by John Ortved
There are certain actors, like Harry Shearer, whom you basically can’t do that with. Dan Castelanetta comes from improv. He’s always trying to think of some other way to do it. He gets caught up in trying to get as much as he can. He’s not only okay with doing so many takes, he’ll get into a run where he’ll say, “Let me do it this way. Let me try it this way.” But Harry, on the other hand, will give you three and then he’ll just stop. [Other sources dispute that Shearer set any kind of limit on how many takes he would do.]
DAVID RICHARDSON, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–94): Well, they were brilliant. You gotta realize that these guys—I think I came in year three or four—had done most of the heavy lifting in years one, two, and three, and they knew the characters really well. Al and Mike were just getting ready to start The Critic. And so we had them only for a day or two a week, depending on their schedules. And they could just come in on any script and it was second nature to them, like breathing to them.
WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): 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’d experienced, or seen other people experience, had been exploited. And to see the show go on is mind-boggling to me.
For the fifth season, Brooks and Sakai brought in an outsider to run the show. David Mirkin originally came from stand-up, though he’d written for Three’s Company and directed episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, and created shows for Fox, like the esoteric Get a Life, with Chris Elliott, and a nutty sketch comedy show, The Edge. David Mirkin tends to be a popular topic among Simpsons fans, because it was under him that the show began to move from recognizable territory to new terrain. The Simpsons had prided itself on how “real” the family was, despite their status as animated characters, and yet under Mirkin, Homer went to space, his barbershop quartet won a Grammy, and Bart became a celebrity.
CHARLEEN EASTON, assistant to David Mirkin: He [came from] The Edge [featuring Jennifer Aniston, Wayne Knight, and Tom Kenny—the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants], which was a Fox show. So he was actually probably just the right guy [to take over The Simpsons] because he had the right sensibility.
He was a decent guy. I’ve been in this business a long time now and I just think he was a decent guy. James Taylor was his idol.
After the fourth season, many of the classic Simpsons writers left, including Wallace Wolodarsky, Jay Kogen, and Conan O’Brien (Al Jean and Mike Reiss were busy with The Critic), and new writers were brought in to replace them.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: With David Mirkin, it was a different kind of comedy. That’s when Homer sort of became stupid. The writers [Mirkin] brought in started to move away from Bart, and the show became very Homercentric, because that’s who they could write for. And that, of course, pisses actors off—it makes some actors happy and other actors bummed out. Because before it was sort of a family comedy and there was so much stuff with Julie [Kavner—Marge] and Nancy [Cartwright—Bart] and Yeardley [Smith—Lisa]. Once the shows start becoming all about Homer, the more secondary characters—those people Homer is around away from home—become central. So there’s more Harry Shearer, more Hank Azaria. It was a weird dynamic, because they just didn’t know how to write for characters like Lisa.
RICHARD APPEL, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): David Mirkin was receptive to having people from other walks of life on the writing staff. He himself had an engineering background, and I had been a prosecutor. He also hired my friend Dave Cohen, who had a degree in applied math.
BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: There were two writers, simultaneously, on the show when I was there who had been published in The Journal of Applied Mathematics: Dave Cohen and Ken Keeler. I thought Dave Cohen was the smartest guy I had ever met. His response was, “Yeah? You’ve never met Ken Keeler.”
One time, Dave was telling us how he’d just had an article published in The Journal of Applied Mathematics. And I thought, Holy shit! And then Ken Keeler says, “What do they pay these days? Is it still, you know, $4 a word or something?”
BOB KUSHELL, writer, The Simpsons (1994–95): The group of guys who were writing on The Simpsons at that time coalesced under the banner of being Harvard guys. It’s not that it was a closed shop, it’s just that they all came from a shared interpersonal experience that I didn’t. I was a geeky drama major from UC-Irvine who was a playwright and had my own sketch comedy shows in Los Angeles. I was a performer in a lot of ways.
These guys were very different than me, you know? They were literally mathematicians and scientists, and they were brains. Far smarter than I am, far smarter than I ever will be. I was young. So it was even more intimidating. Ultimately, I think they looked at me more as a specimen in a jar that they had to figure out.
I felt like a real fish out of water. David Mirkin, even though I don’t know if he’d ever admit it, was maybe feeling the same thing. The pressure was definitely palpable.
BRENT FORRESTER: Mirkin was not a Harvard guy—he came from pure comedy. He is an incredibly talented guy. But he came from stand-up.
CHARLEEN EASTON: I was the one who was in charge of getting all the writers their offices and stuff, so they would confide in me and they would complain to me (about staying long hours, about the direction of the show, that David wasn’t the right guy, and that they knew more, that sort of thing). So I did feel like he was an outsider. And he also made certain creative choices that the writers weren’t happy with. He was very into heads exploding and stuff like that. Everybody just felt, at first, like he was taking the show in the wrong direction. And then sometimes Matt Groening would want to come sit in the room too—he didn’t really offer very much writing-wise, but it added a little bit of tension. David wasn’t happy about that. It was kind of like, “Oh, well, let’s tolerate him, he’s the guy who got lucky basically, hit the lottery.”
