Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has praised his show’s animated rival South Park after its record-breaking episode that mocked Donald Trump.
The show’s respective creators have been embroiled in a feud since South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone targeted Family Guy’s writers over their reliance on cutaway gags in a 2006 episode.
However, MacFarlane has momentarily buried the hatchet, calling the show’s writing team “amazing” for their ability to include timely real world references in their episodes.
“I would never trade our animation team for anything on Family Guy, but their production cycle of, what is it, like, two weeks? It’s kind of amazing,” MacFarlane said.
“It’s pretty incredible that it’s... yeah, any show that lasts that long is pretty astounding.”
He told the Puck’s podcast The Town that it’s tough to make Family Guy as timely as South Park considering episodes are made so far in advance.
“Our shows take about 10 months to a year to produce each episode, so we have to really kind of guess what the world is going to look like, which obviously gets harder and harder,” he said.
South Park’s season 27 premiere, which skewered Trump, set a record for the comedy series, amassing the show’s biggest share of a cable audience for a season premiere since 1999.
One scene depicted the president naked and in bed with Satan, while also referencing the recent cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Trump’s lawsuit against Paramount and the prospect of government censorship.
South Park first aired in 1997, with Family Guy, which is now in its 23rd season, premiering two years later.
Responding to fan questions surrounding whether he’d watched MacFarlane’s show, South Park co-creator Stone once revealed that he had – and said he “hates” it and “doesn’t respect its writing”.
In 2006, South Park depicted Family Guy’s writers as a group of manatees picking jokes at random.
MacFarlane hit back with a 2009 Family Guy episode that saw character Quagmire’s “South Park-style” jokes get a lukewarm response at an improv night.
Speaking to Howard Stern in 2015, he acknowledged the rivalry, stating: “It’d be interesting to know where it comes from because I don’t know them.”
MacFarlane is a producer on the new Naked Gun film, which stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson.
In The Independent’s four-star review of the reboot, Clarisse Loughrey hailed the film as “a masterclass in buffoonery”.
The original Naked Gun was written and directed by Airplane!’s Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, and was based on their television series Police Squad!, which parodied the genre of police procedurals that were popular at the time.
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