In January 1992, during a campaign stop at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to help American families become “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.” A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the animated sitcom’s weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush make his remarks. “Hey! We’re just like the Waltons,” said Bart. “We’re praying for an end to the Depression, too.” While the immediacy of the response was surprising, the retort was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, skewering both the president’s cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Twelve months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.
When The Simpsons had premiered on Fox, in 1989, prime-time television was somewhat lacking in comedy. Despite a few bright spots such as Cheers and the barbed, happily crude Roseanne, the sitcom roost was ruled by didactic, saccharine family fare: The Cosby Show, Full House, Growing Pains, Family Matters. Of the last—the show that gave the world Urkel—Tom Shales piously declared in The Washington Post, “A decent human being would have a hard time not smiling.”
It was on this wan entertainment landscape that The Simpsons planted its flag. Prime time had not seen an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, in the 1960s, and the Christmas special with which The Simpsons debuted made clear that Springfield and Bedrock were separated by more than just a few millennia. In “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” Homer takes a job as a department-store Santa after the family’s emergency money is spent on tattoo removal for Bart. Following a motivational chat from Bart on the nature of Christmas miracles on television—meta-commentary was a Simpsons hallmark from the start—Homer risks his earnings at the track, on a dog named Santa’s Little Helper. When the dog comes in dead last, the family adopts him. While the ending sounds a tad cheesy, and it was, the seeds had been planted: up against impossible odds, and one another, the family ultimately bonded together and overcame. And the gags were solid: Homer is despondent at the length of his children’s Christmas pageant; a tattoo artist unquestioningly accepts 10-year-old Bart as an adult; the family’s Christmas decorations are clearly pathetic in contrast to the Flanders family’s next door. Critical reaction was nearly unanimous. “Couldn’t be better . . . not only exquisitely weird but also as smart and witty as television gets,” raved the Los Angeles Times. “Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains?” asked USA Today.
What followed is one of the most astounding successes in television history. The Simpsons went on to be a ratings and syndication winner for 18 years, and has grossed Fox sums of money measuring in the billions. It has won 23 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and was named the best TV show of all time by Time magazine in 1999. (The magazine also named Bart one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. “[Bart] embodies a century of popular culture and is one of the richest characters in it. One thinks of Chekhov, Celine, Lenny Bruce,” the writer cooed.) But the most telling accolade is that The Simpsons is TV’s longest-running sitcom ever, outlasting The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet’s 14 seasons.
Not surprisingly, given its success, The Simpsons has spawned many imitators and opened doors for new avenues of animated comedy. Directly or indirectly, the show sired Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Adult Swim, and South Park, which, nearly a decade after Bart’s boastful underachieving, managed to regenerate a familiar cacophony of ratings, merchandise, and controversy when it premiered, in 1997. (The controversial label was perhaps deserved. Bart’s greatest sin has been sawing the head off the statue of the town’s founder; last year, on South Park, Cartman tried to exterminate the Jews.)
“It’s like what sci-fi fans say about Star Trek: it created an audience for that genre,” says Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. “I think The Simpsons created an audience for prime-time animation that had not been there for many, many years. As far as I’m concerned, they basically re-invented the wheel. They created what is in many ways—you could classify it as—a wholly new medium. It’s just wholly original.”
“The Simpsons is the bane of our existence,” says Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park with Trey Parker. “They have done so many parodies, tackled so many subjects. ‘Simpsons did it!’ is a very familiar refrain in our writers’ room. Trey and I are constantly having our little cartoon compared to the best show in the history of television, The Simpsons. Why can’t we be compared to According to Jim? Or Sister, Sister?”
Not that there aren’t some debits on The Simpsons’ ledger—for every King of the Hill, there was a Fish Police and a Critic. But over 18 years, The Simpsons has been so influential, it is difficult to find any strain of television comedy that does not contain its DNA. And yet the show’s footprint is so much larger. Homer’s signature “D’oh!” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. There’s a “Simpsons and Philosophy” course at Berkeley (for credit), not to mention the hundreds of published academic articles with The Simpsons as their subject. Even conservatives have come around. “It’s possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever,” wrote the National Review in 2000. “The Simpsons celebrates many . . . of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority. . . . Springfield residents pray and attend church every Sunday.” Next to pornography, no single subject may have as many Web sites and blogs dedicated to its veneration. The Simpsons has permeated our vernacular, the way we tell jokes, and how our storytellers practice their craft. If you look around, you can see the evidence, but as with any truly powerful cultural force, you can never see it all—it’s buried too deep.
Such lofty significance was never the goal of Matt Groening, a native of Portland, Oregon, who, with writing aspirations, moved to L.A. in 1977, at the age of 23, immersing himself in the punk-rock scene and working on novels. He was freshly graduated from Evergreen State College, a hippie school in Olympia, Washington, with no grades, exams, or required classes. After several menial jobs, he began recording his disgust with life in L.A. in a comic strip, Life in Hell, which he sent to his friends back home and distributed at the record shop Licorice Pizza, where he found work behind the counter. The strip featured deeply cynical, existential ruminations from a bunny named Binky, his illegitimate, one-eared son, Bongo, and a fez-wearing gay couple—who may or may not be identical twins—named Jeff and Akbar. It found its way into the Los Angeles Reader and then LA Weekly, in 1986, and eventually caught the attention of James L. Brooks, writer-producer of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writer-director of the film Terms of Endearment, among others.
