Seth MacFarlane Delivers Very Backhanded Compliment to ‘South Park’

It might be hard to clock backhanded compliments and thinly veiled insults if you didn’t have the experience of being a teenage girl. That period of one’s life is defined by that genre of commentary. Your mother saying, “Look slimmer today,” the high school administrator saying you look “so much less tired” since you started wearing makeup, a girl in your English class saying, “Oh, you actually look pretty today.” These barbs wrapped in sugar are so common that by the time we graduate high school, young women are as adept at receiving them as we are at delivering them. 

It seems Seth MacFarlane has gone through some similar academy of life, because he has delivered a truly masterful backhanded compliment. On a recent episode of the podcast The Town with Matthew Belloni, MacFarlane discussed Family Guy’s longtime animated rival, South Park. MacFarlane “praised” South Park for the incredibly quick turnaround time for episodes. This summer’s season premiere exemplified just how fast the show could be made — the Trump/Epstein plotline felt like it addressed the news as it was unfolding. 

“I would never trade our animation team for anything on Family Guy, but their production cycle of, what is it, like, two weeks?” Macfarlane said to Belloni. “It’s kind of amazing.”

“It’s pretty incredible that it’s, yeah, any show that lasts that long is pretty astounding,” he continued about South Park. “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.”

Many in the media are lauding this as an “applauding” of South Park. But anyone who has ever been told “you’re growing into such a lovely young woman, just make sure not to over-indulge” recognizes MacFarlane’s move here. Those “incredible” and “amazing” descriptors are used to hedge some less than flattering assessment. MacFarlane is saying what Family Guy is doing is harder, takes more time and really requires a lot more effort than what they’re slapping together over at South Park. He’s saying, “We could never do what South Park does, and we would never want to.”

It’s not surprising that MacFarlane would say something a little underhanded about South Park. The two shows have been feuding since 2006; Trey Parker once said, “I just want to say for the record right now, we’ve seen Family Guy — we do hate it.” 

There’s little chance much has changed in light of MacFarlane’s most recent comments.