Family Guy Creator Seth MacFarlane Reveals He Has Complicated Relationship With FOX Now

This fall, Family Guy will return to FOX for its 21st season, continuing its run as one of the longest-tenured primetime shows on television. The series has become a staple for FOX (alongside The Simpsons) since it first premiered in 1999, and Seth MacFarlane has been steering the ship ever since then. In recent years, however, the relationship between MacFarlane and the FOX network has become a bit complicated. FOX, and particularly FOX News, lies on the opposite end of the political spectrum as MacFarlane and many others. Issues like human rights and gun violence in America have brought that schism to the forefront, and it’s become a much more difficult situation for many that work on FOX programs.

This weekend, MacFarlane spoke at the Produced By conference, joining remotely alongside Erica Huggins, the president of his production company, Fuzzy Door. During the conversation, MacFarlane opened up about his relationship with FOX as a network, and how it has changed over the years.

“It’s an incredibly complicated relationship that I have with that company,” MacFarlane explained (per Deadline). “There are people there with whom I have great personal relationships. There are people that I like a lot. But it is a different company than it was when I started. It’s very difficult for me to reconcile exactly what my relationship is with that company right now.”

“I, like many people, have a lot of issues and a lot of objections to their practices,” he continued. “Certainly, the news division and the entertainment division operate relatively independently of each other, and that’s something that allowed a lot of us to sleep a little better.”

MacFarlane went on to say that he has some “objections” with that the company finds acceptable in our world. That being said, he has never run into a specific issue in regards to decisions made about Family Guy.

“My overall reaction – and I know I’m not alone – to what the company does and how they communicate what they choose to communicate and what they think is acceptable is, I have a lot of objections,” MacFarlane explained.

“I dump on Fox a lot, but I will say the whole time I was there, no one ever tried to censor the show politically,” he added. “There’s a very laissez faire attitude that worked great for us…I was never censored and I was never pressured to project a different political outlook.”

The 21st season of Family Guy debuts on FOX on September 25th.