Instead of the million-odd it might take to produce a standard animated episode, Fox offered MacFarlane a bare $50,000 to bring in a pilot. He spent six months drawing and animating an episode at his kitchen table, then provided all the voices himself. By the time the show went into production, with its creator promptly signed up at a million dollars a year, other actors had taken the roles of the long-suffering wife, the man-child son and the square, responsible daughter, but MacFarlane hung on — and continues to hang on — to the three most distinctive characters. He counterfeited a nasal Rhode Island boom for Peter, the “big, fat, loud New England guy who is good at the core but has zero self-editing mechanism”, then developed a flutingly pretentious Anglo drawl for Stewie the evil-genius toddler. Brian, meanwhile, the world-weary talking dog, became the sole inheritor of MacFarlane’s own natural speaking voice.
Family Guy took off fast, swiftly assembling a devoted fan base — one composed predominantly, as MacFarlane admitted, of men in their late teens, twenties and thirties — that allowed it to survive two cancellations by a restive network. MacFarlane also created, wrote and executive-produced two spin-offs: The Cleveland Show, a comic series featuring an African-American family, and American Dad, which revolved around the surreal home life of a square-jawed CIA agent. To interviewers who complained about Family Guy’s increasingly close-to-the-bone one-liners — such as paterfamilias Peter wondering “Would you rather be black or crippled?” — MacFarlane equably maintained that the joke was not the joke itself but the person making it. “It all comes back to Peter’s obliviousness,” he observed. “If Peter meant that maliciously, then it wouldn’t be as funny. We try to keep it so that there’s an innocence to the way he conducts himself.”
As MacFarlane’s wealth grew, so did the opportunities to pursue more eclectic projects. At first these seemed to take the form of Hollywood wish-fulfilment — he bought a rare example of the gull-wing DeLorean car from the Back to the Future films — but they soon took more concrete form. Already a militant atheist, rationalist and self-described science geek, he decided several years ago to throw his weight as producer behind a forthcoming remake of Cosmos, the seminal Carl Sagan series that attempted to open viewers’ eyes to the wonders of the scientific universe. “We’re obsessed with angels and vampires and whatever,” MacFarlane told The New York Times, “when there are more exciting and very real and much more spectacular things to be excited about in our own planetary backyard.”
He also began to explore another obsession, proving that the most surprising things about MacFarlane may be the things he takes entirely seriously. Already an accomplished pianist, he began quietly taking singing lessons upon his arrival in Los Angeles with Lee and Sally Sweetland, a nonagenarian couple who once coached Sinatra and Streisand. In 2009 he popped up at the BBC Proms, dark-suited and smooth-coiffed, performing a handful of music-theatre standards as part of a tribute to MGM musical comedies. The spot-on musical parodies in Family Guy, it seemed, had stemmed all along from their creator’s irony-free love of the Sinatra-era crooners and classic Broadway.
Two years later, an album, Music is Better than Words, paired him with a big band for another string of covers, torch songs and show tunes, and he returns to the Proms this summer with a programme of stage classics set to music from the John Wilson Orchestra. “If I could go back to school for one thing,” he has said, “it would be to learn how to arrange for orchestra.”
Is today’s king of comedy tomorrow’s bandleader in waiting? Admirers and critics, for very different reasons, will both be watching with interest.
'Ted’ (15) opens on 1 August
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