By Matthew Jackson, Source: Blastr.com
Family Guy is a blockbuster animated series that made its creator and star Seth MacFarlane a household name, but in a new interview MacFarlane says he feels like the show has run its course. What would he like to do instead? A new Star Trek series.
MacFarlane became a megarich superstar on the back of Family Guy, the FOX sitcom where he weekly serves as executive producer, creator and voice of a talking dog, evil baby and loudmouth New England beer lover. The show is so beloved that fan campaigns to rescue it from the brink of oblivion helped bring back to the airwaves in 2005 after a three year hiatus.
But as Family Guy embarks on its tenth season, MacFarlane admits he’d almost prefer it if the show was already over:
“Part of me thinks that Family Guy should have already ended. I think seven seasons is about the right lifespan for a TV series,” he says of a show that launched its tenth season last month. “I talk to the fans and in a way I’m kind of secretly hoping for them to say we’re done with it. There are plenty of people who say the show is kind of over the hill … but still the vast majority go pale in the face when I mention the possibility.”
As he sees it, there’s something to be said for wrapping up the series and doing a movie once every couple of years. “Creatively, that would be the way to do it for me. Do a really fantastic final episode while the show is still strong,” he says, acknowledging that there are plenty of powerful reasons—including the viewer demand and the amount of people employed by the series, some 300 people in total—to give him pause. (There is a deal in place for a Family Guy movie, which he is writing with series co-producer Ricky Blitt; it’s now a matter of finding time in MacFarlane’s schedule to make it happen.)
So, if MacFarlane had his way and Family Guy was off his plate, what would he be doing? Well, apart from several other projects—among them a new Flintstones series he’s developing for FOX—he says his dream would be to bring Star Trek back to television:
“I don’t know who would give me the keys to that car,” he jokes, acknowledging that the films have been so profitable for Paramount that he isn’t so sure they have a lot of interest in getting back into the TV business. “But I’d love to see that franchise revived for television in the way that it was in the 1990s: very thoughtful, smartly written stories that transcend the science fiction audience.”
So, the guy whose greatest contribution to science fiction is a trilogy of Star Wars parodies in which a giant chicken plays Boba Fett wants to try his hand at a serious, smart Star Trek show a la The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine? Well … that Family Guy episode with the Next Generation cast guest starring was kinda cool.
Is it so crazy it just might work?
