>>44283 (OP)
American Dad is the best of MacFarlane's modern catalog, but that isn't a high bar to clear. Recent episodes have been especially bad. The latest episode had clearly cut portions where they would have referred to a Kamala lookalike as the president, and Steve pulls out his phone to show a years old Fortnite video. References to incels and 4um have found their way into the writers rooms of Family Guy and American Dad. The animation has seen a downgrade too. There's an obvious influence in character design from Big Mouth. The only interesting thing to come out of the show recently was a backdoor pilot for a Roger-centric spin-off about his time before the Smiths, and that was seasons ago. Given how the previous backdoor pilot was for a space-centric series and likely led to the Orville being made, I think a new MacFarlane cartoon may be on the horizon.
Fox is hosting American Dad as a consolidation deal between WBD and Disney as WBD reorganizes itself to pull out of scripted television, if not television entirely, and expand its streaming business to compete with Disney+. I expect TBS to be shuttered soon enough. Without American Dad, its lineup is all old syndicated sitcoms and rare sports games. It's like an oldies channel for the 90s and 00s. The late-20s and early-30s may be the literal end of television as opposed to the virtual end of television that came a few years ago.
>>44323
AI cartoon streams are part of what prompted the recent strikes. These shows are basically ghost work for writers and voice actors. By appearing in them, they can get guild credits. It's part of the bloat of Hollywood and copyright. If the average person can use a computer to generate their own episodes of these shows, these people will have to compete on the market again. That would probably be a good thing for MacFarlane, since his best writing, themes aside, has gone into Ted, and I suspect that Ted is what a Chris-centric Family Guy would be like. As he said at Family Guy's peak popularity, one of the best things about Family Guy was how it being pulled from the air so often meant a regular refresh of writers.