In the 90’s, there were few more proactive and totally outrageous paradigms on TV than “The Simpsons.”
As the old saying goes, it takes two to lie — one to lie and one to listen. But as it turns out, it takes many more, some luck, and timing to make the golden age of America’s favorite cartoon family.
Author Alan Siegel of The Ringer traces those heady years in the writers’ room and beyond in his new book “Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How The Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television — And America — Forever.”
And since KJAZZ only broadcasts for 23 feet, Alan Siegel is here with us instead.
What do you consider the golden era of a show that's heading toward its 37 season right now?
I think you could safely say the first eight to nine seasons, if you want to get a little more sort of micro-specific about it, I think you could go like three to eight, I think, is like a very, very concentrated, great portion of the show.
So you started looking at all the different ingredients that went into making ‘The Simpsons.’ And this was originally a series of interstitial shorts on the ‘Tracey Ullman Show.’ The idea that it would ever run for this long was completely unfathomable. So take us back to the beginning. Who was there on the ground floor with the show, and how did it actually get the green light?
So it was originally created by Matt Groening, who is a very popular indie cartoonist in LA in the 80s, and he had a strip called ‘Life in Hell,’ and it had a cult following, and TV networks tried to get him to create a show for a long time, but it didn't really come together until Fox came along in the mid- to late-80s. And at the time, they called Fox the coat hanger network, which meant that you needed a coat hanger as an antenna to get it, which these references date me for sure. And, Groening didn't really want to give up the rights to his comic strip. And so what he did, basically, legend has it, he just scribbled some characters on a napkin and presented it to Fox and James L. Brooks, one of the executive producers. And they were like, yeah, we can do this. We can make a series of shorts. So those became these sort of minute, minute and a half clips that would appear in the middle of the ‘Tracey Ullman Show.’ And you know, she was a really funny British comedian who did a bunch of characters. And the thing that kept happening was these shorts were shown to the live audience, sort of in between the sketches, and those got bigger laughs than Tracey Ullman, so there was sort of that feeling that there was something special there. And again, there was talk of a full TV show, but adult animation didn't really exist at the time, since ‘The Flintstones,’ at least, in the 60s. But, you know, with a lot of pushing, Groening and James L. Brooks got Fox to greenlight 13 episodes, and that was basically the start of it. And there was a time when it was just going to be a holiday special, and that's it, but James L. Brooks and knew that was risky, right? So just, just doing one episode wasn't going to cut it, and they got the full season order.
Now, what about the role that Sam Simon played? Because he was precocious, you know, kind of ahead of his time TV figure, and they brought him into the mix. How did he help to conceive of what the show became?
So Sam Simon was kind of like a wunderkind at the time. He had run the show ‘Taxi’ in his 20s. He had worked in animation even in the 70s. And I would ask the writers like, what was it about Simon that made him great, and people just said he just was a savant when it came to TV. He knew how to make really good TV, so he ran the show in the first couple years of ‘The Simpsons.’ And what sort of made him great was he took risks. He just assumed the show was going to be canceled. So he told all his writers, like, we want every episode to be different than the last one. And that really produced things that no one had ever seen before.
The writers’ room of that era is mythologized now. I mean, your book is partly about the famous Conan O'Brien stint on ‘The Simpsons’ and the Monorail episode, but as you write in the book, it was anything but a romantic place to work. It was very shabby and the hours were terrible. So what was the scene actually like on the Fox lot for people putting the show together?
In those days, it was like where the Simpsons writers’ room was, was like in this building called the Simpsons motel. It was just this sort of squat, two-floor building, and the writers’ room was like a dorm room or a frat house, just a bunch of sort of guys sitting around, stained carpet, smelled like smoke, because back then you could smoke, you know, in the room. And it was gnarly. And I remember talking to Conan O'Brien, who, again, spent a couple years at the show, about it, and he said that people always ask him, like, take me back to this magic moment where you created something really funny. And his answer was, always, look, it's not romantic. It's a lot of fried food. It's writing longhand on paper. It's driving your Ford Taurus into the lot on Saturdays. It's eating Chinese food, going to the vending machine, and like, the glory of it comes later, and I think, that's what people should know. Like, it's not as romantic as it seems in hindsight.
It was not a diverse writing staff. How did that influence the tone and the voice of the show? Because obviously, you had all these geniuses, but there's some pictures in your book and it's a bunch of white guys.
