by John Ortved
As a comparison, the hugely successful Family Ties cost $1.3 million per episode to syndicate in the eighties (when that deal was struck, its creator, Gary David Goldberg, received a check for $40 million),3 while Home Improvement would score approximately $2.7 million per episode4 in the mid-nineties (it was a number one show at the time—it has weathered badly). The only series to rival The Simpsons in the syndication contest would be Seinfield, which is popular both before prime time and after the ten o’clock news all over the country. Seinfeld’s per episode price was above $3 million in 1996. When the show ended in 1998, it negotiated its second round of syndication deals, with two hundred stations, for a record number, 5 as much as $5 million per episode. When The Simpsons finally goes off the air, we can count on a new record, as stations all over the world vie for the privilege of accessing twenty-plus years of reruns.
The mid-nineties was also a time when the Internet was finding its way into most homes. Next to pornography, it was hard to find an online subject more popular than The Simpsons. Through newsgroups, and then fan sites and web-based message boards, the community of Simpsons fans found each other, and a whole new forum to air their praise for and grievances against their favorite show. Finnish Simpsonsphile Jouni Paakkinen has shepherded The Simpsons’ presence online since the early nineties.
JOUNI PAAKKINEN, administrator, Simpsons Archive: It all started in a newsgroup called alt.tv.simpsons. These so-called Usenet groups were the first global discussion forums on the Internet. They still exist, but the majority of the discussions nowadays take place on web forums. The group was started as early as 1990, and at that time, most of the users studied or worked at academic institutions. Over the nineties, the number of people with access to the Internet grew rapidly, and by the midnineties the group had become very active, with dozens of regular posters and probably thousands of lurkers (including even Matt Groening himself). Popular topics were Is Smithers gay? and Where is Springfield? Nowadays it’s common for fans to compile this kind of stuff from their favorite shows, but the Simpsons’ fans were among the very first to start the tradition.
In the midnineties, alt.tv.Simpsons migrated to this new thing called the web. When the site turned ten in 2004, every month 1.5 million pages were viewed and the site had over fifty maintainers.
JACOB BURCH, administrator, NoHomers.net: In the middle of the week people would ask questions about the episodes on the newsgroup, either things they didn’t get or things they wanted further investigation into. On Wednesday—and then Saturday, as the show moved back to Sunday nights—there would be this anticipatory discussion of either what people knew or what had leaked. [An employee of Film Roman was leaking scripts and information to the websites—the word got around Film Roman and he was fired.] And then the day of an episode’s airing, the group became a giant reviews warehouse: people loving it, people hating it, people more than willing to point out what was flawed. And that was always the peak.
ERIC WIRTANEN, founder, NoHomers.net: In the mid- to late nineties, on the alt.Simpsons newsgroup, you’d see a new post every three or four seconds. It was ridiculous.
JACOB BURCH: If an episode touched someone a certain way, “Mother Simpson” or “Lisa’s Substitute,” they would defend it to the death.
JOUNI PAAKKINEN: As it became easier for a regular user to publish web pages, the latter half of the 1990s saw an explosion of The Simpsons’ fan community on the Internet. Hundreds and soon thousands of Simpsons fan sites were available all around the world. When all the good ideas had already been used, even the smallest supporting characters started to get their own dedicated sites. Most of the sites have been short-lived, but some have survived over a decade.
The Simpsons Archive stores information from scripts to celebrity appearances to cultural references—it is a living museum for all things Simpsons. Much of the current Simpsons debate and discussion takes place on web discussion groups. The most popular of these is NoHomers.net.
ERIC WIRTANEN: It got people together to discuss their love for the merchandise, review episodes. It made them realize that there was a whole world of fans out there just as dedicated as they were.
The show reached a point where there was this reciprocal relationship, where unlike Seinfeld and The Cosby Show, there was a wealth of things that could be argued about, things that could be discovered. The level of discourse that it allows is significantly higher than other shows. It created a body of evidence for the creators to note, “Hey, what we’re doing is working. Let’s do more of it. They like this hidden stuff.” It allowed the show to continue because it proved that it worked.
