‘Family Guy’ Called Out Kevin Spacey’s Skeeviness In A Joke 12 Years Ago

Decider via NY Post ^ | Oct 30, 2017 | Brett White

[minnesota_bound]

#6 Where were the studio heads? The owners of the company?
They probably had their own assaults to worry about.

[discostu]

By the time you get big in Hollywood you’ve already made multiple deals with multiple devils. And big isn’t permanent, if you want to stay big you gotta keep making deals.

[x]

Thing is, McFarlane didn’t have incontrovertible, indisputable proof, which is what it would take for accusations to succeed at that point. Without that, you lodge accusations as your peril.

That's certainly true.

But you could contrast McFarlane with the comedian who took on Cosby.

McFarlane was hiding behind the joke, not taking the allegations entirely seriously.

Whatever else you could say about him, Hannibal Buress was definitely one brave guy.

[discostu]

Two vastly different situations though. By the time Burress started talking about Cosby there’d already been a case settled out of court and there was enough rumors out there that he could include in the joke “Google ‘Cosby rape’ you’ll see”. If Cosby tried to take him to court he could have fought it off. Also given how scatological and random Family Guy is trying to build anything into specific real world allegations wouldn’t really work.

[Spktyr]

Maybe yes, maybe no. Go check out his Wikipedia article - at the time he took on Bill Cosby, Buress had already been frozen out of most of Hollywood and had little to lose.

Seth McFarlane, for better or worse, was worried about his significantly more substantial career and fortunes. I don’t think it’s clear that he wasn’t taking the allegations seriously, honestly. Hard to tell either way.