The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  The crossover brouhaha had reverberations all throughout The Simpsons’ staff, especially in David Mirkin’s writing room.

  BOB KUSHELL: There was a big outcry from the writers about doing it. And people just didn’t feel like it was right or appropriate. There was a big discussion one evening, and we were all sitting around talking about the validity of doing a crossover episode. And as each individual writer weighed in, it was becoming increasingly evident to David that the writers did not want to do the show. And yet at the same time you could tell that David was feeling a lot of pressure to do the episode and it was probably because Jim Brooks was producing The Critic.

  BRENT FORRESTER: The higher-level guys [senior writers who were against doing the episode] were arguing with Mirkin, and Mirkin didn’t have the clout and/or confidence to fight with them. Bob Kushell was the lowest guy on the totem pole, and Bob mistakenly also threw in some criticism to Mirkin. And Mirkin decided to take it out on Bob.

  BOB KUSHELL: Dan McGrath, one of the writers, was sitting behind me and said something about not thinking it was good for the show. You could just see David about to burst. And of course I had to throw my hat in the ring. I remember I raised my hand, and I said, “You know, David, I just think it hurts the integrity of The Simpsons.” He looked over his desk, and I happened to be sitting on the floor at the time, I couldn’t have been any lower to the ground. And he said, “That’s why you’re an asshole.”

  And I said, “What?”

  Remember, I’m only twenty-five years old. I’m on my dream show and I’m—you know—I’m a kid! And here my executive producer is calling me an asshole. The room kind of just stopped. I was thinking, Did this guy just call me an asshole in front of all of these guys?

  And he goes, “I said that’s why you’re an asshole.”

  I said, “Did you just call me an asshole?”

  And he said, “Yeah.”

  I stood up and I gave some crazy guy-in-a-courtroom speech—that had to have been written by Aaron Sorkin—about how you don’t call anyone, from the lowest PA on the show to your second in command, an asshole, at any time. It was eloquent and articulate (or I remember it being), and I just let him have it. I laid him low, and I walked out of the room.

  As I’m walking out of the room I heard, you know, the room was obviously dead silent, and I heard him yell, “Come on, Bob, you know we talk that way in this room.”

  We never talked that way in this room. That was never a way we talked to anybody; it was not that type of room. I love rooms where you can call people assholes, but this was not a room where you can call people an asshole, and if you did, it was serious.

  BRENT FORRESTER: Bob then made the mistake of acting as if Mirkin and he were on the same level socially, or something, and said, “What you said was really rude and hurtful to me, and I demand an apology.” Mirkin just said, “Well, I’m not gonna give you an apology.”

  Now Bob was kind of over his head: What could he do? So he stormed out of the room, and he said, “I will not ever come back until I get an apology.” You know, again he hadn’t thought it through. [Laughs]

  BOB KUSHELL: And I turned back on my heels, walked back into the room, and just did it again. I made another speech that was articulate and well delivered—I’ve never been able to reconstruct since, but I remember it was very good.

  And I left the room. I had just bought a house, and I remember thinking, There goes that, and there goes everything. I was walking back to my office, and I started crying, and I called my wife, and I said, “Karen, either I just fucked up so bad, or I am the hero of the staff.” Because I think that everybody had wished or wanted to tell David Mirkin off at one point or another. And she said, “Bob, I support you, whatever you did; I believe that you had to do it, and I support you.”

  I remember just hanging up the phone and sitting in my office all alone and crying. Just like, This is it. I’m off the show.

  And one by one, the writers I guess had snuck out of the room and called me, or came up to my office to see how I was, and everybody thanked me for what I had done. And I remember very vividly that Bill and Josh, who had not been in the room, called me when they heard about it and said that I was their hero.

  BRENT FORRESTER: And, you know, like a few hours later, he just kind of slunk back in and went back to his job, and kept working there for a year or so.

  BOB KUSHELL: At the same time, you know, of course I was completely fucked because my contract was a pay or play for the rest of the season and my contract wasn’t up until December and this was February. I had to persevere on that staff under David Mirkin for the next eleven months after what happened, and it was brutal.

  I never got another script, and it was very difficult, and it would have been much better just to have been fired and been able to move on. But my boss was somebody who I don’t think could ever get over me having done what I did.

  Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, the writing team that took over next, are described as true Simpsons fans. Mirkin had been deferential to the pair, allowing them autonomy with their scripts and rewrites not granted to others. When they took over, they tried to bring the show back to its roots as a family sitcom, digging deeper into the characters, but also taking it in wild new directions, further exploring the world of Springfield with episodes like “22 Short Films About Springfield” and “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.” Bill and Josh were in paradise. For them, it was like they were back in college, hanging out, screwing around, and making each other laugh. Their style produced the last great Simpsons seasons, but the clubby atmosphere could rub some of the writers the wrong way. “It was almost like a fraternity. It’s like they didn’t seem to want to go home. And that’s sort of a common thing in a lot of showrunners—they use their work to avoid whatever situation was happening,” one writer told me. “Showrunners didn’t usually have families, they didn’t have girlfriends. There wasn’t any reason to go home.”

