His Success: It's impossible to deny Seth MacFarlane's success as a TV mogul, given how popular his two flagship animated shows Family Guy and American Dad have been. He eventually parlayed this into a movie directing career, with his debut Ted opening to solid reviews and an insane $549.4 million box office haul (against a $50 million budget). To date, though, that's all he has to show for his filmmaking career. His Failures: Even ignoring all the complaints about how Family Guy hasn't been good for years and MacFarlane is just collecting a paycheck as the creator and voices of Peter and Brian (after all, he's only written three of the show's episodes), it's a frequent bugbear of his fans that he's a lazy writer. Take his second movie, A Million Ways to Die in the West, which was a mild commercial success and a critical dud, criticised for lowest common denominator jokes and an overt reliance on gags which felt like they were just leftovers from the Family Guy writing room. Much like Lucas, MacFarlane has had his esteem blown so wildly out of proportion by the truckloads of money that Family Guy and Ted made that he thinks people will just eat up anything he makes (even when he takes the starring role), hence the low-effort job on his comedy western. It doesn't look like things will be much different with the ridiculously unnecessary Ted 2 this summer, but time will tell. How He Can Save His Career: Make a whole new comedy project which a) doesn't feature him in the lead role and b) doesn't featuring him doing the Peter Griffin voice in any capacity (which was easily the most audience-baiting aspect of the otherwise hilarious Ted). He's never going to struggle financially, but if he wants artistic satisfaction, he'll need to try a little harder than he has been for, well, the majority of his career.
Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes).
General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.
