A couple months back, Family Guy ran an episode where Peter wins the Boston Marathon by driving his car through it, then bombs the Quahog bridge in two completely different scenes that have nothing to do with each other. Unfortunately, someone saw those, said “HERP DERP CONSPIRACY!” and tried to frame it as Seth MacFarlane either predicting the bombings or somehow acting as the government’s puppet or … something. Honestly, the whole falls apart under even the lightest of scrutiny, but it’s prompted FOX to pull the episode and MacFarlane to comment on the debacle. Via Deadline…
A FOX spokesperson confirmed that it has pulled the episode, which is titled “Turban Cowboy” and first aired last month, was pulled down today. YouTube also has marked some of the edited clips and discussions about the issue as “being potentially offensive or inappropriate”. [..] The edited clip puts the two scenes together, making it appear as if the explosions came from the marathon. Tweeted MacFarlane today: “The edited Family Guy clip currently circulating is abhorrent. The event was a crime and a tragedy, and my thoughts are with the victims.”
Here’s the thing: we’re inherently tuned to try and find patterns in things. It’s an evolutionary thing that helps us survive, but sometimes it backfires and we end up reading into things that aren’t true. The truth is that no, Family Guy didn’t predict anything. It didn’t forewarn about the bombings. It’s dumb, funny show about fart jokes, not some shadowy government conspiracy, and the bombings are a senseless, violent atrocity that no one could have possibly seen coming. What makes more sense: That a group of sane people concocted something that killed three people and wounded countless more, or that a consolidated few nutjobs did something horrible? Sometimes, bad things happen and they make no sense. The best we can do is help those who need our help and try to do our part wherever we can.