Gary Panter, friend of Matt Groening’s, cartoonist: The people I knew who were doing the mini-comics at the earliest were Matt, Lynda Barry, me. . . . Matt’s earliest comics were about language. . . . He did a whole series of Life in Hell called “Forbidden Words.” He would just name all these phrases that were overused in culture and forbid them from being used again. His comics were very ambitious, and his drawings very simple, but beautifully designed; it has clarity, and Matt’s a great writer, and understands human psychology.
James Vowell, founding editor, Los Angeles Reader: Matt was always trying to sell Life in Hell as an idea to me for a weekly cartoon in the paper. He’d draw these little pictures on paper napkins . . . and occasionally I’d say, “Matt, why don’t you make that chin a little smaller.” He didn’t need me to edit his cartoons, I guarantee you. . . . They became super popular almost immediately.
Polly Platt, production designer, Terms of Endearment: I was nominated for an Academy Award for Terms of Endearment, and I wanted to give Jim Brooks a thank-you gift. [Matt] did a cartoon called “Success and Failure in Hollywood.” So I called Matt and I bought the original. [Jim] was thrilled! He just laughed and laughed, and hung it up on his wall in his office. It was a brilliant cartoon. Success and failure come out to exactly the same thing in the cartoon. I think it’s people shooting each other.
My suggestion to Jim was that I thought it would be great to do a TV special on the characters that Matt had already drawn; I never envisioned anything like The Simpsons.
At the time, Brooks was looking for a cartoon short to place before commercials as minute-long “bumpers” on The Tracey Ullman Show, a sketch-comedy series that Barry Diller, then C.E.O. of Fox Inc., had asked him to produce in 1987 for the new and struggling Fox network.
Jay Kogen, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): They really wanted Life in Hell. But Matt was making a good bit of money on mugs and calendars from Life in Hell, and Fox wanted to own the whole thing. He said, “I won’t sell you this. But I have this other family, called The Simpsons, that you can have.” And then he proceeded to draw something on a napkin that legend has it he just made up on the spot. And they said, “O.K., we’ll do that!”
Polly Platt: What’s funny now, because he’s so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn’t even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor. I stopped my car and said hello and offered him a ride. We were going in different directions, or he was too proud, or whatever.
Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, Maus: I pleaded with Matt and advised him strongly from my elder-statesman position to not work with Fox. “Whatever you do, don’t work with those guys! They’re gangsters! They’re gonna take your rights away!” He’s never let me forget it.
Gabor Csupo, original animator, The Simpsons (1987–92): When Jim Brooks originally saw Matt Groening’s drawings on his wall, it was all black-and-white, just the line drawing, no color or anything. And that’s how he wanted to do the show. And we said, “You know what? We gonna give you color for the same price.” And all of a sudden the eyes lit up and he said, “O.K., you guys are on.” The characters were so beautiful but, let’s face it, primitively designed that we thought that we could counterbalance that design with shocking colors. That’s why we came up with the yellow skin, and the blue hair for Marge.
Michael Mendel, associate producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–92): Matt would just show up with a two-page script and go, “Here it is. This is the cartoon we’re doing this week.” It was sort of guerrilla-style animation. We would hang out on the stage of Tracey Ullman, and in between block and rehearsal, we would grab [the actors] and record their lines. It was me and Matt and the animators and a couple directors—a really small group of people working on this little one-minute cartoon every week.
Wally Wolodarsky, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): The Simpsons were viewed as poor relations by the writing staff of The Tracey Ullman Show, and we secretly always felt that The Simpsons was the funniest part of the show.
For the voices of Homer and Marge, the producers used Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, actors who were already regulars on The Tracey Ullman Show. (Marge’s rasp is Kavner’s normal voice, almost uninflected.) Yeardley Smith, who auditioned using her own voice for Lisa, was a struggling actress with some Broadway and TV-movie credits. She had originally auditioned for the role of Bart, while voice actress Nancy Cartwright tried for Lisa. When they switched, Cartwright—who had followed the advice of her mentor, Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi Bear, to move to L.A. and try voice acting—attempted a version of a voice she had used on My Little Pony and The Snorks, and Bart was born.
The bumper episodes were amusing snippets of the dysfunctional family’s daily life, focusing mostly on the kids being kids, and the grief they caused their parents: Bart and Lisa engage in a burping contest; Bart directs the pallbearers at a funeral as if he were the foreman on a construction site.
Though critics liked The Tracey Ullman Show, the series wasn’t a big hit; but, then, neither was much else on the network. Still, Diller saw that the big-three networks were getting old and tired—they were losing viewers to cable and independent networks—and he was eager to experiment. In early 1988, he launched one of television’s first reality programs, America’s Most Wanted *(*Cops would follow in 1989), while taking the sitcom in lewd new directions with Married . . . with Children. When Brooks approached him with the idea of making The Simpsons into its own series, Diller eventually bit, thinking that the show might be, as he later put it, “the one that can crack the slab for us.”
Barry Diller, former chairman and C.E.O., Fox: Everything was failing at the time, all those half-hour sitcoms: Mr. President, etc. We all thought the Simpsons were really cute, but their shorts weren’t making any noise, nor was The Tracey Ullman Show, for that matter, which was unfortunate. I never saw it as a series. What made the difference was Jim Brooks. I know it was originally Matt’s drawings, and I’m sure [executive producer] Sam Simon made his contribution, but the show never would have happened, or have been successful, without Jim Brooks.
