Fox Giveth As It Takes Away

Fox Broadcasting is taking American Dad from its Sunday night cartoon lineup and going with a live-action half-hour. But animation will be added back into the mix early next year.

Fox hasn’t forgotten that a lot of its longest-lasting bread and butter has been with the most colorful type of series, and they're now starting to promote the culturally satirical series Bordertown, which will jump the fence into primetime next year.

Bordertown is the brainchild of Family Guy writer/producer Mark Hentemann, who is executive producing with familiar cohort Seth MacFarlane, whose name should give you a pristine idea of what brand of humor this series will wallow in. Family Guy takes the 80s and women-bashing jokes, American Dad takes on the Republicans, The Cleveland Show took on black culture, and now Bordertown will likely skewer Mexican heritage and America’s current resistance to immigrants. It’s like the four food groups, if food had a way of insulting you with TV-MA jokes. ...

MacFarlane is spending less time at Fox Animation (on Wilshire) these days and more time at his new headquarters in Beverly Hills.

But that won't matter much with Bordertown, since the new series isn't housed at Fox Animation, but over in the San Fernando Valley, at Bento Box, which has done a lot of Fox animated projects the last few years, and looks as though it will do more in the near future. (We're informed -- perhaps erroneously -- that ADHD, which was supplying late-night cartoon shows to Rupert's conglomerate, won't be doing as many Fox projects.)

Bordertown is only now ramping up to full strength. Board artists are at work, also directors. The balance of the pre-production crew should be in place over the next month.