, hosted the Oscars and had a blockbuster comedy bring in beaucoup box office receipts. He has contributed $1 million to the Reading Rainbow kickstarter fund and produced the recent reboot of the classic science series Cosmos; Harvard named him their 2011 Humanist of the Year. Yet Seth MacFarlane has managed to inspire an intense, rabid hatred of his raunchy comedy and retro-dude attitudes that’s been as fervent as the fanbase that brought the canceled Family Guy back to life. It’s a sentiment that seemed to reach a fever pitch this past weekend with the poorly received release of Ted 2 — the sequel to his 2012 hit that’s garnered its fair share of condemnation for a racial-allegory story about the titular profane teddy bear’s attempts to be legally recognized as a person.

Those criticisms are the latest in a long line of censures for the 41-year-old filmmaker, who’s been the target of scorn and ridicule ever since he first hit it big in TV animation. Call it Sethenfreude: the irrepressible urge to hate on MacFarlane, which as our timeline indicates, has been steadily escalating for the past 16 years.

1999-2000: Family Guy
An offshoot of MacFarlane’s Life of Larry, his thesis film at the Rhode Island School of Design, Family Guy scored a prestigious premiere slot directly after Super Bowl XXXIII; Fox had hoped to make the show about an Archie Bunker-like loudmouth part of a primetime-animation one-two punch. From the very beginning, however, the show was immediately savaged for its juvenile, scattershot and often-bigoted absurdity – elements that would become both its, and MacFarlane’s, calling card. In particular, the show’s crude humor attracted the ire of Entertainment Weekly‘s TV critic.

“Family Guy — about dumbbell dad Peter Griffin, his wife, three children, and dog — is The Simpsons as conceived by a singularly sophomoric mind that lacks any reference point beyond other TV shows. . .the acclaim for writer-artist-actor MacFarlane (who does three regular voices on the show) is shaping up to be the hollowest hype of the year.” – Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, 4/9/99

When it came time for EW‘s worst shows of the list, guess what Tucker singled out? The write-up would help spark a long-running feud between the critic and MacFarlane (including some choice Family Guy episode digs at Tucker), and contributed to the notion that the comic was thin-skinned and vindictive in addition to someone who traded in wannabe-extreme offensiveness.  

“Racist, anti-Semitic, and AIDS jokes; shoddy animation; stolen ideas: the cartoon as vile swill.” – Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly, 12/24/99

Not surprisingly, the show attracted the ire of several TV watchdog groups, including the Parents Television Council, who’ve objected to the show’s tendency to push the envelope of “good taste.” They petitioned Fox to drop the show as early as 2000; the network eventually did give the series the axe after three seasons in 2003, due to low ratings.