Rupert Murdoch, C.E.O., News Corp.: I was at a program meeting with Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network, and afterwards Barry said, “Come into my room, I want to show you something.” And he had a tape there, of about 20 minutes in length, of all the little 30-second bits that had been through The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I just thought it was hilarious. I said, “You’ve gotta buy this tonight.” He said, “No. It’s more complicated than that.” So we went forward from there.
Michael Mendel: Barry Diller just wanted to make specials and Jim [Brooks] put his foot down and said, “It’s a series or nothing.” The network wanted to play it safe, and they weren’t sure if this was going to work. I don’t think that happens today. I don’t think anyone gets on the phone with Barry Diller and says, “Take it or leave it. It’s a series.”
Barry Diller: I wanted to do anything that did not involve making a commitment of 13 episodes. But Jim said, with six months of lead time, it wouldn’t work any other way.
Michael Mendel: It was like, “I love them as one-minute cartoons, but as a whole half hour, I don’t know.” I didn’t think they’d be able to hold people’s attention. Great prediction on my part.
Rupert Murdoch: You look at it in today’s figures, the risks [of making The Simpsons its own series] weren’t that great. But at the time, we were very conscious of how much money we were spending on productions. It was certainly tremendously important in establishing the use of brand of the network.
Brooks’s man in charge of developing the show was Sam Simon, a writer-producer who had worked with Brooks on Taxi and Ullman. Simon would depart The Simpsons after its fourth season, leaving behind much acrimony between him and Matt Groening over creative differences and compensation issues. Simon’s lawyers negotiated a lucrative deal for him; he left without much severance, but retained a piece of the show. (He has made more than 10 million dollars a year since.) Many of the original staff remain loyal to Simon, crediting him with taking Groening’s crude characters from The Tracey Ullman Show and making them into the Simpsons that the world knows and loves. Simon recently told 60 Minutes, ”Any show I’ve ever worked on, it turns me into a monster. I go crazy; I hate myself.” For his part, Groening has said, “I think Sam Simon is brilliantly funny and one of the smartest writers I’ve ever worked with, although unpleasant and mentally unbalanced.”
Colin Lewis, postproduction supervisor and producer, The Simpsons (1990–97): Sam had problems with Matt from the beginning. The stuff with Matt, anyone will tell you, in terms of them feuding and not talking . . . that was consistent from the beginning.
Polly Platt: Matt did not get along with [Sam]. Nobody got along with him. He’s kind of an awful person. If he was at any meeting, it just seemed that everyone would turn on each other.
Barry Diller: I was totally aware of their problems and often mediated them on behalf of everyone. For a while it was not a happy place. But I think it ultimately made the show better.
Michael Mendel: A lot of the foundation for the show and the reason why I think it’s successful was laid down during those tumultuous times.
Jay Kogen: It was clear that there was animosity back and forth. It was a tough position for Sam to be in, because Matt was getting all the accolades. I would think that if you were pouring your life’s blood into something and getting none of the credit, it would be irritating. If you look at the original Simpsons cartoons, those are closer to Matt’s drawings, but Sam reshaped them and re-drew them. He had experience in sitcoms. He had also worked in animation. He’s also a very talented cartoonist himself. He’s really smart, and handled storyboards and all that stuff.
Brad Bird, supervising director, The Simpsons (1989–92); feature-film director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: I think the unsung hero has always been Sam. I was in the room when he took some pretty mediocre scripts and just sat there in his chair, with all the writers in the room and a cigar, and went through, line by line. And he would get people to pitch lines . . . but 9 times out of 10 he came up with the best line. And if someone came up with a genuinely better line, he’d put that in.
Jay Kogen: Matt wasn’t always in the room. So it’s hard to fight with everybody and have a real say if you’re not there. He’s also a very pleasant, easygoing guy, and the writers’ room can be a tough place. But, you know, ultimately Matt got what he wanted. When he pitched stuff, he got what he wanted.
With the enlarged scope of a series, a cast of characters outside the family was needed. There were Patty and Selma, Marge’s spinster sisters, and Grandpa, Homer’s neglected father. Moe the bartender, Homer’s enabler, is the bitterest man in town, while the local-TV kiddie show is hosted by Krusty the Clown, a Friars-era showbiz hack. Homer’s boss is the 104-year-old nuclear-power-plant owner, Mr. Burns, a throwback to the robber barons (with some Charles Foster Kane, Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller thrown in). To voice the supporting roles, the performing cast was filled out with veteran improv actors Hank Azaria (Chief Wiggum, Moe, Apu) and Harry Shearer (Principal Skinner, Mr. Burns, Kent Brockman). The late Phil Hartman helped create some of The Simpsons’ best moments voicing the charmingly incompetent litigator Lionel Hutz and washed-up actor Troy McClure.
Josh Weinstein, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): When Jim and Matt and Sam first assembled a group of actors for the show, they didn’t go for voice-over actors, people who did kids’ voices and cartoon shows. They went for real actors and actors who had a lot of comedy, improv experience. Sometimes some of the best moments came from the actors themselves, and not from the script.
Hank Azaria: The hard stuff was the first two or three years, where we were finding the tone, sensibility, even specifically the voices of the characters. There was a lot of finding it in fits and starts. We would record all day long.
