Patrick Warburton's mom tried to get “Family Guy” canceled despite his salary from the show supporting her
The actor quipped that his family members "hate the show even more today than they did 25 years ago."
Patrick Warburton's family isn't big on Family Guy.
During a recent PaleyFest panel marking the animated series' 25th anniversary, the actor revealed that his mother once tried to get the show canceled — despite the fact that his salary from the show helped support her.
"They hate the show even more today than they did 25 years ago," Warburton said of his family members, according to PEOPLE. The Seinfeld alum, who voices police officer and Griffin neighbor Joe Swanson on Family Guy, added, "My mother belonged to the American Television Council and they were trying to get the show canceled. I was helping support my parents with Family Guy money."
Mama Warburton even tried to sway her son into signing the petition to yank the show off the air. "I said, 'Mom, if you don't think I'm going to talk about this publicly, this is the greatest irony," he said. "You're laundering money, you're laundering it to yourself.'"
Hailing from creator Seth MacFarlane, who also voices several characters on the show, Family Guy follows the adventures of the Griffin family: patriarch Peter (MacFarlane); matriarch Lois (Alex Borstein); kids Meg (Mila Kunis), Chris (Seth Green), and Stewie (MacFarlane again); and talking dog Brian (yep, MacFarlane!). The show is currently in its 22nd season.
Polarizing and often deemed offensive for its coarse humor, the show proved to be too much for Warburton's conservative parents. "My father was in a monastery for three months. He almost became a monk," Warburton said. (His father died in 2017.) "My mother [went] around the neighborhood when I was 13 years old passing out pamphlets on the sins of masturbation, [which] did not get me into the cool crowd."
Despite its controversies, Family Guy is still going strong — and MacFarlane doesn't see a "good reason to stop" just yet. "It makes people happy and it funds some good causes," he recently told the Los Angeles Times. "There was a time when I thought, it's time to wrap it up. At this point, we've reached escape velocity. I don't know that there's any reason to stop at this point unless people get sick of it. Unless the numbers show that people just are, 'Eh, we don't care about Family Guy anymore.' But that hasn't happened yet."
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