In the age of the “Me Too” movement, can Family Guy make amends with Glenn Quagmire? It’s going to give it a giggity-giggity go.
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Executive producer and co-showrunner Rich Appel, producer Alec Sulkin and writer Steve Callaghan opened up about how the recent cultural movement against sexual harassment and assault is affecting the upcoming season of the FOX show to ComicBook.com at San Diego Comic-Con Saturday.
“The Me Too stuff became such a cultural force while we were writing for next season and we are taking it head on with Quagmire,” Appel told ComicBook, adding that they’re “trying to be pretty fair about the whole character we’ve got, and [creator Seth MacFarlane] completely encouraged us to do that. In fact I think he took a specific interest in this episode.”
Quagmire’s hypersexual nature took a blow last season in what seemed to be a moment of reckoning for the character when he got his penis bitten off by a shark. But at the last minute, his dad showed up to give him his old penis to reattach, leaving Quagmire only slightly worse for the wear.
The decision to address “Me Too” in the problematic protagonist comes as MacFarlane has spoken out against alleged sexual abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey — the latter of whom has shown up as a punch line about sexual assault long before allegations were widespread against the actor. But do the writers see themselves as cultural oracles?
“I think the key to that is just number of jokes times volume of shows,” Sulkin told Comicbook. “We tend to talk about a lot of different subjects, and it’s bound to happen that it will line up somehow at some point. And I feel like now, with the sort of Trump era and the Me Too movement and all that kind of stuff, we just have a few extra prongs that are lining up at the right time.”
Callaghan added, “You buy enough lottery tickets, you’re eventually going to win.”
Family Guy Season 17 returns to FOX on September 30th at 9 p.m. ET.