Michael Mendel: Fox had this really huge A.D.R. stage, and everybody [not just the actors] was in the room with the microphones. You couldn’t make a noise while they were recording or you would ruin it. It was always a challenge to not laugh on top of these actors’ takes because they were so funny. So people would be, you know, crawling under their desks not to ruin the take.
Producing the volume of animation needed for the 13-episode first season was another hurdle. One problem was that much of the actual work would have to be farmed out to studios in Korea, which were used to animating Transformers and not sophisticated comedy shows. Another was that most of the staff—including Brooks and Groening—had little experience with animation.
Kent Butterworth, director of first Simpsons episode: Gabor Csupo had escaped from the Iron Curtain with a couple of his animator friends. . . . He had never done that volume of work, and had not worked with overseas studios, and he was concerned about his ability to deliver.
Michael Mendel: The first show came back from Korea and it was a complete disaster. It was unairable. We had to re-cast some voices. The director just went off and did a bunch of stuff on his own.
Gabor Csupo: It was a very, very raw first assembly of the scenes, and some of the scenes were still missing, didn’t come back, wrong colors, wrong angles. So it was a disaster. Jim sort of got into it, started to laugh for the first five minutes, and then all of a sudden his face started to turn green and yellow, match the Simpsons characters almost. He got really disappointed because none of the jokes worked or nothing, and then all of a sudden he started to scream and yell, saying, “What is this?” He just went off and he even started to demand extra camera angles, which was the funniest thing ever—he never did animation in his life. He asked for coverage like when you’re shooting a live-action movie. “So where are the other camera angles?” And [my producer] and I were just looking at each other, “O.K. . . . ”
I was just so angry and embarrassed at the same time that they forced us to show this raw footage before we could even correct it. Jim was screaming and yelling that “this is not funny!” And I said, “Well, it may be not funny because you didn’t write it funny.” And then everybody looks at me: “Oh my God! You dared to say that to Jim!” But I felt I had nothing to lose.
Kent Butterworth: It was not fun. It was decided [by Brooks] to shelve this episode and get back to it later. Meanwhile, he would contact Fox and let them know that the delivery of the series would be delayed in order to get the quality they needed. Needless to say, my employment on The Simpsons was over!
The next episodes, directed by David Silverman and Wesley Archer, were less problematic.
Barry Diller: I remember when we screened the first episode, for a number of Fox executives, we all went down to their bungalows over at The Simpsons, and not a single person in the room was laughing, except for me and Jim Brooks. No one had done an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and it was just like, “What is this?” But we put it on, and it became more and more successful every week.
The show hit a ratings high at the end of its first season, in the spring of 1990, cracking the Top 10 (the only Fox show to do so that year). Fox struck a deal with Mattel, and talking Bart Simpson dolls began disappearing from department-store shelves. Bart T-shirts were selling at the rate of a million per day in North America. His catchphrases, such as “Underachiever and proud of it” and “Don’t have a cow, man,” became staples of early-90s lexicon. Bootleg merchandise was soon as ubiquitous as the real thing. “Black Bart” T-shirts were a popular phenomenon in African-American communities, with Bart’s catchphrases altered to “Watch it, mon!” and, without irony, “You wouldn’t understand; it’s a black thing.”
Matt Groening found endless amusement in these imitations.
Conan O’Brien, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1991–93); host, Late Night with Conan O’Brien: Friends of Matt’s would be traveling and they would find bootlegged Simpsons merchandise. Sometimes they were funny and sometimes they were disturbing. Like a Marge made out of a lizard’s skull . . . or T-shirts that were from some country—recently liberated from the Iron Curtain—that had Bart saying weird phrases that were mildly threatening or racist. I remember Matt cracking up once. “Did you see what they just found? Ceausescu had this in his basement.”
Jay Kogen: I had not been a part of anything that was that huge, ever. Literally, people were selling T-shirts of the show I was working on on freeway off-ramps. Instead of oranges off the freeway, they were selling Simpsons T-shirts. All people were talking about was The Simpsons. It was gigantic!
With Bart omnipresent and Fox expanding its programming schedule from three nights a week to five, a bold plan was hatched: beginning with the show’s second season, in the fall of 1990, it would be moved to Thursday nights, where it would take on the reigning television champion, NBC’s The Cosby Show.
Barry Diller: We were at a scheduling meeting, so there were about 15 people there, and we were figuring out what to put up against Cosby on Thursday nights at eight o’clock. Cosby had been the biggest thing on TV for God knows how many years. Rupert leaned over and whispered to me, “What about The Simpsons?” And I stood up and went over to the board and moved the little magnet that said “Simpsons” to Thursday night at eight. And it took a solid minute before someone said, “You know what? That could work.” And it was a big deal, little Bart Simpson going up against big Bill Cosby. So it was a dragon-slayer story.
Rupert Murdoch: We were sitting down with Barry, reviewing the schedule. We look at it and I said, “We gotta be more aggressive . . . Let’s put it up against Cosby. Cosby must be coming to the end of his run—he’s been there forever.” And everybody in the room was horrified and sort of laughed at me. Except Barry Diller, who said, “No, let’s think about this.”
Wally Wolodarsky: None of the writers cared [about the scheduling move]. It was just an opportunity to make fun of Cosby and be impudent about it. The writers never had a stake in the ratings; you never cared about that. That was always viewed as a business decision.