We could never understand why Matt got so much credit for the show. One of the reasons why we were told was that he was a good front man for The Simpsons. He was the guy who would go out and represent The Simpsons, and they needed that.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: The mentality of the show changed so much. In the early days, the people in the crew had nicer cars than the writers. I think the nicest car a writer had was a Cressida or something. Then David Mirkin came in, and Mirkin drove an NSX. It’s so weird to talk about cars, but it really was evidence of the show changing. Mirkin drove an NSX and all of a sudden you started seeing Beamers and Mercedeses.
And it stopped being 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.”
HANK AZARIA, voice actor, The Simpsons: I love Al, Mike, and David Mirkin as showrunners. I like different things about each of them. David Mirkin, he was really good at combining a lot of elements of the show. Clever is the word that comes to mind with David. I think a lot of the cleverest shows were under David’s reign. Specifically, “Deep Space Homer.” That’s a classic Mirkin show—he’ll take a broad idea but make it so specifically funny. Homer literally went into outer space, but David was so aware that the idea was outrageously over the line that he was able to make shows like that work really, really well.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: We’d been doing twenty-four episodes a year, and I think it was Mirkin who said, “This is crazy, we’re doing twenty-one.” We always hit this point where scripts would just suck. You’d hit a point where people are just burnt, because they’re working five or six days a week, like fifteen-hour days. After you get past those initial bunch of scripts, you start getting the second and third ideas from people, and they’re not as fleshed out, but there’s no time between the first draft and the table read to fix it.
CHARLEEN EASTON: Mirkin just had balls. I remember one time, on Get a Life, we
were working on a show with monkeys that had to roller-skate around Chris. And we were there till like three in the morning, because the monkey wasn’t able to roller-skate and Fox was ready to shut us down. He just didn’t care. I mean, they were threatening to fire him. He didn’t care, he wanted it the way he wanted it. I just thought that he had incredible balls.
BRENT FORRESTER: Mirkin really knew how to game the system. He was a huge fan of James Taylor and Paul McCartney, and he got them both in the show as guest voices. And with the Paul McCartney one, he managed to convince Fox that Paul McCartney could be recorded only with the showrunner present. Now, why this would be the case, when multiple actors had recorded remotely, is inexplicable. But they flew him on the Concorde, to England, to meet and hang out with Paul McCartney for two days, which was Mirkin’s fantasy. He had the mojo to pull that off—so God bless him, man.
CHARLEEN EASTON: There’s no way he would go against Jim Brooks or Richard Sakai. They were two people he would never cross.
RICHARD APPEL: David Mirkin delegated a lot less. When I worked there with Bill and Josh, who ran the show after David, and then Mike Scully after that, there were always at least two rooms going. With Bill and Josh, one of them would usually be in a room. They’re a very evenly matched partnership, and you don’t think, I’m stuck with Bill, I wish I had Josh, or vice versa. Mike Scully would just delegate to me or to someone else to run another room. And so you had a sense of two rooms going. David didn’t do that. He liked to have one big room. And I think the shows were great under him.
JENNIFER CRITTENDEN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1995–96): The thing that really stuck me was that there were just so many people. There were so many writers on staff it was crazy. It was a time when there were a lot of consultants, too, so it was like George Meyer, Jace Richdale, Al Jean, Mike Reiss—Mike and Al would consult—Oakley and Weinstein would usually work in their offices but come in occasionally. It was a giant group of people. And we worked in Mirkin’s office, which was a little odd, but he had a giant office and it was just couches and chairs all around the perimeter of the room. There could be up to eighteen people in the room.
CHARLEEN EASTON: We would come in the morning and there would be a lot of sitting around because David would read the trades and there was a lot of wasted time during the day. He was really a night owl. So a lot of times we wouldn’t even get started on the rewrites until like four or five. We didn’t necessarily have to work those crazy hours, but I think David liked to have fun writers and people around him. He liked to be the center of attention. He was always very fair and very generous, but he worked a lot of hours. I think people thought of him as a narcissist.
BOB KUSHELL: David Mirkin sat in front of a room, at a large desk. Visualizing it now, it felt like we were all a little below him. We were all sunken down into these couches and deep chairs and he was kind of the professor behind a desk who was leading the group. And there was an intimidation factor, whether it was intentional or not. I think it was probably unintentional. But there was an intimidation factor and it depressed me. I found the student factor debilitating.
BRENT FORRESTER: I wouldn’t say Mirkin’s style was “professorial,” because that indicates an intellectualism that Mirkin did not bring to the show. It was more that he was a little bit dictatorial. I mean, he really was not one of the guys. He was much more top-down: I am the authority here. But, you know, that actually worked to our advantage in some ways.