Yeah, it was definitely reflective of what writers’ rooms were like at the time. The show was very progressive in a lot of ways. But again, these were largely Ivy League educated white males who had very similar perspectives. There are a million examples of what that led to. You had Apu, who was the Kwik-E-Mart owner, who is an Indian man who was voiced by a white guy. Marge doesn't have any friends. And the writers talk about that; like, it makes sense why the male characters are sort of emphasized at the beginning in that era. And it's neither an excuse, nor a commendation of this. It's just sort of the way it was.
You know, those early shows…with hindsight, there's some rocky ones. I don't think I ever, as an obsessive, like you I don't think I ever need to see ‘Babysitter Bandit’ again. That was the first one that they got back, right?
Yeah. So that episode was supposed to be the first episode. And if anybody hasn't seen it, because it was a long time ago, Penny Marshall was a guest star, and it's sort of a babysitter who turns out to be a criminal. Back then most of the animation was done in Korea, and it was a way to save money, and that, that was sort of something done in the industry at the time. And the episode came back and from Korea, and the jokes were off, the timing was off, the audio was off, the visuals were off. Just because the Korean studio, like, this was a brand new show, they didn't have the visual style down yet. And there was a moment there where people wondered, like, is this show going to be canceled? Are we done before it starts? But they kind of stuck through it, and the next episodes that came back were much better.
When it debuted, it was in an era of’ The Cosby Show’ and ‘Alf’ and ‘Married With Children.’ So how long did it take for ‘The Simpsons’ to become a hit that Fox could actually build around?
Honestly, it was almost immediate. By the second episode, which aired in January 1990, the reviews were great. Millions of people were watching. And it was maybe not instant, but by spring of 1990 or late winter 1990 it was a complete phenomenon, I think. In the first year of the show alone, they sold 15 million T-shirts, which is an absurd number. And if you go to any flea market or thrift shop or vintage store anywhere around the country, Simpsons gear is there, and it's sort of like, like fossils of like, what that phenomenon was.
It's the blue shirt Bart era, if you can get your hands on any. So what was your path to the show? I think we're around the same age, and I know I had a kind of similar story to you, which was, like, dying to see it.
Yeah. So I'm 42 so I think I was in first grade when the show came out, and I remember seeing kids with Bart T-shirts and being like, what is this? And I asked my parents about it, and they sort of agreed, like, oh, yeah, you can watch. But first they wanted to see it, so they watched an episode. And it was an early episode where Homer’s sort of caught dancing with a belly dancer. And it was pretty risqué for, you know, a 7-year-old. So my parents kind of were like, Nah, it's not for you like, we're gonna hold off on that. So I would say, like, within a month, though, they just gave in. It was way too much of a phenomenon. And that was sort of how I started watching, I think at the time, I probably understood about 20% of the jokes, but I definitely got into it.
You know, your book makes the point that it was so edgy at one point that it became a talking point in the presidential campaign, with George H.W. Bush running for re-election in 1992 hard to believe today, when it's just so widely embraced and part of the culture, but there was a time when it was really a controversial show. Why was that?
It's insane to think about now, just because the Simpsons has become an American institution. It's on U.S. postage stamps. But it was considered edgy because it was sort of like youth in revolt, right? So Bart was so anti-authority, and there had never been a character on TV, especially an animated character, and a young kid who, again, would talk back to his parents, who got a tattoo in the first episode. I think that scared a lot of adults, and I think that they sort of projected stuff onto the show that wasn't true. The genius of the show, especially at the beginning, was it was subversive, but that was sort of tempered by a very pro-family image, right? So, the family's intact. They go to church every week. They love each other. They struggle to make an ends meet. But that's a typical American family, and that's what the creators of the show wanted to get across.
How did the visual style set in? You know, you had showrunners over the years who had had particular visions and so on. And obviously, it's a cartoon, but it wanted to be based in reality, especially toward the beginning.
So how did the look of the show evolve from those Tracey Ullman, spiky haired colors to what we know today?
Yeah. Matt Groening’s style was very rudimentary, very rudimentary, but also iconic. He created characters, kind of like ‘Peanuts’ before him, where you could identify them by their silhouettes, right? So, you know, Bart's hair, Lisa's hair, Marge's hair, Homer's head. It was very iconic in a simple way. But early on, it did look pretty rough, but David Silverman is sort of credited with really massaging the look of the character to make them more human, like, almost cuter, in a way, than the the very first season, which looks, again, pretty rough. But by the second season, the look of the show that you know, it really rounds into shape and also the colors are something that's really like an underrated part of what makes the show. Primary colors, simple colors, like muted colors. It gives it a classic look.