Rupert Murdoch: And so we did it. And at the end of the first year, Cosby announced his retirement. We started behind him, but I think we’d caught up by the end of the year; certainly the writing was on the wall. [The shows were close in the ratings most of the season, with The Simpsons occasionally edging out Cosby.]
Donick Cary, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1996–99); creator, Lil’ Bush: They invented a network. In a lot of ways, the Fox Network wouldn’t exist without the longevity and the amount of viewers that The Simpsons has consistently brought to Fox.
Barry Diller: In terms of ratings and financial terms it really built the network, but also in terms of giving Fox its attitude. Some of that was already there with Married . . . with Children, but The Simpsons is by far the most successful show.
The writers’ room, assembled by Sam Simon, would come to be considered one of the great temples of comedy. Many of the original writers—including Wolodarsky, Kogen, John Swartzwelder, and the team of Al Jean and Mike Reiss—had substantial television credits. But Simon also found spectacular new talent in non-traditional locations, beginning a trend that would continue long after his departure. (David Mirkin, who ran the show in its fifth and sixth seasons, hired a mathematician and a lawyer.) Perhaps his key find was George Meyer, editor of a humor zine called Army Man—distributed sparingly in Hollywood in the late 80s—of which Simon was an enormous fan.
In 1991, Conan O’Brien, one of the many Harvard Lampoon veterans on the staff, and the writing team of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein would be the first writers to be added to the original room.
Conan O’Brien: It was as if that first Olympic Dream Team, with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson . . . it was like getting the call, “Do you want to come shoot baskets with us?”
Josh Weinstein: It was like walking into the pantheon of comedy gods.
Colin Lewis: If you talk to a writer on any show, somehow he’ll guide you towards, “What do you do? What show are you on?” And with the Simpsons writers, it was the opposite. They were guys who were having fun, doing what they were doing and making a good show, but they were the geekiest, most unassuming guys.
Donick Cary: A lot of these guys had written on the Lampoon together in college, so they were sort of falling back into their college routine—which was, basically, to hang out all day and entertain themselves.
Bill Oakley, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): From Season 2 to Season 8, there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff.
Conan O’Brien was fresh from Saturday Night Live when he joined The Simpsons. When not cracking up his fellow writers, he managed to craft memorable episodes such as “Marge vs. the Monorail” (a takeoff on The Music Man in which a straw-hatted shyster sells Springfield a dilapidated monorail) and “Homer Goes to College” (Homer lives out his college fantasies, which have been informed entirely by 80s Animal House rip-offs).
Conan O’Brien: I was very nervous [when I started]. They showed me into this office and told me to start writing down some ideas. They left me alone in that office, and I remember leaving after five minutes to go get a cup of coffee. And I heard a crash, and I walked back to the office, and there was a hole in the window and a dead bird on the floor—literally in my first 10 minutes at The Simpsons, a bird had flown through the glass of my window, hit the far wall, broken its neck, and fallen dead on the floor. And I remember George Meyer came in and looked at it, and he was like, “Man, this is some kind of weird omen.”
I think when I first got there I stood out a bit, because everyone sat still in the room and thought, and I don’t think it was too long before I was climbing on furniture. I would pitch the characters in their voices, and I thought that’s just what people did, but then Mike Reiss told me nobody does that.
Wally Wolodarsky: Conan used to do this thing called “The Nervous Writer” that involved him opening a can of Diet Coke and then nervously pitching a joke. He would spray Diet Coke all over himself and that was always a source of endless amusement amongst us.
Conan O’Brien: Everyone heard the news [when he was hired to replace David Letterman on NBC in 1993], and John Swartzwelder—he looks like someone who would arrest an anarchist for throwing a bomb at Archduke Ferdinand’s carriage—was sitting there and smoke was trailing off his cigarette. He doesn’t say much, and then he just looked at me and he said, “I’d watch your show.” And that meant a lot to me, because he’s not a guy who will say something he doesn’t mean.
Some executive at Fox—who I don’t remember, and that’s probably for the best—said, “No, no, no. He still owes us money on his contract.” And it was like a year’s salary or something. So I think NBC paid half, and I paid half. I actually had to pay my way out of Fox, which always felt a little strange. I’m sure Simon Cowell has that money now. He’s using it on hair gel.
George Meyer is still with the show, considered the godfather of the writers’ room and the unofficial show-runner. In a 2000 profile of Meyer, The New Yorker claimed that he has “so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons can be seen as mostly his.”
Richard Appel, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): One thing George does, in any room he’s in, he sets the bar high just by being in it. One of the best things to have in a writers’ room is a sense that you’re trying to make the best person in the room laugh. And George was always that at The Simpsons in my time there, and I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say that’s what he was before I got there and after I left.
Conan O’Brien: George Meyer has just such a discerning comedy mind, your biggest fear is saying something hacky or contrived.
Wally Wolodarsky: There’s a darkness and lightness in George, both of which are surprising. For someone who could pitch such dark material, he also had a kind of hippie lightness of spirit that you wouldn’t necessarily think go together.
Richard Appel: George did the most, of anyone I know, to sustain the voice of the show. And I think he had a huge hand in defining the voice of the show, but so did Jim Brooks and Matt and Sam Simon. I have heard everyone say it’s just a thrilling experience to be in a room with Sam, and I think George really thinks the same things of Sam, and for me, my Sam was George.
John Swartzwelder has written far more Simpsons scripts than anyone—upward of 50, including classics such as “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” “Rosebud,” and “Bart Gets an Elephant.”
