Strange TedFellows

Eria Huggins wasn't the obvious choice to run Fuzzy Door, the production company founded by Seth MacFarlane, an icon of boundary-pushing young male comedy.

Colleagues raised an eyebrow when she exited her job heading the film division at Imagine in 2018. Was she really going to work with the creator of the foul-mouthed teddy-bear film Ted? (A prequel series is coming to Peacock soon, by the way.)

"I knew who Seth MacFarlane was. He was playing in my household ever since my children were way too young to be watching Family Guy and American Dad!," says Huggins, whose two sons are now young adults. "I'm not the funniest person in the world. I love humor, I have an easy laugh, I really am smart when it comes to funny, but I'm not myself a joke-teller. It was surprising for a lot of people." She's now been president of Fuzzy Door Productions for five years.

Huggins and MacFarlane originally bonded over politics, a love of books (especially sci-fi) and a shared desire to be "a little subversive," she says. "I've always been that person that mixes stripes with polka dots."

Both have eclectic and offbeat sensibilities, and both hate being pigeonholed. At Imagine, Huggins had grown frustrated being "siloed" on the film side as many of her star-driven drama projects wound up streaming on TV. Meanwhile, MacFarlane is known mainly for edgy animated comedies — including a Netflix remake of Good Times on the horizon — but his interests range from sci-fi to music to drama.

Raised in Sherman Oaks by a divorced preschool teacher and a "shrink" father, Huggins studied documentary film at Hampshire College, married her college sweetheart (a photographer) and began her career editing "schlocky B movies."

She got her break serving as an apprentice editor for filmmaker John Waters on Hairspray while living in a Baltimore hotel for the blind. "I got thrown right into the center of John's world," she says. "It was like boot camp."

After she'd edited several films, Interscope hired her as a producer. She stayed for a decade, followed by fourteen years at Imagine. When she started at Fuzzy Door, Huggins says it was basically "a name on a door." Now, following a deal with Universal, she has developed a slate of twelve films and thirty TV projects, including Bill Nye's The End Is Nye and an adaptation of graphic novel series The Shrouded College (both at Peacock), a series on the Little Rock Nine and a new adaptation of Herman Wouk's The Winds of War.

Huggins is looking for edgy material but indicates even dramas will have a dose of MacFarlane lightness. "We wouldn't do anything that's really bleak," she says, but "we're definitely changing the perception of what Seth MacFarlane can and wants to do." 

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #8, 2023, under the same title.