‘Family Guy’ to Do Donald Trump Episode About Fake News

Family Guy is a show that’s never afraid to take on the more controversial topics and in season 17 that means taking on the President of the United States.

Sometime during the upcoming season, the FOX animated series will feature an episode that will see the Griffin family move from Quahog to Washington D.C. when Peter is hired to be Donald Trump‘s new Communications Director due to his skills as a purveyor of “fake news”. However, after Meg has an “unpleasant encounter” with Trump, things get complicated with Peter and Trump engaging in an “epic battle”.

“Although this episode was written almost a year ago, fortunately Trump has done nothing since then to embarrass himself or our nation,” showrunners Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly.

The upcoming Trump episode was announced during the show’s panel at San Diego-Comic con last weekend which also so saw several other reveals about the show’s seventeenth season. One of the bigger ones is that the local Quahog high school, which has been named James Woods High — yes, for the actor — since the show’s premiere will now be called Adam West High. The name change is to honor the late Batman actor who also voiced the Mayor of Quahog in the series.

As for other upcoming episodes on the series, it’s not just Trump that Family Guy will be taking on. Appel and Sulkin along with writer Steve Callaghan spoke with ComicBook.com at SDCC and revealed that the show will take on the “Me Too” movement as well.

“The Me Too stuff became such a cultural force while we were writing for next season and we are taking head on with Quagmire,” Appel said, 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.”

MacFarlane taking specific interest in the episode isn’t surprising. He has previously spoken out against alleged sexual abusers such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey — the later of whom has shown up as a punch line about sexual assault on the show long before allegations were made against the actor. Sulkin commented on those jokes, noting that it’s not so much that the show predicted things but that with the number of jokes they tell something will end up true eventually.

“I think the key to that is just number of jokes times volume of shows,” Sulkin said. “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 put it a bit more simply.

“You buy enough lottery tickets, you’re eventually going to win,” he said.

Family Guy season 17 returns to FOX on September 30th at 9 p.m. ET.