Trimming Back (In Different Ways on Different Shows)

A few less episodes for Seth's live-action show:

... Fox dropped its back-nine order for Tuesday night comedy “Dads” to a back-six, essentially making Season 1 a 19-episode run instead of full 22.

The network explained that it has other comedies launching midseason and simply does not have room on the schedule to fulfill its original intention.

Fox had ordered 13 episodes of the Seth Green/Giovanni Ribisi comedy, later expanding to a full 22-episode season.

But “Dads” has not done well in the ratings in its initial year, struggling to find an audience at 8 p.m. There was also controversy before the show even debuted. ...

Dads is getting trimmed for one reason; Family Guy is going to eighteen episodes in its new season for another ...

A Family Guy staffer told me yesterday:

Seth is just stretched way thin. He's often doing his live-action stuff. Some months he's only here [at Fox Animation] only a couple of days.

We've had board artists who sit on changes from the writers because Seth hasn't approved them, and weeks go by. And then they decide to have us go ahead with the redo, and sometimes Seth approves them and sometimes he says: "This isn't making it. Try something else. You can do this better."

He's delegating more, but we're still doing four less episodes.

And one upcoming FG half-hour?

... Just weeks after the controversial death of "Family Guy's" Brian Griffin, it sounds like we might be seeing America’s favorite atheist pooch again really soon.

Fueling speculation that Brian’s passing was merely a publicity stunt, the official description for the Dec. 15 episode — cryptic as it may be — strongly suggests that Brian (Seth MacFarlane) will be returning to the land of the living.

On the Christmas episode, “Stewie devises a master plan to get the one and only thing he wants for Christmas,” according to the official description from Fox. And, as pointed out by Entertainment Weekly, the network lists Brian as a character on the episode. ...