There was a giant debate, when I was there—Seasons 5, 6, and 7—almost war in terms of the passions of the people on the show. Some people felt that what was so valuable about The Simpsons was that its characters and emotions were realistic, and that David Mirkin was taking it in a direction that was too surreal. And I think Mirkin would agree that he was pushing it more in the direction of pure comedy. I think he really didn’t enjoy the human-emotion element of The Simpsons, and he drove the show away from there if he could.
I think what happens is, if you’re watching a show in which you get something real, it tricks you into being more sensitive and more sensitized. So you couldn’t have one character bash another character’s head into the ground. In the Mirkin era, you could do that. I specifically remember when Homer has to be Krusty for a while [Homer goes to clown college and begins to fill in for Krusty], there’s a scene in which he bashes someone’s head on the ground. Homer beats [the Krusty Burger’s version of the Hamburglar] to death, crushing his head on the pavement. And there’s the memorable line, “Stop, it! He’s already dead!” [Laughs] Which was considered the side-busting line.
And I remember thinking, That’s never happened on The Simpsons before, a man’s head being bashed in. But that was kind of the Mirkin sensibility in a nutshell. That was just the most hilarious thing to Mirkin.
Disagreements over these lurches away from the “reality” of Springfield, so carefully constructed, eventually came to a head when the writers were asked to write a crossover episode with Al Jean and Mike Reiss’s The Critic, which, having failed on ABC, had been resuscitated by Fox, placing it behind the Simpsons in the 8:30 Sunday night spot. The Simpsons would be visited by Jay Sherman, who played the title role in the other Fox sitcom, also produced by James L. Brooks.
BRENT FORRESTER: I remember it being controversial. We had a really high standard on The Simpsons for not doing things that we felt had already been done in comedy. And unfortunately, the crossover episode began with a set piece that was a parody of the Gregorian monks—who had a popular CD at that time—which involved “Rappin’ Rabbis.” Now, to parody rapping was considered hacky, and to throw rabbis into comedy was considered hacky. So to open up the crossover show with rappin’ rabbis was like [indignant voice], “In the history of comedy of The Simpsons, how dare we, in the crossover, do something so mathematically hacky?” That kind of debate was getting people’s ire up.
You can’t underestimate how fired up people can get over comedy—which might seem, to the outside world, the very definition of trivial.
Some of the more veteran writers had a problem with The Critic incursion, but Matt Groening was dead set against it and made his feelings publicly known. Days before the episode went to air, he removed his name from the episode’s credits and made his grievances known to the press. “I am furious with Matt,” Jim Brooks told the Los Angeles Times’s Judy Brennan. “He’s been going to everybody who wears a suit at Fox and complaining about this. When he voiced his concerns about how to draw The Critic into The Simpsons’ universe he was right and we agreed to his changes. Certainly he’s allowed his opinion, but airing this publicly in the press is going too far … This has been my worst fear … that the Matt we know privately is going public … He is a gifted, adorable, cuddly ingrate. But his behavior right now is rotten. And it’s not pretty when a rich man acts like this.”1
Groening responded: “The two reasons I am opposed to this crossover is that I don’t want any credit or blame for The Critic and I feel this violates the Simpsons’ universe.”
Brennan noted that a Simpsons episode takes six months to complete. Why was Groening voicing his complaints only days before the show aired? Groening claimed that he hoped Brooks would have a last-minute change of heart (doubtful, considering how much time, money, and effort go into the production and scheduling of an individual episode). Groening’s other explanation for his timing—that pieces were appearing in which he was erroneously credited as The Critic’s creator—rings equally hollow. I found a single such claim, in a Buffalo newspaper. If there were others, they were not from major newspapers or media outlets. It seemed that Groening’s real reason for going to the press was that he had simply not gotten his way; he was having a tantrum.
“My concern is for my professional ethics and reputation,” Groening said. “The problem for me is this: In the mind of the public, I created The Critic and produced it, or both.” (Far be it from Matt Groening to take credit for the work of others—an irony Jim Brooks seemed to appreciat
e.) “For years, Al and Mike were two guys who worked their hearts out on this show, staying up until four in the morning to get it right,” Brooks said. “The point is, Matt’s name has been on Mike’s and Al’s scripts and he has taken plenty of credit for a lot of their great work. In fact, he is the direct beneficiary of their work. The Critic is their shot and he should be giving them his support.”2
Groening did not directly trash The Critic, but he didn’t have anything nice to say about it either. “Cartoons have their own style,” he said, “and I really have nothing to say about The Critic.”3 Reiss and Jean were upset but took Groening’s bleating in stride, arguing that the cross promotion was minimal, and that The Simpsons episode was a good one (to their credit—it is). After all, the episode was already going to air; what sense did it make for them to add anything to the melee? The Critic lasted only ten episodes and then died for good, but Jim Brooks and Matt Groening had reached a crisis point in their relationship—which was never that close to begin with—that some say has never been repaired. Rupert Murdoch told me, “Those two can’t stand each other.”