So there was success, and that triumvirate we were talking about, they didn't always get along, necessarily, Matt Groening and Sam Simon. There were also, importantly, different eras of the early part of the show with who was in charge. So what did each different showrunner bring to the show that kind of changed it over those early years?
So Sam Simon ran the show for the first two years, and again, it was a complete breath of fresh air. He taught his writers basically to take risks, like, do things that no one else had done on TV. So in the first couple of years, you had the first Treehouse of Horror Halloween special, which was an anthology. It had an adaptation of ‘The Raven’ with James Earl Jones’ voice.
And Bart as the Raven.
Yeah. And that's very heady for a cartoon that sometimes kids watch, right? So after Simon was Al Jean and Mike Reiss, and they basically were disciples of Simon, and their episodes just got a little more complex. Like, for example, like there's an episode where Krusty the Clown learns, or rather, the audience learns Krusty’s father was a rabbi. So it's sort of this first side character backstory episode, and basically it shows that the world was growing, right? And so after Reiss and Jean you had David Mirkin, who was a live action director. So if you watch his episodes, they are sort of like, almost like watching like a live action movie. He did parodies of ‘Citizen Kane,’ and he did an episode where Homer went to space. So really, like the show is growing and growing and growing and becoming more ambitious, right? And then to round out, sort of, the Golden Age, you had Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who were the first Simpsons fans to become showrunners. They got to the show a little bit later, and their episodes, again, were just really creative and different. You had an episode where Homer eats a Guatemalan chili pepper and goes, like, on, basically on a modified acid trip.
Find your soulmate.
Yeah, Johnny Cash was the guest star of that episode. So that's sort of the progression, I would say, of the golden years of the show.
Since you mentioned Mike Reiss, let me ask you something. He's been on our show a few times, and he actually did one of his Simpsons presentations in Albany, and inevitably, was asked about all the references to upstate New York on ‘The Simpsons.’ And he kind of brushed it off and said, we do references to everything. But I don't entirely buy that. I think they do a lot of Albany and upstate New York — steamed hams — references. Do you have any insight on the obsession with upstate New York?
I think to them, maybe it sort of represents, like Main Street USA, or just, I don't want to say Podunk, because that's very insulting,
We can take it.
It just seems like a fun middle of the road place to reference.
Being voted handsomest boy in Albany, New York, or Albany ham scam. I mean, I think these are badges of honor, to be honest with you. If we're going to talk about writers, we have to talk about the reclusive John Swartzwelder, who has done one interview, I think, in his entire career, just a couple of years ago in The New Yorker. But he wrote the bulk of ‘The Simpsons’ early episodes. So what did he bring to the series?
His perspective was very different from the other guys. He was not an Ivy Leaguer. He was a former ad man. He kind of looked like David Crosby. He was maybe a libertarian. He just was like this big, tall, sort of lumbering dude who did things like drive a Datsun that was, like, always overheating. He would smoke in the writers’ room. He just had, like, a very old timey approach. He loved radio plays and old timey baseball and things like that. He had this very funny Americana perspective that was very different. And again, his what made him so such a genius, at least to the other writers, was like his first drafts were always almost impeccable. So almost every Simpsons script, if anybody doesn't know, was rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten to get the jokes right. But Swartzwelder episodes were always far and away ahead of everybody else's, and he had these rules that he would follow to sort of make the show great. A good one is that he considered the Simpsons a drama done by stupid people, so it would have a lot of warmth to it, but, like, completely ridiculous premises.
You know, the show kind of tracked along with the rise in the use of the internet by the average American, and that was always a tension, as you write about in the book, between the show creators and the writers and the fans, who, as far back as, like, 1992 were saying ‘The Simpsons’ had lost its edge and wasn't as good as it used to be, to the point where that became a meme within the show. So to what extent did No Homers and other online groups weigh on the direction of the writers’ room and how the people working on it looked at it?
