Seth MacFarlane has been interviewed by The Associated Press about money, politics, and most importantly the future of Family Guy.
Discussing future episodes of Family Guy he revealed a number of spoilers to look forward to. In terms of guest-voice appearances the original cast members of Star Trek: The Next Generation are reuniting on the show for an episode in which “Stewie kidnaps the cast” (Patrick Stewart, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, regularly features in American Dad these days as Stan’s boss). Then there’s the sequel to the Star Wars spoof Blue Harvest. “[Blue Harvest] was so popular that we thought it might be fun to write the ‘Empire (Strikes Back)’ episode… As we got into the ‘Empire’ episode, we found that it’s almost twice as much work, but we’ll get through it, somehow, and it’ll be great. It’s like redoing the movie.”
Family Guy shows no signs of shying away from controversial issues as “Brian tries to legalize pot in Quahog” and later down the line there’s an abortion episode. “Hats off to Fox for letting us take some risks, as always,” said MacFarlane on the subject. “There can be a lot of trouble, but at the end of the day, they do generally step up for risky, sensitive, topical stuff.”
Responding to whether the show after seven seasons was beginning to run out of pop-culture references, MacFarlane said, “we hope the characters have gotten to the point that we don’t have to lean on that quite as much.”
As for the long term future of the show, he commented that “if the FCC continues to put the crunch on everything and things become more conservative, Family Guy may be viewed like All in the Family, which would be like the greatest thing in the world for me. It’s just about the greatest show there was… Twenty years from now, if they say the show is still funny, that’s enough for me.”