Last night, after trump was elected the next President of the United States, a man named Jayson Baker tweeted: “@SethMacFarlane on the bright side of Trump being president, Family Guy will have funny Tump (sic) references.” MacFarlane replied to the tweet: “That presupposes I can still stomach working for Fox after this.” He also referred to the new POTUS as a "rambling, incoherent creature."
MacFarlane has worked with Fox for 20 years
Fox is the infamously right-wing television network that has had a working relationship with MacFarlane for two decades and is home to the animated series he has created and/or produced, including American Dad!, The Cleveland Show, Bordertown, and yes, Family Guy.
Currently in its fifteenth season and with 274 episodes under its belt to date, Family Guy is already on thin ice, with MacFarlane announcing before now that he would like to end the show and focus on other projects, such as his upcoming sci-fi comedy-drama. However, it is worth noting that this is his passion project and also being produced with Fox, so if he cuts off his working relationship with them, that show goes down the tubes too. Family Guy has yet to be renewed for a sixteenth season and it is becoming more and more likely that the fifteenth will be its last.
Nothing has been confirmed yet
MacFarlane may have been overreacting and has changed his mind about Fox by now, but he is right that in Trump’s America, Fox will be more formidable than a biased news network.
According to The Huffington Post, Fox News “was not created by politicians and is not funded by a political party,” and yet its coverage has a conservative bias that influences viewers’ opinions, and in Trump’s America, that could be dangerous.
Whether or not MacFarlane will stick to this remains to be seen, but he capped off the night with a tweet that lightheartedly referenced the notorious Dallas plot twist that he has parodied himself in an episode of Family Guy: “Going to bed now.
Maybe this is all a nightmare and I’ll wake up to find Patrick Duffy in the shower.” Since Dallas was a CBS show, this could be a veiled hint at a network switch, but it’s unlikely as CBS is much too tame to handle MacFarlane’s humour, and much more likely to just be a pop culture-referencing joke to make light of a dire political situation, much like Family Guy does at its best.