Seth MacFarlane calls Fox a “complicated” relationship – produced by – Deadline

Multihyphenated Creative and Executive Producer Seth MacFarlane He struggled to explain the complicated relationship he currently has with Fox Network on Sunday at the 13th Annual Gala produced by conspiracy.

Fox has long been home to many of MacFarlane’s featured TV projects, such as A man who loves family life And the Cosmos. The conflict was a result of his feelings for Fox News, while also revealing that he had a refreshingly easy partnership with Disney after it acquired several of his properties.

Speaking remotely at the conference — which ironically took place at the Fox Studios lot — alongside Erica Huggins, the head of his production company, Fuzzy Door, MacFarlane took a moment to express constantly ambivalent feelings about the network. He parted ways with Fox to pursue a lucrative agreement with NBCUniversal’s UCP in 2020, in large part due to his objections to the tone and content of its sister division Fox News.

“It’s an incredibly complex relationship between me and that company,” MacFarlane explained. “There are people with whom I have great personal relationships. There are people that I love very much. But it is a different company than it was when I started. It is very difficult for me to reconcile exactly my relationship with this company at the moment.”

“I, like many people, have a lot of issues and a lot of objections to their practices,” he added. “Sure, the news department and the entertainment department operate relatively independently of each other, and that’s something that has allowed a lot of us to sleep a little better.” But he cited controversial former New York mayor and Trump administration insider Rudy Giuliani about the network’s successful reality contest. masked singer as “sad”.

“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, I have a lot of objections.”

MacFarlane has noted that despite his public criticism, Fox has never attempted to censor content that leans too much left, which often pushes boundaries in series like family lover, Which showed its share of sarcastic comments on Fox News.

He revealed, “I talk about Fox a lot, but I will say the entire time I was there, no one ever tried to censor the show politically.” “There is a lot economic freedom A position that has worked admirably for us… I have never been censored and I have never been pressured to present a different political view.”

He added that he felt that the media would benefit from conservative news from an honest, reasonable and conservative perspective. “The tragedy for me is that I think that there is in fact, in this day and age, there really is an openness and a need, for God’s help, a news outlet that is conservative and rational and presents an opposing view in a thoughtful way and that acknowledges the truth and acknowledges the science and acknowledges the reality of the world around us. And that doesn’t really exist. .”

“At some point, you could make the argument that Fox News was going in that direction, and that they really took a right turn that went somewhere radically different,” he added. “For me, the ideal would be if they could course correct and make a conscious moral decision to try to do it, and make that their turn to move forward. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell, but you never know.”

Meanwhile, MacFarlane said his relationship with the famous, family-friendly Walt Disney Company has been going smoothly since it cleared some of his IP addresses when buying them 21^Street Century Fox in 2019.

“It was fantastic,” he said, referring to his long and close relationship with former Fox TV director Dana Walden, who was recently promoted to the chair of Disney’s general entertainment content board. “She’s a great friend and a great CEO, and she’s so happy to work for her. She’s one of those people that you can see that you follow across the industry, just to work with her over and over again.”

MacFarlane finds Disney offers an “interesting comparison” of his experiences with Fox. “The company as a whole has been mostly impressive — not always, but mostly,” he said. They are trying to be culturally aware. They try to be morally responsible. And creatively, my relationship with them has been great.”

He referred to the transmission of his science fiction series Orville From its original network on Fox to Season 3 on Disney-owned Hulu as “one of the best creative experiences of my career, the support I’ve received from Disney and from Hulu as much as giving us the resources to do just that and compete with some of the most visually ambitious TV shows has been really fun.” …and I can’t say enough good things. I really enjoyed there.”

Meanwhile, MacFarlane and Huggins have been high on some of the upcoming content they’re producing for Peacock as part of Fuzzy Door’s NBCU charter, including a series of adaptations to his movie franchise. Ted, Starring a bad-mouthed teddy bear full of questionable lifestyle choices, which would serve as a precursor to the films.

“I am happy to do something no one has done before, as far as I know, at least,” he said of producing a series in which the central character is a detailed creation provided by CG. He noted that Peacock approached him with the idea of ​​creating a series, “and I was glad it was something they were even considering.”

While the nature of Ted’s CG animation would present production challenges that would require time and computing power, MacFarlane, who directed, wrote, and voiced the titular puppet in both films, was more concerned with where and how to capture the story with co-star Mark Wahlberg. “If you look at the initial shots before the bear was put in it, a lot of it was Mark: he was really seeing this thing, and so the bear splintered very organically.”

MacFarlane focused on the original story approach, with teenage actor Max Burkholder now playing Wahlberg. “The only way, to me, that really seemed interesting was an introduction like this one going back to the ’90s, which people always seem to be happy to revisit now,” MacFarlane said. “To explore this part of his life that we are entering, in the opening montage of the film, and to now delve into it and see how it was done, and what exactly the sequence of events led to John’s character such a retard and such disappointment in his adult years.”