Bill Oakley: If you look at the Swartzwelder scripts—it’s like he comes from another dimension. He is a genius—his material is so strange you almost wonder how his brain works. The ultimate Swartzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode “Whacking Day.” Homer is letting people park on his lawn, and he has a sign that says, parking: $10 per axle. And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, “Woo-hoo!” and the foreign man goes, “Hooray!” God, it just makes me laugh.
Wally Wolodarsky: Swartzwelder seemed to go directly from being a homeless person to a writer on The Simpsons. He was a little bit older than us and had, I think, seen a little bit more of the world, in terms of being up and down. He did have interesting preoccupations. I know for a while he was collecting wanted posters. Real Patty Hearst wanted posters.
Jay Kogen: One time, I remember, [Swartzwelder] bought a painting that Hitler had painted. I was like, “Really? You want to buy a Hitler painting?” But he loved historic artifacts.
Animation had opened up a whole new world—the world, in fact—to the creative staff. Not only could they take their characters anywhere, physically and emotionally, but there were no adorable actors to become tangled up in pubescence, no live studio audience to pander to, no laugh track. (Even when Seinfeld premiered, in 1990, certainly a step forward for the sitcom, the viewer was still being told when to laugh.) Another advantage was the cover that a cartoon provided for humor that could never be permitted in live action.
Donick Cary: We’d have episodes where it starts with Homer’s car crashed into the front porch, ‘cause he drove home drunk. If an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond started with Ray Romano’s car crashed into the front porch, there’d be a lot of chat about that.
One factor keeping the show’s writing fresh has been the lack of network influence. Fox executives are forbidden to give notes to The Simpsons.
Larry Doyle, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1997–99): When you have a table read with a regular sitcom, you go in there and there’s always a sense of fear, because those people [at the network] are unpredictable. They can come back and say, “No, we don’t want you to do that,” and then you’ll have a day to write a new script. That never happens to us.
Josh Weinstein: Working on The Simpsons then felt like being in the graduate school of comedy, or a great comedy lab, where you could try and do anything and no one would stop you, as long as it was good or funny. That had an amazing feel.
Brad Bird: There were discussions [with the network], but they were over pretty quickly. I think people felt good being under the titanium shield of Jim Brooks. The studio might get upset and they might make notes, but we didn’t have to take them unless Brooks said we had to take them.
Barry Diller: Anything with Jim Brooks has a level of independence in it, but it’s not exclusionary. Jim’s not about being exclusionary, and in this case couldn’t be—there was just too much strife going on [between Sam Simon and Matt Groening]. Were we engaged in the early development of it, Fox network people? Yes. Did we give line notes? Not ever. I never gave line notes in my life.
Colin Lewis: David Mirkin was the first [show-runner] who said, “Why do we have to change it? We’re The Simpsons. We’re in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won’t deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them.”
What is striking about the early episodes is how sweet, and at times dramatic, they can be. “The question was: could you make cartoon characters that looked this weird and grotesque and actually make you feel some real emotion,” Groening has said. The Simpsons faced legitimate problems: Homer lived in fear of losing his job; he had trouble connecting with his daughter. It was only in later years, to keep the writing interesting, that the characters became more exaggerated, as did their situations—Homer went to space; Maggie shot a man; the family created an international incident with Australia.
Conan O’Brien: Homer’s a real temptation. We had so much fun trying to make him dumber and dumber and dumber that there was one time where Homer’s brain got angry at him because he was so stupid, and so you heard the brain say, “That’s it, I give up,” and walk down a corridor and slam a door. I loved it—but it’s like, “Wait, if his brain is his consciousness, who’s his brain walking out on? And who is his brain angry with?”
Donick Cary: I think we got to times where it felt like Homer was just being dumb, like literally he’s on the floor eating out of the garbage. And you’re like, “Hmm. Is this really the best place to take this character?”
Conan O’Brien: There is a strong lack of sentimentality on The Simpsons, but something that Sam and Jim and Matt stressed was: this is a family. And that kind of talk can start to sound pretty treacly, but you can’t have an episode where Homer sells Bart, or harvests his organs. So I think one of the things that works is respect for that unit was always kept intact.
Wally Wolodarsky: I think that Sam had helped to create such a vibrant world that once he left, his vision was in place, and I don’t think that that ever really changed.
Donick Cary: At Letterman [where Cary had been a writer] it was always like, “We need material for tonight! What are we gonna do? We need jokes!” I got to The Simpsons, and I was like [speaking rapidly], “All right. Homer’s under the table—and he’s eating butter, and he’s running around. And Homer . . . “ And people are like: “Dude . . . we got nine months to get a joke together.”
Conan O’Brien: By the time an episode came out, you had maybe heard the script read through like 20 times, and if for some reason the joke wasn’t getting a laugh on the 21st time, you had to rework it. Sometimes your first pitch is your best pitch, but over time, if you revisit it constantly, you’ll grow weary of it, it will start to wilt, and then you’re just coming up with a different pitch that’s maybe not necessarily better.
Donick Cary: So you go out—you write like crazy, your script. You bring it back in. And then the room would spend a week rewriting it. . . . If it was a story that was close to your heart, it could be a very painful process. Suddenly there’s 15 opinions on why it’s good or bad.
