NYCC 2014 Recap: ‘American Dad’ EXCLUSIVE Interviews

American Dad has the unique distinction of being one of the only shows to be canceled by one network, and then almost seamlessly transition onto another one. When FOX dropped Seth MacFarlane’s second animated family sitcom series (as in the second one he created, as well as the second one that FOX canned) TBS eagerly snatched it up for a fifteen episode stint, and the first episode on the network aired earlier this week. The show was also renewed for an additional season, number 12, which is now being produced and will take the show to the 205-episode mark. American Dad has now been on for almost a decade and has definite staying power – no surprise, considering how funny Monday’s TBS debut was. And in case you were wondering, as far as I can tell, not much has changed with the show in its new home. Or has it? Co-creator/writer Matt Weitzman, writer Brian Boyle, and actors Wendy Schaal (Francine), Scott Grimes (Steve), Rachael MacFarlane (Hayley), and Dee Bradley Baker (Klaus) gave us their opinions at a New York Comic-Con press event prior to an advanced screening of the episode.

“We now get to say two shits and a douchebag per episode,” Matt Weitzman said excitedly.

“Think of the artistic freedom we have now!” Brian Boyle added. “It’s really liberating. Sometimes you do say ‘shit.’ It just makes it feel so much realer when you’re watching the cartoon.”

However, according to Weitzman, we shouldn’t expect too many changes. “The material is mostly going to stay the same. We’ve always been a pretty edgy show and we’ve gotten away with some things that some people would cringe at. We’re not trying to push [the envelope], we just come up with stuff we think is funny.”

As for specific things they can or can’t get away with on TBS, a few came to the writers’ minds. “I think in every Standards note we’ve gotten this year, it always reminds you that we shouldn’t see any pubic hair,” Boyle said.

“That’s the line,” Weitzman said, laughing. “And they let us show butts. It’s such a winning scenario. We’re so grateful.”

“They’re letting us go a little further. They’ve loosened the leash on the show,” Dee Bradley Baker said of the network. “TBS is very supportive and very enthusiastic about having the show there. It doesn’t feel like they want to control it or contain it, they want to unleash it and let it be what it is. It feels like a great continuity of what we’ve already established, and I think fans will find that and they’ll love it.”

“The show is tonally the same,” Rachael MacFarlane added to ease any viewers’ worries. “Fans will tune in and still see the American Dad they love; it’s just edgier.”

What kind of situations will this newfound freedom lead the show to? “We have an episode where Steve says, ‘Fuck you,’ to his mom for the first time ever,” Weitzman said before rattling off several storylines and guest stars in a row. “We have Uma Thurman playing Gwen, who is Francine’s Chinese half-sister. We have Ted Danson playing a shrink in an episode where Stan has a near-death experience and feels very out of control in life. In order to regain that control, he ends up buying these little miniatures and railroads, and ends up shrinking himself down and putting himself in that world, and the family goes with him.”

Boyle said this episode, in which Stan gives up a cab to a couple that ends up getting crushed immediately afterward by a falling sign, is based on a story his dad told him about a similar situation he encountered during WWII with a taxi and a bomb.

Other Season 11 plots include a Wheels and the Legman episode in which the Smiths go on a trip. “Francine and Stan come to New York and [she gets] kidnapped – as you would,” Wendy Schaal said. Also: Steve and Snot learn karate from Roger, Stan and the fellow agents get caught behind enemy lines and become POWs, Stan and Francine go to Hollywood and Stan gets convinced that he is the reincarnated version of an old Hollywood actor, Haley and Steve join a roller derby team together where Roger is the night manager at the rink, and something involving Roger putting the kids in cages.

Weitzman also explained another: “At one point, American Dad is going to be bought by a Chinese billionaire, from Seth. In that story, Stan has forgotten Francine’s anniversary – surprise, surprise – but to make it the best anniversary possible, and give him some time to make it the best anniversary possible, he goes and commits her to an insane asylum.”

Kathy Bates and Carl Reiner will appear in episodes this season, along with the late Mickey Rooney in one of his last roles ever. Weitzman pointed out that oddly enough, Wendie Jo Sperber and Ricardo Montalban also previously recorded American Dad episodes as their last roles ever, suggesting the show may have some sort of curse. Hopefully it won’t affect a future guest star of the show, who basically signed on just moments before the interviews.

“We were just in the green room and Kevin Bacon was in there – which is awesome,” Scott Grimes said. “Kevin Bacon has never done American Dad, but we did an episode where Roger dresses up like Kevin Bacon. Looked just like him, by the way. Kevin Bacon’s avatar on his Twitter is Roger as Kevin Bacon. So Matt had to go up to him and go like, ‘Dude, why is your avatar [Roger]?’ And he’s like, ‘I love the show.’ So I think we got Kevin Bacon next season. That’s what’s great about the show; people are attracted to making fun of themselves on it. We write episodes if a star wants to do it.”

