When it comes to the #MeToo movement, Family Guy has surprisingly been ahead of its time, as the hit show has called out everyone from Kevin Spacey to Brett Ratner well before the disgraced Hollywood stars started making headlines for their alleged behavior.
Everything came full circle on Sunday night as Fox’s animated comedy directly called out the growing list of alleged sexual abusers with a joke that united them in an Avengers-style team-up. In the May 6 episode “HTTPete,” the show cuts to a gag that brings the likes of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and more together for a parody dubbed “Marvel’s The Offenders.”
Cosby takes on the role of Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, donning an eye-patch as he assembles the entertainment industry’s not-so-beloved stars. In addition to Cosby and Weinstein, the group includes directors Roman Polanski, Ratner, James Toback and Woody Allen as well as Spacey, action star Steven Segal and former Today host Matt Lauer.
The cutaway gag also poked fun at Boston-bred actor Matt Damon, insinuating that he was “aware” of some of the stars’ alleged actions. The joke plays off of critics having taken Damon to task over what he knew about Weinstein, considering that they worked together on Good Will Hunting.
“Is Matt Damon coming?” Allen says in the episode.
“No, but he knows about all of us,” Cosby replies. “He’s very aware of what’s going on here, you see.”
This, of course, isn’t the first time that Family Guy has called out Hollywood’s alleged sexual harassers. The show famously joked about Spacey in 2005 with a gag that featured a naked Stewie Griffin running through a mall yelling that he just escaped the actor’s basement.
“Obviously, it’s a terrible thing to say, how we’ve had a lot of good luck predicting sexual predators, but I do think a lot of people — like Kevin Spacey — there have always been rumors out there about him,” showrunner Alec Sulkin told the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. “So we will just kind of say those things. We write things that we hear about and then a year and a half later, they’re on TV and then 10 years later they happen.”
