Fox's very own Family Guy made failed steak salesman and all-around dunce Donald J. Trump the subject of a recent episode. As expected, this is the sort of episode of the Seth MacFarlane-created series that has also spawned an extended post-broadcast chat with showrunners Rich Appel and Alec Sulkin.
"We knew, writing this episode, that what we were writing we weren't going to see on television for a year and a half, so we just had to lay into the fact that luckily Trump has been consistently a disaster, so that hasn't changed at all," Sulkin toldEntertainment Weekly of the episode that aired Sunday.
Trump is depicted in the episode with predictably tiny hands and ultimately serves as a stand-in for the chicken in the series' longstanding tradition of Peter Griffin vs. Ernie the Chicken throwdowns. Though the episode doesn't delve into specifics, their take on Trump also sees the shitbag preying on Meg, Peter's daughter.
"Let's play a game," Appel said Sunday. "If I say the words Donald Trump to you, what's the first thing you think?" The overall point he and Sulkin's team wanted to make with the Meg plot, Appel added, was to show that this type of man is known for preying on the vulnerable. "It's clearly offensive and gross and not appropriate," he said. "But not only didn't we not want to show it, we don't want to be too explicit about exactly what happened."
Sunday night, MacFarlane shouted out both Appel and Sulkin for their work in shaping the episode. MacFarlane's shout-out, interestingly enough, was in response to an apparent Trump cult member.