And why not? It sounds like the perfect gig, according to Baker. “It’s quick, it’s air conditioned, and you don’t have to memorize your lines,” he said, comparing acting on an animated show to a live-action one. “You can have a career that lasts for decades and have a great variety of things you get to do. On camera, it’s really hard not to end up just doing one thing. Trying to break out of that to get some variety is not an easy thing to do.”

MacFarlane agreed. “In a given show, I [might] play a two-year-old and a 90-year-old. Obviously I can’t do that in live action. The range that we get to explore as voice actors is so much fun. I can be British, I can be German, I can be French – all in a day.”

The show provides ample opportunities to try out numerous roles of all sorts. “They’ll have us read various characters in the table read,” Baker said. “They’ll throw that to the writers as well as us, and they’ll give us maybe three or four or five different roles to take a swing at. Sometimes they keep us in that character and let us read it, sometimes they already have it teed up for a celebrity to read, and sometimes they don’t know yet. That’s sort of a little testing ground for them to see. There’s good opportunity for that for us in the show too; it’s a lot of fun.”

The tests aren’t always successful, according to Rachael MacFarlane. “We had an episode recently where I was playing a French maid and it was fine and I did it at the table,” she recalled. “And then Weitzman said, ‘She’s too young.’ I was playing her about 50, and she needs to be about 85. And I just couldn’t get it. There was something about the placement where it was either going to be youngish French or old lady. I just couldn’t do it, it was really, really, challenging. I literally had to say, ‘I’m sorry, I think you found the thing I can’t do: old French.’ Just let it be known that I can’t do old French.”

Not only can voice acting be difficult, but it can also be downright dangerous. “I got a hernia doing Steve,” Grimes said. “I was probably saying ‘Awesome!’ and I felt this pop in my belly.”

I said I would’ve guessed it was Steve’s signature tennis noise that would have caused the injury. “[Laughing] Dude, I’ll tell you this: the tennis noise? My kids make me do that,” Grimes said, before giving some background on the sound. “It said in the script: ‘tennis grunts.’” So he recorded a series of heavy breathing noises, and one time added a different high-pitched whine – and of course that’s the one that they used. Over and over again. Grimes also lamented the amount of times he has had to record making out voices alone in the booth with sound engineers watching.

I suppose that’s easier than recording the noises with someone else in the same room, which doesn’t occur because the actors work solo. Although it still happens at the show’s first reads. “We do table reads all the time…and she sits next to me at every one,” Grimes said of Schaal. “And she has to sometimes have sex with Stan, and it’s the greatest free show, guys.”

However, these trial readings are essential to the show’s success. So much so that it causes Scott Grimes some anxiety. “Read-throughs are not easy,” he said. “I get nervous still after almost 200 of them, because you’re reading something that someone else wrote and spent a lot of time on, and you don’t want to screw it up. You don’t want to mess up that joke because then it’s going to be gone.” And the writers’ actions during the reads only make it worse. “There’s always a writer to my right, and I still don’t know when he checks a line [in the script] that’s being said, if that check means it was funny or it wasn’t. He’ll check and I’ll be like, ‘Goddammit, what does that mean?! Does that mean I did it right?!’”

“It is really important,” Schaal added. “It’s a casual setting, but everybody is hearing that show for a first time. It’s everybody’s chance to hear the show and to hear what needs to be changed.”

The star and creator of American Dad, Seth MacFarlane, was unfortunately not present at NYCC 2014 (although, oddly enough, Patrick Stewart made a guest appearance at the panel.) Still, he came up in a few questions, the most notable one asking Rachael what it is like to work with her brother. Or, more accurately, what it was like to work with him, as she hasn’t in about five years. “He doesn’t really have much to do with American Dad anymore besides the voices,” she said. But Seth and I have been performing together in some way since we were 5 and 7, so it sort of just felt like a natural extension of that. I was doing musical theater here in New York and he was the one that said, ‘I think you should try voiceover; I think you’d be good at it.’ I love working with him. He’s probably the most talented director I’ve ever worked with. He knows exactly what he wants and he knows when he gets it, so he doesn’t waste time doing ten takes. In animation, he’s brilliant.”

Even with Seth’s brilliance, it was clear when speaking to the cast & crew that they’re still surprised at the show’s success after all these years. “I’ve never been on a show that lasted more than a season-and-a-half,” Weitzman said. “For it to make it ten years? God, how lucky.

According to Weitzman and Boyle, a key to American Dad establishing longevity was differentiating itself from older brother Family Guy – a show that it has often been compared to. “You worked on Family Guy,” Brian said to Matt. “If there’s a similarity, it’s probably your fault.”

So how is it actually different? “Our devotion to character and story,” Weitzman explained. “I think at this point, anybody who has any awareness knows how different the show is. In the beginning there was definitely that comparison, but as time has gone on, I think that we’ve really separated.”

The show has even separated from itself, to some extent. As Boyle pointed out, American Dad now emphasizes feelings a bit more than it previously did, following the blueprint of a show that knows longevity better than any other. “We’re going for the Fourth Season Simpsons model,” Boyle said, with Weitzman quickly adding: “While saying shit twice an episode.”

[Photos by Becca Green]