MacFarlane also wrote and voiced Family Guy's theme song — and then fought network executives for its survival.
"We had to fight pretty hard to do a theme. ... It's a tradition that's kind of going away, and part of that is the networks are worried that people don't want to sit through the same thing week after week, and so shows are being discouraged from writing themes," he says. "I think what [executives] don't realize is, showmanship is showmanship. It hasn't changed in hundreds of years. It's a drum roll saying, 'Here comes a show.' ... And it gets the audience psyched up. ... And I think the absence of that is really tragic."
MacFarlane also fought for the theme song in his second Fox sitcom, American Dad! But by the time The Cleveland Show aired, he says, Fox executives had stopped discouraging him.
"Luckily, by the time The Cleveland Show came out, we never even heard anything from the network about that," he says. "I think by that point, they realized it was a stylistic thing for these shows — that you need a little bit of a drum roll. You need a little bit of a P.T. Barnum intro."
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