Writing for The Simpsons is genuinely fun; running the show is like crawling nude over broken glass in hell. No one ever asks to be showrunner—the title is generally thrust upon some talented, hardworking sucker. Al Jean has been running the show for the past twenty years, and no one’s ever tried to unseat him, because being showrunner on The Simpsons is like being mayor of Detroit: great title, crummy job.
In 1991, The Simpsons was going into its third season, and was a blockbuster, game-changing hit. Sam Simon, who’d been running the show, had moved on to develop new sitcoms. Al Jean and I, still in our twenties, were put in charge of the show with a mandate: Don’t Screw It Up. And we had so many opportunities to screw it up! Our duties included supervising the writing, directing the voice actors, going over storyboards, approving character designs, editing voice tracks and final animation, and determining spots for music and sound effects. We were trained in absolutely none of this.
The pressure on us was immense; we were learning as we went along, working one hundred hours a week, fifty-one weeks a year (thank God for Christmas week!). Al and I would edit the show’s audio track from eight to ten each morning, run the writers’ room from ten A.M. till eight P.M. (where the writers bitched about their own hours), then go back to editing till two in the morning.
Once, nearing my breaking point, I took an emergency day off. At midnight, I gave my last note to the production team, saying that a background character should look like Hollywood Squares star Wally Cox. Then I left, asking not to be disturbed under any circumstances for the next twenty-four hours. The phone rang at seven the following morning: “Do you want Wally Cox before he had a mustache or after?” Arrghh!
We never missed a day, even when Al had pneumonia. I said something that made him laugh, but the laugh soon turned to a coughing fit, and he crumpled to the floor and passed out.
Oh no, I’ve killed Al, I thought. I can’t do this show alone.
A minute later, Al came to, climbed back into his chair, and said, “Let’s keep going.”
Another time, I came to work with the flu. I sent a production assistant out to get me cough drops. The next day, I got an angry call from our budget guy: “What’s this eighty-five cents you’re billing to the show?” I’m not making this up—the budget guy was sick, too: he had six weeks to live, and he was fighting me over eighty-five cents.
“Pal,” I said, “this is not a good use of either of our time.”
At the end of season 4, I left to take my Christmas break. I picked up a year-end magazine that declared “the writing on The Simpsons has gone downhill.” That critique ruined my holiday. I obsessed about what I could have been doing wrong. Twenty years later, that same magazine declared season 4 “the greatest season of the greatest show in history.” Thanks.
During my two years running The Simpsons, I gained seventy pounds—I was working sixteen-hour days, living on takeout meals and junk food, never having the time or energy to exercise. When I finally got to a doctor for a checkup, he told me, “You’re morbidly obese. Do you know what ‘morbidly obese’ means?”
I mumbled, “That’s what Homer is.”
I’d hit 239 pounds, exactly Homer’s weight. In the episode “Brush with Greatness” he crows, “I’m two-thirty-nine and I’m feeling fine!” I wrote that line.
(Sam wrote the next line. Mr. Burns says, “You’re the fattest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been on safari!”)
I’ve since lost all that weight. You can read about it in my next book, The “Don’t Run The Simpsons” Diet.
Cape Feare: The Musical?
Al and I ended our two years as showrunners with the episode “Cape Feare,” in which Sideshow Bob gets out of prison to terrorize Bart. The show was based on a Robert De Niro movie, which was a remake of a Robert Mitchum movie, which was adapted from a John D. MacDonald novel. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more derivative, someone turned our episode into an off-Broadway musical, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, a story of some postapocalyptic survivors who share only one cultural link: the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons. They recreate the script and perform it as a traveling theater troupe. In act 2 we see their play seventy-five years later: it’s become as ritualized and bizarre as a Greek Orthodox Mass. I’m always thrilled to see The Simpsons permeate pop culture, whether we’re being parodied on South Park or rendered in oil paint by Ron English. Plus, I loved the concept for this play. I couldn’t wait to see it.
And then I saw it. Somehow they’d made The Simpsons three things it had never been before: grim, pretentious, and dull. It was so grim, pretentious, and dull that the New York theater critics loved it. I met the playwright after the show—she also struck me as G, P, & D. I said, “You’re not a Simpsons fan, are you?”
“No, not really,” she replied.
The only scenes people seemed to enjoy were the large hunks of our script that she used in the play—without crediting any of us. The whole thing made me furious on a daily basis; the theater was fifty yards from my front door and I had to pass it every day.
The play later opened in London, where the critics were less kind—one called it “three hours of utter Hell.” God bless the Brits and their good taste. They gave us Chaplin. And Benny Hill.
WHAT IS A PRODUCER?
After thirty years on the air, The Simpsons has a bureaucracy as bloated and corrupt as the Italian parliament. The proof is that the show now has forty-seven producers.
Every writer on the show is called a producer. So is the guy who cuts the checks. And the casting agent. The showrunner, who works eighty hours a week, is a producer; but so is one guy who hasn’t set foot in the office in fifteen years. And another guy who’s been dead for three years. In short, some of our producers compose; others decompose.