JACOB BURCH: The response on the Internet gave them Comic Book Guy [the overweight überdork who runs the comic book store and has “expert” opinions on all entertainment and media; he is a stand-in for overenthusiastic Simpsons fans, absorbing humiliating ripostes to his fanaticism in every scene in which he appears].
As The Simpsons entrenched itself into the popular culture of the nineties, it provoked some of the show’s veterans to produce animated sitcoms that would avoid the pitfalls of The Simpsons’ earlier imitators. The Critic, created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss and produced by James L. Brooks, lasted twenty-three episodes, on two different networks, before being canceled in 1995. King of the Hill, created by Simpsons writer Greg Daniels and Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butt-Head), has won two Emmys and is entering its fourteenth season on Fox.
Originally envisioned as a live-action show, The Critic followed the life of Jay Sherman, a cuddly (read: fat), balding, divorced film snob who reviews movies like “The Red Balloon Part 2: Revenge of the Red Balloon” and “Crocodile Gandhi,” on his weekly New York cable show (using his “Shermometer” as a rating device). I’ve never understood why The Critic did not fare better than it did. Jean and Reiss managed to send up Hollywood, the media that cover it, and life in New York City, while creating a fairly lovable loser out of Sherman, voiced with the knowing cynicism and genuine humility of Jon Lovitz. The look of The Critic, more realistic than The Simpsons, was simple but elegant, a throwback to old New Yorker covers, presenting scenes of a bustling but classic New York City where Gershwin tunes would always be the appropriate sound track.
Critics were bowled over by the idea that someone had finally made a show about them, if not by the show itself. Roger Ebert, who rarely commented on television, devoted a column to it, and Tom Shales called it “the feel-good show of the year. Or at least of the night.” Shales went on to say that “Jay Sherman isn’t as interesting as any single Simpson” but added that Jon Lovitz “gives the poor schnook not only verve but poignancy.” Ultimately, perhaps The Critic failed to have enough bite in its Hollywood satire, or enough heart on the homefront, where Jay was confronted by his son, ex-wife, romantic interests, and coming middle age. “Even at its funniest,” Howard Rosenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The Critic is a sanitized Pillsbury Doughboy compared to HBO’s TV-satirizing The Larry Sanders Show … On the Shermometer, The Critic rates about a 7.”
Viewers agreed. The Critic was not renewed after its thirteen-episode run on ABC. Fox picked it up in 1995 and ran ten episodes before the show was canceled permanently.
King of the Hill took a much less snide, media-savvy approach to the America it was choosing to portray. Drawn in the style (though with much more realism and dignity) of Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill introduced us to a normal Texas family, the Hills, living their lives in the suburban town of Arlen. Its patriarch, Hank Hill, a moderately conservative and thoughtful salesman of “propane and propane accessories,” is confronted each week with modern incursions into the traditional world of canned beer, football, and pickup trucks. Those challenges revolve around his drinking buddies, who are more redneck than him; his earnest wife, Peggie, a homemaker and substitute Spanish teacher who is discovering alternatives to traditional housewifery; and his chubby, unathletic twelve-year-old son, Bobby, whose dream is to become a prop comedian. “That b
oy ain’t right,” is a common refrain from Hank about his son.
“For a cartoon, it’s defiantly slow, sometimes a virtual still-life,” wrote Tom Shales. “And yet there’s something curiously compelling about its utterly trivial everyday goings-on.” The New York Times was equally impressed and bored with King of the Hill’s realism: “It scarcely matters that Hank and his friends are cartoon characters, and that fact suggests the ambition and the problem with King of the Hill.”
BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: Their whole goal was to get back to something real, even in animation. And if you look at the designs of the characters, you can really see it. Mike Judge said, “I’m not gonna do google-eyed characters, I’m not gonna do funny characters. I’m gonna go to the mall and look at people and draw them.”
And that’s what the designs of King of the Hill are, and the aesthetic of that show flows from that—actually to a point where Fox was freaked out by the first episode, because Greg and Mike decided they weren’t gonna do any close-ups. And that, actually, is very difficult to do in comedy. But they were just like, “Yeah, we’re doing all wide shots, man.” Reality is in wide shot, but that’s actually too revolutionary for comedy. As you sit there trying to laugh at lines, you want to see people’s faces. As a human being, you want that information, and so you kind of have to go to close-ups when you’re doing punch lines.
If viewers were puzzled at first, they certainly caught on. King of the Hill is never derisive or disrespectful toward the sector of America it satirizes—it genuinely appreciates its characters and their struggles, and viewers did the same. “This could easily be a setup for a mean parody about rural life in America,” wrote Matt Bai in The New York Times, “but King of the Hill … has never been so crass. The show’s central theme has always been transformation—economic, demographic and cultural … The real point is not to eviscerate so much as to watch Hank struggle mightily to adapt to a world of political correctness and moral ambiguity.”
Later in the decade, Matt Groening would launch his second animated sitcom, Futurama, with the help of former Simpsons executive producer David S. Cohen. Drawn like a glossier, streamlined Simpsons (the overbites and googly eyes are still there), Futurama took place in the year 3000, telling the story of a hapless pizza delivery boy who mistakenly freezes himself for a thousand years on the eve of the third millennium. Waking up in thirty-first-century New New York City, Fry must come of age as a delivery boy for his only living relative, the ancient Professor Farnsworth, who operates a package delivery company staffed by a one-eyed, sexy alien named Leela, an alcoholic robot named Bender, and a lobsterlike Jewish stereotype (a “spacejew,” one producer called him) named Dr. Zoidberg.
Although it did not premiere until 1999, Futurama was, perhaps more than any other series, direct evidence of The Simpsons’ progenitive abilities. “The way I sold the show was by saying. ‘This is The Simpsons in the future,’ and dollar signs danced in front of their eyes,” said Groening.6 He spent five years researching science fiction before pitching the show with Cohen. To his and Cohen’s credit, it is truly funny. Placing the sitcom a thousand years in the future removed many of the restraints on thing like physics and cartoonish exaggeration that Groening had placed on The Simpsons. Futurama both embraces and parodies its genre, bringing with it the irony, intelligence, and metatheatrical playfulness we’d become accustomed to on The Simpsons. Not surprisingly, even though this was Groening’s baby, writers Ken Keeler, J. Stewart Burns, Eric Kaplan, Bill Odenkirk, and others carried much of the load, a burden that nearly overwhelmed Futurama’s showrunner, David S. Cohen.
BRENT FORRESTER: There are two kinds of comedy people. There are the people who came in because they’re kind of like class-clown people, performer energy. And then there’re the people who are just very, very intelligent and, frequently, very socially recessive. And The Simpsons was mostly the latter. I think, virtually entirely the latter.
David Cohen was no exception there. I mean, he’s just a brilliant guy, but when he came to do Futurama, he was suddenly sort of thrown to the lions, in terms of him having to deal with the social crises: Whom do you hire? How much did you hire them for? And executive notes and everything.
And, at a certain point in creating Futurama, Dave had a bit of what seemed to me to be a breakdown. ’Cause I talked to him, “Dave, how’s the show going?” And he said, “Oh, I just told them it wasn’t fun anymore. I wanted to keep working, but it just wasn’t fun anymore.”
He really sounded like he’d been sedated or something. I told him he couldn’t just turn his back on this. But, apparently, they got to him; they broke him. And he was out. And so then they came back to him and figured out a way he could do the show. I don’t know what psychological compromise they made. But when he came back, he came back as David X. Cohen. I mean, he always uses that X now. And I always think of it like he had a mental breakdown and came back as David X. Cohen. I love that aspect of it.
