It's an early-summer Monday morning, but the Los Angeles offices of Family Guy hum with a kind of opening-night excitement. Today is the table read of FG’s eighth season premiere. The main conference room is filled three rows deep with a motley array of young writers, animators, ad reps, and various others lucky enough to stumble into an hour of poop jokes, dick jokes, and more poop jokes.
None of the show’s better-known voice actors—Seth Green, Mila Kunis, “Mayor” Adam West—are present, so the centerpiece, without competition, is Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who sits unobtrusively at the head of the table, face buried in the script. MacFarlane does the voices of the three main characters (obese patri-tard Peter Griffin, alcoholic canine Brian, and sociopathic infant Stewie), as well as countless subsidiary ones (pervy neighbor Quagmire, Peter’s WASPy father-in-law Carter Pewterschmidt—to say nothing of God, Hitler, and the Kool-Aid guy). He gets most of the lines and most of the laughs. In every way, this is his show.

About 10 pages into the read, as Peter drives the Griffin clan to the country house where a not-very-mysterious mystery will go down, MacFarlane (as Peter) tries out a bunch of funny voices. There’s a cattle rustler, a stuffy British guy, and some other random voice, which Peter decides will be a “pie man.”
“Hey, that’s pretty good,” he says to himself. “I could make millions doing that.”

It’s not Peter Griffin’s destiny to make millions, but that line pretty much sums up Seth MacFarlane’s empire. At 36, MacFarlane draws cartoons, sings songs, and does silly voices for a living, and he makes millions doing it. Many, many millions. And this year Family Guy received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series, the first time an animated show has been so honored since The Flintstones, in 1961. One can assume teams Simpsons and South Park were not pleased with the news.

Family Guy is many things: a monster ratings hit for Fox, a huge success in syndication, a DVD juggernaut, with a live tour that sells out theaters from coast to coast. It has, in general, mimicked, mocked, and become part of the pop-cultural landscape like few shows in history. Before Seth MacFarlane, that landscape definitely lacked a talking, chain-smoking, martini-swilling dog or a baby hellbent on murdering his parents. Says Gary Newman,cochairman of 20th Century Fox Television, “It may be an incredibly dysfunctional family, but it fits in really well with the evolution of the family comedy. From Leave It to Beaver, such a perfect aspirational family…to this anything-but-aspirational family.”

Despite its undeniable debt to TV shows past (and in Family Guy’s case, being derivative is practically the point), MacFarlane has tweaked the template for the 21st century. The first real TV powerhouse of the post-Simpsons’ era (and maybe the last), he has a sensibility that combines the short-attention-span theater of the Internet generation—those non sequitur cutaways work almost like Web-page hot links—and the queasy discomfort of The Office. Jokes are either blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short or deliberately go on wa-a-a-a-y too long until they circle back to hilarity. In short, the show remains an ultra-efficient laugh-delivery mechanism. MacFarlane goes high- and lowbrow, and he’s just as likely to make a gag out of some Technicolor Hollywood musical as the latest viral-video gross-out. A typical episode features riffs on Raiders of the Lost Ark, 9/11, “2 Girls 1 Cup,” homophobia, Austin Powers, bulimia, and sex with Heather Graham.

The only unifying logic is MacFarlane’s leave-no-laugh-behind doctrine. “There’s equal legitimacy in a Woody Allen joke about the nature of consciousness as there is in Johnny Knoxville roller-skating inside the back of a truck,” says MacFarlane. “There’s nothing dishonest about a fart joke. Somebody makes a fart joke, and you end up laughing so hard you can’t breathe. What’s the problem there?”

In 1997, on the basis of two short cartoons, Fox signed the 24-year-old MacFarlane to create a pilot for a show that would follow The Simpsons on Sunday nights. “I spent about six months with no sleep and no life,” says MacFarlane, “just drawing like crazy in my kitchen.” The show was an instant success…until it wasn’t, running aground as Fox messed with its time slot. After getting crushed in the ratings by Friends and Survivor, Family Guy got canceled. Twice. But when it found a massive cult following in reruns and logged astounding DVD sales, Fox finally saw the light and reupped in 2004.
Now, 11 years after becoming the youngest show-runner in TV history, MacFarlane has a deal estimated at more than $100 million, and he has become, by far, the richest. This fall, with FG spawn American Dad still running, Fox is debuting The Cleveland Show, a spin-off starring Family Guy’s Mike Henry that Mac-Farlane considers “The Jeffersons to FamilyGuy’s All in the Family.” If anyone can claim to be the Norman Lear of cartoons– a workaholic polymath with his finger on the pop culture pulse –it’s MacFarlane.

Despite its overwhelming success, or perhaps because of it, Family Guy has come in for its share of derision and snobbery. Most famously, in a 2006 two-part episode of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone mocked the show’s writing staff as nothing more than manatees who insert random funny ideas into a script-writing machine. “I am nothing like Family Guy!” proclaimed South Park’s Eric Cartman. “When I make jokes, they are inherent to a story...not just one random interchangeable joke after another!”
“Those cutaways are the hardest things in the world to write,” says MacFarlane. “You wouldn’t look at what Gary Larson did with his Far Side comic strip and say, ‘Oh, that sucks because it has no cohesive story.’ That’s what the form is: little vignettes that stand on their own. What we’re trying to do with those cutaways is an animated version of a one-frame newspaper cartoon. Why that makes Matt and Trey so angry is a complete mystery to me.”