CONAN O’BRIEN ON MIKE AND AL
“Al and Mike are very different personalities. They’re both extremely hard workers, and they’re both tenacious about getting the joke just right. And they both really want it to be good. They work their asses off, those guys. They don’t settle, which is good. Also, they are not guys who are at the strip club at eleven o’clock at night. They have this work ethic. They’re both fairly conservative—not politically, but in the way they live their lives. So in that sense, they’re very similar. Al is a little more introverted and Mike is more of the transplanted vaudevillian comic. He’s got an old-school delivery. If you could put him in a time machine and put him in Atlantic City in 1931, he could make a living and do pretty well as a comedian.”
Padding
Occasionally on The Simpsons, you’ll see a scene that’s weird, even by our standards: it’s not conventionally funny, and may have nothing to do with the story. Odds are, this scene is padding. One skill I learned at Harvard was how to stretch a five-page paper into a fifty-page thesis, and this served me well when I was running the show with Al Jean. For some reason, our episodes were always short, and we had to find a way to make the network minimum length: twenty minutes, twenty seconds.
One week, after editing the show “Lisa’s First Word,” we had an episode that was funny, touching, fast-paced . . . but thirty seconds too short to air. So Al and I wrote an extra-long couch gag—it ended with the back wall of the Simpsons’ living room opening up into an elaborate Vegas stage show. (The opening credits of Family Guy look a lot like this couch gag. Just saying . . .) Though invented in desperation, the extended couch joke has become a creative mainstay of the show—we’ve done long couch gags many times since, and they are often fan favorites.
While people love an extra bit at the beginning, they’re often baffled when it comes at the end. We once filled out a short show with a thirty-second cartoon called “The Adventures of Ned Flanders.” It was hardly an adventure:
NED: Knock that off you two, it’s time for church.
TODD FLANDERS: We’re not going to church today!
NED: What? You give me one good reason.
TODD: It’s Saturday!
NED: Okely dokely-doo!
Seconds after that aired, my father called. “What the hell was that?” he demanded. I didn’t even know he watched The Simpsons.
Then there’s the famous Sideshow Bob joke in “Cape Feare” that involves him stepping on an endless series of rakes. That alone was creative padding. But the show was still seven seconds short, so Al Jean said, “Let’s do it again.” We repeated the sequence exactly, and somehow turned a slapstick joke into a surreal classic.
Itchy and Scratchy cartoons are another great way to fill out a show. They’re quick and funny, and they have no effect on the plot whatsoever. Bless their violent little hearts.
One padding trick we rarely use anymore is Bart’s prank phone calls to Moe. They were freestanding scenes you could drop in anywhere, and they were a trademark of the show. However, these sequences were surprisingly hard to write—each one involved four separate jokes, which all had to be clever in their dumbness.
For example:
THE NAME: Amanda Hugginkiss
MOE MAKES IT WORSE: “Hey, I’m lookin’ for Amanda Hugginkiss! Oh, why can’t I find Amanda Hugginkiss?!”
THE PATRONS MAKE A REJOINDER: “Maybe your standards are too high!”
MOE THREATENS VENGEANCE: “You little SOB! Why, when I find out who you are, I’m going to shove a sausage down your throat and stick starving dogs up your butt!”
But the main reason we stopped doing these is that they never got a laugh at our table reads. Never.
One legendary attempt at show padding has been lost to the ages. Back in 1990, a second-season episode came in much too short, so we banged out a filler piece: “Nazis on Tap.” It was supposedly a Simpsons cartoon short from the 1940s. It seemed like The Simpsons, but everything was just a little different: Mr. Burns owns an aircraft plant making planes for the war effort; Bart’s spiky hair is replaced by a pointy Jughead cap; Moe the bartender is a dog, who asks, “Rrruff day at work, Homer?”
Matt Groening nixed the piece because it was too weird and too early in the series to just throw at people. I’m sure he wouldn’t have a problem with it now.
Whether it’s sitcoms or prom dresses, when padding’s done right, it’s a beautiful thing.
Interestingly, showrunner David Mirkin, who followed Al and me, had the opposite problem: his shows were often too long. Mirkin was always looking for tricks to jam a thirty-five-minute show into a thirty-minute slot. Someday you can read about it in his book, Smirkin’ with Mirkin.
No Tech
If we have a guiding principle at The Simpsons, it’s “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Our cast members together earn $2 million per show—about half our production budget—but we’d never dream of replacing them with cheaper soundalikes. Most musical scores on TV shows simulate a symphonic sound with synthesizers, but we still use a full orchestra every week. It’s slower, more expensive, and sounds just the same. So why do we do it? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.
The show is still drawn by hand—twenty-four thousand drawings per episode, to be exact. For fourteen years, it was also painted by hand, a slow, messy, expensive process. There were calls to switch over to computer ink-and-paint, but many feared the show might lose some character and warmth. So we did an experiment—one episode was picked at random (“Tennis the Menace,” where the Simpsons get a tennis court), and the coloring was done by computer. We put it on the air to see if viewers could tell the difference, and if one person in America complained, we’d never use the process again. Nobody noticed, so we switched over to computer ink-and-paint—two years later.
You see, our other motto is “If it is broke, don’t fix it, either.” We have a single phone in the writers’ office, and the 1 key doesn’t work. It broke ten years ago and has never been repaired. So, to my mom in the 619 area code, sorry I haven’t called.