The Banned 'Family Guy' Episode

FOX Last night, The Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane hosted a reading of an episode censored by Fox for being too controversial. Paul Cullum attended to hear the jokes that got it spiked.

It seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. Take The Family Guy, Fox’s prime-time animated sitcom, whose theme song opens with just such a curmudgeonly sentiment in an homage to All in the Family: “Boy, the way Glen Miller played...”

A kind of middlebrow Simpsons written by public university grads rather than the Harvard elite, The Family Guy prides itself on pushing the envelope of good taste whenever possible. At times, this can seem liberating; at others, merely mean-spirited and offensive, as when they ridicule Tommy Lee for letting a five-year-old drown in his pool, or say of Joaquin Phoenix, “He’s just a harelipped reminder of what might have been.”

The one-liners, ungrounded in the best of times, now teeter dangerously close to nastiness.

So when a scheduled episode from the upcoming season on the subject of abortion—“Partial Terms of Endearment” by staff writer Danny Smith—ran afoul of Fox censors, showrunner Seth MacFarlane did the only logical thing: he scheduled a table read of the episode before a live audience in the heart of Hollywood. The reading took place last night.

The last time MacFarlane found himself censored by the network was in 2000, a year after Family Guy premiered on Fox, and just before it was canceled for the first of two times. (It was revived in 2005 after blockbuster DVD sales and a popular syndication run on the Cartoon Network; McFarlane’s most recent deal was for $100 million. As one of the writers said at last night’s event, “We argued at the time there weren’t Nielsen boxes in either dorm rooms or prisons, and those were both big demographics for us.”) That was the episode “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein,” which, despite being spiked, showed up in the Season 3 DVD set. In that episode, family patriarch Peter Griffin, realizing that stockbrokers and accountants invariably have names like Ian Greenstein and Larry Rosenblatt, seeks to convert his teenage son Chris to Judaism so he’ll earn a better living. “Is there anything you people can’t do—besides manual labor?” he asks one of the Chosen People.

Censored Family Guy episode performed live

But it was the show’s elaborate musical number—known as a cutout in showbiz parlance—that had Fox in a tizzy: a takeoff on “When You Wish Upon a Star” titled “I Need a Jew,” which included the offending lyrics: “Though by many they’re abhorred/Hebrew people I’ve adored/Even though they killed my Lord/I need a Jew.”

(The penultimate line was subsequently changed to, “I know they didn’t kill my Lord.”)

This time around, MacFarlane chose to beat his liabilities into assets. So last night, at the Ricardo Montalban Theater—literally at Hollywood and Vine—The Family Guy’s principal cast, together with a 16-piece orchestra (perhaps the last of its kind in network television), gathered to give a live reading of what a Reuters article claimed contained “very graphic, very morbid” images of an abortion.

On stage were MacFarlane, in a black-on-black tux, looking like Kevin Spacey doing his Bobby Darrin impression, reading the parts of Peter, Stewie (a Noel Coward-inflected infant) and Brian (the family’s talking dog); the tiny, incorrigibly foul-mouthed Alex Borstein, with her signature Betty Boop Brooklyn honk, reading for Peter’s sensible wife, Lois; Mila Kunis, in a microscopic black dress, who didn’t say much as teenage daughter Meg, and didn’t have to; and actor-writers Jon Viener, Alec Sulkin and Danny Smith, plus ringer Christine Layton rounding out the cast. For the record, everyone looked mah-velous.