The most serious criticism leveled at MacFarlane is that he essentially just took the Simpsons formula and dumbed it down. The Simpsons has taken numerous shots at FG over the years, including one where an Italian policeman is looking through a book of mug shots and sees Peter Griffin’s face with the word Plagiarismo underneath. Family Guy responded with an extended scene about the rivalry, which Fox refused to air, saying it didn’t want to further the “feud.” But the similarities are too glaring to ignore, from the family structure to the pop culture references to the use of guest stars. Family Guy has featured everyone from Will Ferrell to Jenna Jameson to Tom Brady (though maybe the ultimate was The Godfather’s Alex Rocco playing The Golden Girls’ Bea Arthur...playing Family Guy’s Peter Griffin).

Born in 1973 in Kent, Connecticut, MacFarlane grew up attending a series of tony New England boarding schools. With his dad teaching and his mom working as a guidance counselor, he immersed himself in the endlessly rerun fantasylands of Batman, The Flintstones, and The Brady Bunch. An unrepentant pop culture savant, MacFarlane’s favorite TV shows of all time are All in the Family and Star Trek: The Next Generation. The former’s influence is apparent from the first shot of FG’s opening credits, which show Peter and Lois Griffin crooning together at a piano. The latter, not so much.

After prep school MacFarlane went to the Rhode Island School of Design, where his talents as an actor and an animator began to blossom. According to his producing partner, Mike Henry, everyone wanted MacFarlane on his or her projects. “Even then Seth had this presence,” he says. “He’s got the it factor.” After college he went to L.A. to work for Hanna-Barbera. Two years after that came Family Guy.
Now, 11 years later, MacFarlane and I meet for lunch at his favorite sushi restaurant in Beverly Hills. “I usually just let the kitchen bring out their best stuff,” he says. So we get caviar and oysters and wild salmon topped with shaved white truffles. In general, the $100 million man doesn’t eat much, though he does imbibe, by himself, a Drunken Clam–worthy quantity of sake. “I had a late breakfast,” he says.
MacFarlane’s dining habits, like everything else in his life, have come under more scrutiny since his big contract. “It always amuses me when I hear the word playboy used to describe me,” he says, his voice sonorous and soothing, like a late-night DJ’s. “I wish to God I had the time to do the partying everyone expects me to. Maybe when I’m in my 40s, I’ll shut down completely and become a party jackass.”
“He gets out a bit,” Henry says. “He’s definitely a lot of fun at work and outside of work. He also shaves his pubes. Well, I don’t know if he actually does that, but it would be funny if he did.”

According to MacFarlane, the new contract hasn’t changed his life on a “day-to-day basis,” but “I bought a house that I love [for $13.5 million],” and a 13-seat private plane. “I have the luxury not to fly commercial anymore,” he says, “which right now might be the best thing about it.” In a well-known story, MacFarlane overslept on September 11, 2001 and missed American Airlines flight 11 out of Boston, which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center—so that particular luxury makes all the sense in the world.

But beyond his freedom from having to fly with the rest of humanity, MacFarlane says, “The job is still the same.” Really, though, MacFarlane’s “job” is more like five jobs in one. When Fox inked his deal, they got a writer-producer-animator-editor-voice actor. It’s a grueling workload. MacFarlane has more than 300 staffers in his employ, and each episode takes months to get from writers’ room to television set.
Says animation veteran Rich Appel, who coproduced The Cleveland Show with MacFarlane and Henry, “I can’t think of anything on TV that’s been as successful with one person in on so many elements. It’s like Seth is Roseanne and the guy who created Roseanne.” A more apt comparison might be to The Simpsons, with MacFarlane combining the roles of Matt Groening (creator), James L. Brooks (exec producer), Conan O’Brien (writer), and Dan Castellaneta (voices).
“He’s impossibly talented,” says Seth Green, who plays the Griffin’s mongoloid son, Chris. “But trying to make sense of it is like trying to describe Michael Phelps’ swimming skills.”

Whether gleefully skewering the likes of Mel Gibson (as when Peter and Lois stumble upon a trailer for Passion of the Christ 2, costarring Chris Tucker) and Matthew McConaughey (Stewie to the perpetually shirtless star: “You’re one of the worst actors in the history of film…You make me physically sick to my stomach, and I wish you would get a heart attack.”) to cracking AIDS jokes, Family Guy has shown an unprecedented willingness to slaughter culture’s sacred cows. This has made it both beloved and a magnet for criticism. The show’s first few seasons aired during a period of relatively loose broadcast standards. It returned to a much stricter media environment in 2005, thanks to Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nip slip the year before. The effects became apparent immediately. “You know,” says MacFarlane of the Jackson imbroglio, “it wasn’t even that good of a tit, and we’re all paying for it.”

Nipplegate mostly affected the show in one way: “Shit jokes are harder to tell. Not even the word shit, but jokes about pooping. Apparently, nobody in the FCC shits, which might account for their uptightness.” For instance, MacFarlane and his staff wrote an episode where Peter wanted to break a world record and therefore decided he could eat more nickels than anyone in history. Walking around, it sounded like a bag of change jangling in his belly. They included a scene of Peter sitting on the toilet, and the resulting bowel movement is supposed to sound like a slot machine. “The FCC wouldn’t let us do it,” MacFarlane says. “It would have harmed the fabric of our nation.”

Still, no one can keep up MacFarlane’s pace indefinitely, and he’s already started to think about how he’ll say goodbye to the show, even though he’s committed through 2012. “The Simpsons has managed 20 seasons and still stays funnier than any other show on TV, but I don’t think we should go that long. I don’t think we can go that long. But it would be great to do a really terrific final episode.”

So for the time being, MacFarlane will keep plugging away. “Right now Family Guy is like a beast that needs to be fed. It gets to be like Groundhog Day, but we’re putting out episodes as good as we’ve ever done.” And if the FCC can finally let Peter Griffin crap nickels like any God-fearing American, the MacFarlane’s triumph will be complete.