Josh Weinstein: The table read is a very exciting, nerve-racking event for a writer or show-runner because that is the first time that you hear your lines, like the opening night of a play. And there are also a lot of outside factors that can affect the table read. If it’s raining in L.A., or if there’s bad traffic, and people come in a bad mood, that can affect a table read as well.
Larry Doyle: A lot of the Fox “offices” are actually trailers that they just never moved, and one of them where the table reads were while I was there was a big double-wide trailer, and it’s got a giant wooden table and the writers and actors sit at the table and then the entire room is lined with chairs that are always filled with everyone else who works on the show, and sometimes guests and sometimes various celebrities come in to hear a table read . . . they’ll bring their kids. I remember once we had a couple Make-A-Wish kids. Ron Howard brought his kids. Stephen Hawking came to a table read.
As Bartmania cooled off, and the series moved toward institutional status with its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, the show’s quality miraculously refused to drop. It got funnier, smarter, richer in allusion and parody. The producers changed animation studios from Klasky Csupo to Film Roman in the fourth season, updating the rudimentary look with slicker designs and a more varied palette.
After Simon had left, in 1993, different writers were promoted to fill the role of show-runner. Al Jean and Mike Reiss took over first. Then the producers brought in David Mirkin, who had written for Three’s Company and created Get a Life, with Chris Elliot. After Mirkin came longtime writers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, followed by Mike Scully (who stayed in charge for four seasons—the unwritten rule had been that show-runners stay for two years), before the show was given back to Al Jean, who has run The Simpsons since 2001.
Jay Kogen: Those years with Al [Jean] and Mike [Reiss] running it were pretty darn good. And then the ones after that maybe not so much . . . some people ran it better than others.
Wally Wolodarsky: We left during the fourth season, and at that point we were already running out of childhood anecdotes. And I think as a result the show got crazier and crazier. Because all the stories we had experienced, or seen other people experience, had been exploited. And to see the show go on is mind-boggling to me.
Colin Lewis: [Under David Mirkin] it stopped being like the geeky guys from college writing the show and became people who just really wanted to be comedy writers, and wanted to be Hollywood, so they could say, “I work on The Simpsons.” That’s when Homer sort of became stupid.
Rupert Murdoch: The show’s had its ups and downs. It had a couple years there where it grew a bit dark, but we sort of got them out of that.
As the series relinquished the emotional grounding of the early years, it became more topical. Later episodes seemed increasingly tailored to guest appearances—a forgivable sin, concerning the impressive list: Mick Jagger, Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Steve Martin, Elton John, Ludacris, Ricky Gervais, Elvis Costello, Stephen Hawking, Tony Blair, Frank Gehry, Susan Sarandon, Tom Clancy, and J. K. Rowling (to name a few). Even the earliest seasons had been graced by Michael Jackson, Penny Marshall, and Elizabeth Taylor, who voiced Maggie’s first word, “Daddy.” (Taylor said “Fuck you” to Matt Groening and stormed out of the recording session after he made her read the line more than 20 times. He said it kept sounding “too sexual.”)
Hank Azaria: They sent me down to greet Mick Jagger [when he arrived to record his part], and I said, “Hey, Mick, we’re all thrilled to have you here.” And he kind of blew right by me like I was the greeter, and went [dismissively], “Yeah, we’ll get it,” which I knew was going to be awkward, because I was about to walk upstairs and record with him. And it also made me a little bit annoyed. So before I even thought, I went, “No, I don’t think we’ll get it—I’m just glad you’re here.” And he kind of turned around and looked back at me like, What the fuck did you just say to me? And I was just like, “Hi. I’m Hank, I’ll be recording with you.” So that was slightly awkward.
Tim Long, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1999–present): Mr. T [another guest] was telling me the scenes that happened in Rocky III, where he lost. The reason he lost was because his mother needed money for an operation, and so he was paid to take a dive. And I said, “Well, I don’t remember that in the movie.” And he just looks at me right in the eye and says, “Things you don’t see!”
I said to him, “I remember you put out a record called Mr. T’s Commandments.” And somehow he heard that as “Mr. T, please sing ‘Mr. T’s Commandments.’” So he sang me the whole song. And I just thought, If I’m killed by a sniper tonight, well, my life would have ended beautifully, because I have been sung to by Mr. T.
Ricky Gervais, guest writer and voice, The Simpsons (2006), creator and star, BBC’s The Office: We had a lunch with Matt and Al Jean and all the writers and producers and everything, and at the very end, I was doing the nerdy thing, asking Matt to draw me a Homer. I was jealous of Moby’s. I saw a Cribs, and it was Moby and he said it was his prized possession—I think the first Cribs where you actually saw a bookshelf. Matt said, “Would you like to be a guest voice?” And I said, “What are the hours?” And he said, “The hours are really good.” I went, “Of course I would.”
One battle the network decided to fight was against the actors who provided the voices on the show. According to a former producer, up until 1999, the actors were paid only about $25,000 an episode, while the Seinfeld cast had been making $600,000 per episode each. Negotiations that year for new contracts turned bitter. Though show-runner Mike Scully refused to participate, Fox began auditioning replacements.
Colin Lewis: There was a day, there was an actual moment when the actors, who are normally just friendly, sat down and started talking more in depth about contracts. . . . They asked us to give them some time alone, and it was like, “Alone? You guys don’t hang out alone.” They literally, like, closed the door.