  BRENT FORRESTER: The kind of chutzpah and confidence that a stand-up comedian has, you’ll find the opposite of that in writers. The writers pride themselves on their tear-myself-apart introspection. That’s more the Bill and Josh way. That’s what you’ll find with people who come at it from writing. And people who come at it from comedy—Judd Apatow, Dave Mirkin—they’re bluffing, at first, when they say, “This is the greatest idea of all time.” But they just stick to it until, finally, it does become very good. And that’s the way comedians work.

  COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: The reason I love Bill and Josh is that they represented a great balance. They worshipped Sam’s writing, Vitti’s, Meyer’s. But they also inherited The Simpsons from Mirkin, where stuff was more jokey, so there’d be a lot of jokes. But Bill and Josh went back to really wrapping each episode into a story that was cohesive and made sense.

  BRENT FORRESTER: These guys were the ultimate fans of The Simpsons in a way that Mirkin was not. I mean, these were the guys who had watched every episode, knew every detail of the show, and believed that the show was the most important thing in America. And now they were running it. You could just feel that vibe from them, that they were the caretakers of something incredibly valuable and important.

  JENNIFER CRITTENDEN: They ran the room differently. We went back to what had been the rewrite room. They deliberated a lot more, and I think the tone of the show changed a little bit, but those were all really good seasons. It was different because they would discuss things between the two of them, whereas Mirkin made his decisions on his own.

  Part of being a great showrunner is managing the time. And there’s something to be said for making quick decisions. It’s important to keep the morale of the staff high and wanting to be there as long as you need to be there, as opposed to dragging their feet and not wanting to be there at all.

  BRENT FORRESTER: Anytime there was anything written anywhere in a script, it had to be a joke. And it took a lot of time to do that kind of stuff. And sometimes it would get hallucinatory. I remember
in the show with Sideshow Bob at the air show; there’s a character in that episode—it was a general.

  So we needed a name for this general. And it’s gotta be a funny name, I guess. And it’s like eleven at night; it’s twelve at night; it’s one in the morning! And it’s like, “How fucking long are we gonna sit here, trying to think of a funny name for this guy?” And we never came up with something that was satisfying to Bill and Josh.

  Finally, somebody came up with a name—Colonel Hap Hapablap. And everyone laughed, but it was kind of a laugh of like, “This is my life? My fucking life is like grains of sand in the hourglass to arrive at Colonel Hap Hapablap?” And we were just all kind of laughing at the waste of our lives, I think.

  But Bill and Josh heard the laughter, and it was contagious. And they were like, “Hap Hapablap! Colonel Hap Hapablap!” They just kept saying it, and it just kept getting funnier and funnier. And that’s the name of that guy in the show: Colonel Hap Hapablap.

  RICHARD APPEL: One night there were five of us working and it was midnight and I was exhausted and I didn’t know when we were going to finish this script. And Bill excused himself and ten minutes later he came back having taken a shower in the bathroom off his office. And I thought, That’s a bad sign, when the showrunner takes a shower at midnight to feel refreshed. And Bill looked around and he said, “Isn’t this great? Haven’t we re-created the entire sensibility of what it was like to be in college around this table?” And I looked at him, and I love Bill, and said, “Yes, except I’ve gone on to get married and have a baby, both of whom I’d like to see before sunrise.”

  BRENT FORRESTER: Bill and Josh really were like, We’ll sacrifice all the hours of our life to do this. And the thing that distinguished The Simpsons from everything else on TV is the density of the jokes. I mean, I used to count and say, “Wow! Fucking twelve good jokes on a page?” There’re barely twelve lines on the page, you know? But if you kept going back, you could go, “Oh, you know what? That straight line could be a joke.” And it got to the point where people would try to get two jokes within a joke.

  Bill Oakley finally coined one of the great phrases ever in comedy—I use it all the time: “One joke per joke, please.” And that was an indication of the way people would try to add an extra joke into the punch line of a joke. It actually ruins it if you go that far. But it would get rococo on The Simpsons.

  After Bill and Josh, Mike Scully took over for Season 9. Although it’s difficult to determine how much blame can be ascribed to Scully personally, he presided over the first seasons after the golden age of the Simpsons had passed. Scully’s episodes excel when compared to what The Simpsons airs nowadays, but he was the man at the helm when the ship turned toward the iceberg.

  RUPERT MURDOCH, chairman, News Corp: The show has 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.

  LARRY DOYLE, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1998–2001): Mike Scully was running the show all four years I was there. From a boss point of view he was a great showrunner. They had just come off of several years where the showrunners had acted like most TV showrunners: they kind of didn’t get around to doing anything until ten o’clock at night. But with Mike it was really important that we kept decent hours and we went home probably by eight o’clock almost every night. Now that seems late to someone who works in a regular office, but to people in TV that’s kind of unthinkable.

