Parenting & Family Quote by Seth MacFarlane

MacFarlane is giving The Simpsons its flowers, but he is also smuggling in a quiet labor history of the medium: animation wasn’t “naturally” for children, it was made that way by economics, standards boards, and the long aftershock of moral panics that taught networks to treat cartoons as daycare with commercials. His phrasing, “didn’t necessarily have to,” is doing a lot of work. It signals how narrow the career path felt for animators before Fox proved a prime-time cartoon could pull adult ratings, sell ads, and survive the outrage cycle.

The intent is partly gratitude, partly a professional origin story. MacFarlane’s own brand of animation - arch, referential, aggressively adult - depends on a world where networks will bankroll scripts that assume the audience gets Nixon jokes and sexual innuendo in the same breath. So he frames The Simpsons less as a cultural masterpiece than as an industry argument that finally won: animation can be a format, not a genre. That distinction matters, because “kids’ television” isn’t just a demographic label; it’s a creative box with different rules about pacing, complexity, and what kinds of human messiness you’re allowed to draw.

Subtext: once the door opens, it stays open for a particular kind of voice - writers who want the speed and exaggeration of cartoons without the mandatory innocence. Contextually, MacFarlane is also defending his lane. When critics dismiss adult cartoons as crude, he can point back to the moment legitimacy shifted and say: we’re not an aberration, we’re the industry catching up to what the medium can do.