Hank Azaria: You know, the show has made so much money, in so many ways. Eventually, we just wanted to get our piece of the pie. And Fox is tough. They’re very tough negotiators. Their business model is not to give money away. So it got a little intense at times.
Larry Doyle: The actors actually didn’t come to work for a while. Their contract expired, and we weren’t recording them for I think a month. Fox had started to audition people. The actors got their deal because of a last-minute thing, some sort of bonus. And it turned out that they weren’t going to get [the bonus money] until 2005 or something. So it was a real, like, Fox-studio “Fuck you,” where the fine print means, “We’re going to deliver that, in pennies, after you’re dead.” So Harry [Shearer], for the longest time, came to every table read wearing a T-shirt that said, you’ll get it in 2005. The suggestion being that he wasn’t going to do anything but work to contract.
Rupert Murdoch: The voices, who have been there since the very beginning, are now getting very large salaries . . . I’m not saying whether they’re worth it or not. Or whether you could replace them or not, but Jim [Brooks] wouldn’t hear of that, because they’re all his friends.
Larry Doyle: I doubt that’s what Jim Brooks said—I think that Jim Brooks might have been friends with some of them, but he wasn’t really good friends with them. And he is first and foremost a businessman. If he was saying he didn’t want to replace them, it was because he thought the show would tank, and I think it probably would have. Had they replaced Homer, I think that would have been the last year of the show.
Hank Azaria: I think that Fox, and even our own representation, didn’t realize how much these voices couldn’t just be replaced. And also, by the way, you don’t animate first and then stick in voices. You’re animating to the vocal performance, so that means comic timing and inflection and character all comes first, and then you animate. Bottom line is: they tried to replace us and couldn’t.
A second contract dispute in 2004 spilled into the press when the cast demanded equity positions. This too was resolved—the actors now make more than “a hundred thousand dollars” an episode, according to Murdoch—and the show has kept rolling on. It has been renewed until 2009, and on July 27 of this year, the characters will make the jump to the big screen. While debate over the show’s quality will rage (mostly on the Internet), what is significant is that it has persevered. Over 18 years, however, the relationship between Matt Groening and Jim Brooks has apparently deteriorated. “Jim and Matt hardly talk to each other now. They can’t stand each other,” Rupert Murdoch told me. But one former producer says that this is not quite accurate: while relations between the two have at times been strained, they are working together on the movie, and are far from not speaking.
Tim Long: [Matt Groening’s] involvement with the show lately has kind of been in an advisory role. If this were a sort of medieval farming situation, he’s like a benevolent feudal lord. He allows us to till the ground the way we want.
While The Simpsons’ glory days passed a decade ago, the show is still reliable for some intelligent laughs, and comfortably sits in its eight-o’clock Sunday spot, watched by 10 million viewers every week. The writers’ room is nearly as vibrant as ever, continuing to draw from Harvard and the cream of the young comedy-writing crop. (A rare exception came in 2006, when show-runner Al Jean allowed his wife, who had been a personal trainer, to write a script.)
Donick Cary: It seems like it’s gotten a little simpler—it goes a little more topical. And . . . it’s a little easy, you know? But, at the same time, they’re in Season 18—so, what the hell?
Rupert Murdoch: I can’t say I’ve watched every episode, but I watch it at every opportunity. And I think it’s still as brilliant as ever.
Ricky Gervais: The longevity is astounding. Four hundred episodes. I had to have a lie-down after six [episodes of The Office]. I imagine the show’s influence is as a paradigm of excellence. People go, “Would that pass in The Simpsons?” Because it’s timeless and universal. But I don’t know if it’s changed the way people make TV. I don’t know if many things do that outside technology and law.
Wally Wolodarsky: I see it in a continuum that starts with Martin and Lewis, Your Show of Shows, Honeymooners, early Carson, early Letterman, Get Smart, early SNL and just keeps moving. I don’t see it as a revolution. I see it as a natural continuum of all the stuff we really loved.
Tim Long: I’d like to think that we prevented the president from invading Iraq and we kept Bush from being re-elected . . . Oh, whoops, we didn’t do any of those things. I think that you can overstate the importance of comedy. At best I think comedians tend to be like that guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square—I think that you’re actually flattering yourself if you think you’re actually affecting anything.
Conan O’Brien: For the last 14 years of doing my show, I’ve been working hard on this comedy, but it’s pretty disposable. I could light my arms on fire on the show tonight and you might see it for a couple of days on YouTube, but then it’s gone. I’m constantly, no matter where I go in the world, running into people who know which episodes of The Simpsons I worked on, and they’re quoting lines to me. I think long after my Late Night show is gone, I feel like the Simpsons episodes I worked on will always be in the ether. People will be watching them on some space station, like, 200 years from now. That’s a nice feeling.
Jay Kogen: We thought we were really writing these really funny, smart, special shows that were chock-full of jokes every few seconds. And then someone showed us this study Fox had done: the No. 1 reason why people liked The Simpsons was “all the pretty colors” and they liked it when Homer hit his head. We were writing the show for ourselves—we always made it funny for ourselves—but who knows why America likes it. Maybe they like the pretty colors and when Homer hits his head, but I hope it’s for more.
Also on VF.com: A Q&A with former Simpsons writer Conan O’Brien and our picks for the top 10 episodes ever.
This is an expanded version of the text that appears in the August 2007 Vanity Fair.
John Ortved is a Vanity Fair contributing editorial associate.
