‘Family Guy’ Bosses on Finding the Right Story for 450th Episode and Emulating Seth MacFarlane

When “Family Guy” returns for Season 24 Sunday, the Fox animated sitcom will also celebrate its 450th episode of those good old fashioned values on which we the audience still rely.

Ahead of the milestone moment, co-showrunners Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin opened up to TheWrap about what goes into making a premiere-worthy episode, those trademarked cutaway gags and working with original series creator Seth MacFarlane.

“We don’t really set out saying, ‘This one is going to be 450, let’s make it great, guys.’ It’s more like we are doing our episodes, we know 450 is coming up and it’s going to be our season premiere,” Sulkin explained. “Then we can look at our pool of episodes: ‘We could potentially make it any one of these, which one do we like best?'”

“We know in advance because the production schedule is longer than a year, so we’re breaking more and have plenty of stories banked. But you have to spread out episodes that have a lot of production needs,” Appel added. “Like, if we had two episodes that are three acts or parodies, you can’t put that next to an episode in production that has a few musical numbers with lots of animation … But yes, when we were breaking this story, we knew it was going to be a potentially memorable episode.”

This weekend’s premiere — entitled “The Edible Arrangement” — is a Lois and Stewie episode. And after 449 installments before it, the “Family Guy” bosses are particularly thankful to have writer/EP/former showrunner Steve Callaghan and his encyclopedic knowledge of the show on staff in order to prevent them from repeating anything.

“It’s hard to keep track sometimes, and then we have to kind of be aware of what ‘The Simpsons’ has done, because we don’t want someone to say ‘The Simpsons’ did this,” Appel shared. “My first job, which I loved, was at ‘The Simpsons,’ and I left just about after the 200th episode. And I sincerely felt, ‘Good luck thinking of new stories, guys.’ Now they’re another 600 episodes later.”

“The beauty is that on a show like ours, in a show like ‘The Simpsons,’ when you think about it, most half-hour comedies have five or six characters, because that’s what the budget can afford. We have 40 characters you could name — a dozen of them voiced by Seth MacFarlane, Seth Green,” he continued. “We have this great ability to populate a whole town, and that just helps us think of stories, how to recombine characters.”

Since its premiere in January 1999 after Super Bowl XXXIII, “Family Guy” has become well-known for its use of cutaway gags. While there’s no formula for the recurring bit, Sulkin pointed out: “They tend to come in the first two thirds of the show.”

“Given social media, a 20- or 30-second cutaway is often going to be seen by more people than the entire episode on Hulu,” Appel further noted. He also praised Fox for letting the show do what it wants after all this time. “They’re a good partner. They give us leeway. They know what the brand is. In terms of standards and practices or the sensor, they’re reasonable,” he said. “So when they say no and hold fast… they’ve been reasonable on a number of things that I could have expected them to push back on.”

Sulkin and Appel have been co-showrunning the series together since Season 16 in 2017. Still, they credit MacFarlane with being Spooner Street’s special ingredient — even after he left the writers’ room.

“In the first 10 seasons, when Seth was there in the room with us, obviously that’s a huge advantage. Not only was he the funniest writer in the room, but he was able to pitch his jokes in the exact voice the way we’d be hearing them on the show. It was like a cheat code,” Sulkin shared. “But back in those days, the writers’ room was a little more cutthroat. People were really vying for Seth’s attention, approval, trying to get as much on the show as they could. It became almost like a numbers game, but still really funny people. Over the years, and certainly where we are now, the room is such a nice place — people are still great at their job, but I think getting longer pick-ups, having been on this long, everybody has just kind of relaxed into their comedy more.”

“Don’t get us wrong: We’re all still desperate for Seth’s approval, but we’ve learned to mask it,” Appel joked. “I was lucky enough to have that time in the room with Seth, which is so key to everything we’re still doing. There are a lot of writers who were there for that and to have been in a room with Seth for a decade, hearing him and his take, just let it kind of seep into our sensibilities. Hearing that voice creates this library, whereas I think the show would be different if Seth didn’t have the time in Season 1 to be in the writers’ room and how those characters would have developed, because that’s so much his personal stamp.”

“Family Guy” returns for Season 24 Sunday on Fox and streams the next day on Hulu.

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