Family Guy got animated over President Trump and members of the First Family on Sunday night’s episode.
In the episode entitled “Trump Guy,” family patriarch Peter Griffin becomes Trump’s press secretary. Aside from skewering a number of the president’s scandals, the animators depicted Trump as a Jabba the Hutt-type figure.
Family Guy showrunner Alec Sulkin explained to Entertainment Weekly : “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. We knew that he was never going to be out of the news, and people wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, yeah! I remember that Trump guy!’ Of course he’s still here — and still embarrassing himself on a daily/weekly basis.”
Concerns about whether or not the episode would actually be made dissolved after the creator’s initial pitch meeting.
Despite initial trepidation from the higher ups, “30 seconds in, we heard chuckles and laughs, and we jumped on that.” co-showrunner Rich Appel told the magazine. “And by the end of the call, they were like, ‘Go ahead.’”
A major arc in the episode is Peter’s daughter Meg being sexually assaulted by the president. The writers wanted to showcase this aspect of Trump without compromising Meg too much, so they focused the story on folks believing accusers, even when the accused is the most powerful man in the world.
And what if Trump watches the episode? Appel hopes he does: “I hope if he watches it, his reaction would be: I now want to buy the DVDs for seasons 1 through 16. So, you know, I can dream.”
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