Futurama lasted four seasons until Fox stopped production in 2003. While critical reception had been varied, but generally strong, it was never really given a fair shot by the network. Fox debuted the series on Sunday nights but then moved it to Tuesdays, while they had allowed King of the Hill to build a steady audience on Sunday nights, piggybacking on The Simpsons week after week at 8:30, to Groening’s chagrin. He lamented to the press how the suits at the network were messing up his show. If he expected the independence and freedom allotted to Jim Brooks with The Simpsons, he was misguided. “There’s an atmosphere of giving notes, of interference,” Matt complained. “When they tried to give me notes on Futurama, I just said, ‘No, we’re going to do this just the way we did The Simpsons.’ And they said, ‘Well, we don’t do business that way anymore.’”7 Throughout its life, the show was jostled around the schedule, often preempted by sports events, making it hard for it to garner a steady fan base. Yet, much like Family Guy, it has had such a lively afterlife on DVD and on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim that it was revived with an additional four Futurama films, which have gone straight to DVD in addition to being played on Comedy Central. While the films have been disappointing and without much humor, Comedy Central officially revived the laughter in 2009 by purchasing tweny-six episodes of the series for its 2010 season, though the good news for fans was stilted by reports that there were disputes with the original cast, with Fox putting out a casting call for new voices. On July 31, 2009, The Toronto Star reported that, after tense negotiations, the full cast had signed on for the new episodes.8
The Simpsons people must be chuffed that their series inspired others. After all, in television, as in life, imitation is the highest form of flattery, that is, next to an Emmy Award. The Simpsons has fought a long, disappointing battle with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; despite nine Emmys for best animated program, twelve for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance, and two for Outstanding Music and Lyrics, The Simpsons has never won the coveted Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. For the first few years, Brooks and the producers couldn’t even get The Simpsons considered in the category—the Emmys would nominate only cartoons for Outstanding Animated Series. “It is a light thrill to beat Garfield every year, but it’s getting a little old,” said Groening.9 “It’s starting to feel personal,” griped James L. Brooks.10 The academy’s argument sounded trifling: allowing The Simpsons to compete against Cheers and Roseanne would set too dangerous a precedent, and could negatively influence the animation awards structure.11
Finally, in 1993, the academy relented and changed the rules. The producers submitted “A Streetcar Named Marge” and “Mr. Plow.” The show wasn’t even nominated. In 1994 they were snubbed once again.j After that, The Simpsons went back to battling it out with Duckman and The Flinstones.k
This isn’t to say The Simpsons hasn’t received its fair share of accolades. It’s one of few sitcoms, and the only animated series, to ever win a Peabody A
ward. It is the longest-running sitcom of all time, and in 2009 it surpassed Gunsmoke as the longest-running entertainment program of all time. The Simpsons has countless Annie Awards (twenty-six, actually), five Writers Guild Awards, and there is a Simpsons star on the Walk of Fame. Time editor Bruce Handy explained their magazine’s decision to name Bart of one of the one hundred most influential people of the past century and in so doing summed up just how The Simpsons managed to transcend its faddish beginnings and become something lasting and meaningful.
“You can’t talk about twentieth-century art without taking into account pop culture. It’s almost what defines the century. I think when people a hundred years from now want to get a sense of what the nineties were like they could do a lot worse than watch The Simpsons. It will still be being viewed and enjoyed when a lot of contemporary, serious literature is forgotten. Does anyone think, I don’t know, David Foster Wallace is a better satirist than Matt Groening?”
Or Sam Simon? Or George Meyer? Or the people who actually wrote the scripts?
THIRTEEN
The Godfathers
In which the Catholic church scares small children … David Letterman nearly goes “Coconuts” … George Meyer gets published in Variety … and John Swartzwelder considers teaching O. J. Simpson the fundamentals of baseball.