It's funny, because a lot, again, a lot of these writers are eggheads, and I think that they would describe themselves that way too. So they were early internet adopters, in the early 90s, Bill Oakley, who was a writer, would tell me that he got a dial-up connection from UCLA because he couldn't get mass market internet yet in the early 90s, and at the beginning it was like, very quaint, because all they had for feedback back then were ratings, right, and the occasional review, but to get direct contact from fans about what they liked, again, it felt like there was a sweet story. And then, like everything with the internet, it just got sort of poisoned. And so in 1992, which was like, smack dab in the prime of the show, inarguably incredible television, people were like, it's bad, it's getting worse, it's horrible, it's going down the tubes. And so that's when the writers really started getting disillusioned with that kind of feedback. It's a theme that you see in episodes, which is like fans who feel entitled, right? Not just critical, but like, this is our show, and we're gonna weigh in. And again, that that became something like with the character Comic Book Guy that they kind of dropped into the show in bits and pieces.
It feels like this could never happen again, because everyone has separate streaming services and things are so niche, and sometimes a show gets released and you've never even heard of it, let alone an entire generation seeing it every Sunday at 8 o'clock. So in a way, I read your book as kind of like a love letter to the end of broadcast dominance. You know, it reminds me that there's not a monocultural program like this that exists anymore, really. Maybe sports is it.
Yeah, I think that's the last one. I mean, even, when ‘Game of Thrones’ was ending, a lot of people watched, but not the kind of numbers that we'd see 20 or 30 years ago. I mean, it's interesting with ‘The Simpsons,’ because, again, we’re sort of on the tail end of the prestige TV era, right? Where ‘Sopranos,’ ‘Mad Men,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ these water cooler shows people talked about when they came out the next day. But I would say ‘The Simpsons,’ maybe it was a water cooler show at the very beginning, but it's sort of like a secret handshake show now, where, if you talk to someone and they make a Simpsons reference, it's like you can immediately bond with them. And I think what's crazy is how that's endured. With Disney+ streaming it now, kids are discovering it, and so it is crossing generational lines.
Are you current on the show? Do you still watch?
I drop in and out. It's hard for me to follow every week. When I see an episode that looks interesting, like I'm from the Boston area, so there was a Boston-themed episode I watched. I watch Treehouse of Horror every year, just because it's always really creative.
The thing I like about it, and I'll cop to being current, is they do so much fan service now for people like us who are noticing characters in wide shots that haven't appeared in decades, and that kind of thing. I appreciate that they know the core audience still. Favorite episode?
I'm gonna go with Mr. Plow, I think. I admit this changes probably every week, but I think Mr. Plow is a great example of what made the show unique, which is it's like a premise that could not exist in live action television, like Homer and Barney are rival snowplow drivers. And like, you just wouldn't see that on TV, like with, with, like them on the mountain, you know, driving and again, it kind of mixes the warmth of these two guys and their friendship, and also, just like this completely ridiculous premise, and, oh, and to mix in some guest stars, like, Linda Ronstadt is brought on to sing Barney's plow jingle, which is an insane combination of words that I just said, but it's what made the show great.
Mine is "Lemon of Troy." I always go back to that. It captures something about being a kid, and also about being from a specific place. And it's just so good. Favorite quote?
Again, this changes every week, but right now, it's in regards to my book, and it's Dr. Nick. It’s the ‘X-Files’ episode where I think Mr. Burns pays Dr. Nick to shoot him up with a specific, weird drug. And Dr. Nick at the end says ‘The most rewarding part is when he gave me my money.’
Dr. Nick has a great one in '‘22 Short Films': ‘This man is suffering from skin failure!’ I love that. Mine is from a little after what your book covers. But there's a just a throwaway line where Moe is being stampeded. He's trampled. And I think it's for Christmas shopping or something. And it cuts back to him, and someone steps on his face, and he says, ‘Oh, why would you wear cleats to a store?’
And to me, that's always been like, that is the Simpsons humor right there, just all wrapped up. How would you like to see and I'm hoping it won't, I want it to go forever, nut how would you like to see the show end? Do you have an ideal finish?
This is a tough question, because unless you do like a seven-hour episode, I don't know how you provide closure, and this is perhaps a cop out, but to me, the episode that I view as a quasi-finale is Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie, which is an episode where they bring in another character on Itchy and Scratchy, and people revolt, basically. And it is this battle of like fan service and ownership. And who a show belongs to. And it's very clever and meta, and I just think it would be a really funny way to end the show. But, yeah, I don't even want to think about it actually ending. It’s gonna make me sad, even if I don't watch the show every week anymore.