  DONICK CARY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1996–99): Mike Scully is a guy with five daughters and, you know, occasionally liked to get home and see his family. With Mike, you came in and started working— went through the script, took an hour for lunch, and then came back and started working again. It was much more focused.

  TOM MARTIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1999–2001): He is quite possibly the best boss I’ve ever worked for. I mean, it isn’t just that he is a great guy—he is a great manager of people. He had a natural intellect that wasn’t institutionalized, but he also had a natural way with people, and he had trust in you. So he would take people and assign them things, and not [hover over their] shoulders, and assume that they would do a good job, and then they would do a good job.

  BRENT FORRESTER: My feeling always was that Scully sat there, working under Bill and Josh, thinking, We don’t have to be here this many hours. You know, the show will still be really good without this level of sacrifice.

  TOM MARTIN: I’ll tell ya, when someone’s running a room he tends to listen to two or three people, and it’s the people he’s on the same wavelength with, and then he kind of filters other people out. Scully had this ability to listen to eight or nine or ten people. If somebody said something, he would at least make eye contact to acknowledge that he heard rather than make the person wonder. He was able to communicate with everybody and keep them working. Everybody went after every loose ball.

  LARRY DOYLE: I remember that we were there when the Internet decided the show had gone down the toilet, so Mike Scully became kind of a focus for that. I’d like to point out, however, that now, many years later, many of the episodes that were apparently the end of the show are now considered golden classics and are used to illustrate how shitty the show is now.

  JACOB BURCH, administrator, NoHomers.net: The notion that the show had been getting worse and worse and worse had been around since the fifth or sixth season. Then the consensus was Season 9, but now I see people naming 10, the idea being that Season 9 was unjustly criticized, though still not great.

  TOM MARTIN: There’re a lot of complaints on the Internet about Scully and I never quite understood why. He handled it so well. I think it bothered him, and it still bothers him, but he managed to not get worked up over it and not take it personally. He talks about it, but shockingly it doesn’t seem to really bother him as much as it would a normal person.

  LARRY DOYLE: One of the things that happened is that Bill and Josh seemed to have gotten bored with the Simpsons, so a lot of the episodes from their last two years focused on secondary characters. I think they were really into trying to deepen and explore the world of Springfield—they did the “22 Short Films About Springfield” episode. And Mike wanted to bring it back to the family.

  BILL OAKLEY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): I haven’t been in the writers room since the ninth season; that’s when they put the conference table in. Everything is very different now. It’s not the way you remember it. I like to preserve my memories the way they were.

  In 2001, Al Jean once again took the reins and has not relinquished them to this day. Until Scully, showrunners took the helm for twoyear stints. While Scully’s four-year tenure as showrunner was seen as too long, Jean’s Mugabe-like stewardship is nearing a decade. Critically speaking, Scully’s last seasons were the worst the show had seen. There was a hope that Jean would bring the show back to some recognizable level of quality. Despite some bright spots here and there (“The President Wore Pearls,” for example), he has largely failed. Trying to explain the decline of the show’s quality over the past nine seasons, current and former staffers tend to use two words more than any others: Al Jean.

  The years Jean and Reiss ran the show together were some of the best, but that was a decade earlier, with a single room of less than a dozen über-talented writers (and Reiss’s contribution should not be underestimated). When Jean returned to run The Simpsons, the sentiment among the writers, according to one of them, was, “We’ll work around it. There’re so many writers. I think there was a lot of feeling that the show would be the same as it ever was.”

  As for the veterans of the room, most of the ex-Simpsons staffers I spoke to no longer watch the show. Other than being amazed at its longevity, none of them had much positive to say about it. Many give Jean and the other producers credit for keeping up any level of quality after this many years, which points to Jean’s skill as an organizer. Coordinating The Simpsons takes a phenomenal amount of organization. As one Simpsons staffer put it, it is a twenty-ho
ur-a-day job, twelve months of the year (because the seasons overlap). There are forty steps per episode for a showrunner to manage, and halfway through the year you’re on step sixteen of the first show, step twelve of the second show, and meanwhile, you have the shows you wrote last year coming back from Korea, which will be on step thirty, etc. They have massive charts to keep everything organized. You need to be a genius like Al Jean to keep it all straight. Another staffer asserted that this was the key reason Brooks has kept Jean at the helm for so long—the shows might not be amazing, but Jean makes the trains run on time.

  TOM MARTIN: I remember one time we were trying to figure out the national debt and what each of us owed. It was printed on the cover of the Los Angeles Times, “National debt is” whatever dollars. And then I said, “Let’s say there’s 250 million people,” and I go, “Hey, Al, let’s say it was like 55 trillion divided by 250 million?” And he did it in one second. He literally did this complicated mathematical equation that involved 10 or 12 places, digits, and he solved it in his head faster than a calculator. Yeah, he’s a freak.