16 Great TV Shows, Part 2: The Simpsons

Part 1: The Wonder Years

Bart Simpson and I are the same age.

Correction: Bart Simpson and I WERE the same age. When the show started, we were both in 4th grade. This is normally the part where I'd make some pithy remark about how he's aged better, but the fact is that I look pretty damn good and of the two of us, I got to go through puberty, so I'm calling this one for Team Bitter.

I'm trying to figure out how to explain the phenomenon of The Simpsons to a young audience that wasn't around at the time. Upon its debut, it was instantly one of the biggest shows on TV and certainly was one of the most talked about. Every kid was imitating Bart's catchphrases like "Don't have a cow, man!" I recall one of my classmates behind forced to turn TWO Bart Simpsons T-shirts inside out on separate occasions. One read "I'm Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?" The other: "Underachiever and proud of it." (That last one is due to be re-purposed any day now by the Republican party as their "anti-elite" slogan.)

When The Simpsons debuted, there was nothing else on TV like it. Prime time animated shows hadn't existed for decades since The Flintstones went off the air. This was a cartoon that hadn't been created with the assumption its audience was somewhere between the ages of 4 and 10. And it had an edge to its humor that most live action sitcoms didn't. Even in the beginning, there was actual social commentary, with plenty of shots at incompetent authority figures like politicians, police, religious leaders, business owners, television performers, lawyers, and the entire justice system. Nothing was sacred. If anything had any kind of authority, The Simpsons was there to take the piss out of it. I was just a bit young for SNL so the only other place I'd seen humor deployed that way was in MAD Magazine (an acknowledged comedy influence on many of The Simpsons's early writers.

The funny thing is that watching that first season now, it seems much more grounded, unsophisticated and tame compared to what would come in just a few seasons when stories shifted focus from Bart to Homer. This allowed for adventures like Homer going back to college or the family having to relocate in witness protection because Bart's arch enemy Sideshow Bob was determined to kill him. That episode is a great example of the density of pop culture references in The Simpsons. The story eventually turns into a riff on Cape Fear. I'd never seen either version up to that point, but enough of the film was out in the culture that I recognized the influences and some of the gags.

Pop culture jokes on The Simpsons landed with me one of two ways: either I got the reference and laughed at how perfectly placed it was, or I didn't get it and years later I'd be watching a classic film and realize "That's what they were stealing from!" The Simpsons parody of The Shining is so dense that it tells the whole story and hits every possible joke in about seven minutes. Years later when I saw the two-hour-plus film it was based on, I couldn't believe

The reference itself was never the entire joke, there was always a deeper point to it. They also proved that The Simpsons's writers were a well-educated bunch. How can you not love a joke about the "Ayn Rand School for Tots" (where they believe in "nurturing the bottle within.") And I'll confess that at the age of 12, the absurdity of a musical version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" blew right past me.

It was smart. It was literate. It was one of the first shows where I can recall regular "freeze frame" jokes that were on screen for a mere few seconds. The jokes were smart and they made you feel smart for getting them. This wasn't simple hack writing with basic cartoon plots. This show had a voice, and where it didn't match my developing comedy voice, it was certainly influencing it.

I'm also pretty sure it was my introduction to meta humor, or at least was the first time I'd seen it deployed on such a scale. There came a moment when I realized that every story about the making of Itchy & Scratchy was basically the writers' catharsis for what it was like to work on The Simpsons.

In its best seasons, beneath all the wit and satire were strong stories about the characters. It was weird at the time to realize that this silly cartoon had a lot of heart and emotion behind it. The flashback episodes dealing with Marge and Homer's courtship, marriage and journey into parenthood are some of the best examples of this. Also, you could never go wrong with a Lisa episode, particularly an episode that put Lisa together with Homer. Homer could be a complete idiot, but if you give him a story about how Lisa is totally disappointed in him and he tries to fix it, you really start to feel for the guy.

Heart. Joke density. Story density. Those are three of the things I took from The Simpsons. They had a habit of doing a first act that seemed to be going in one direction until a sudden zag in the story that sent things into a completely unexpected direction. That's more common now, but at the time it was revolutionary. I remember the experience of watching an episode I knew I'd seen, but not remembering what the yet-to-emerge A-story was. TV writing was in a process of getting faster and faster paced, and you can really see that building throughout the 90s.

The show also eventually built an entire world, populated with dozens of characters who the audience knew very well. Within a few seasons, Springfield felt like a real place you could visit with a history and culture all its own. It wasn't some generic animated town. Heck, even by the halfway point of the run, it felt like we had met most of its population.

I don't watch it regularly anymore. For me, the golden age of The Simpsons is probably Seasons 2-8, with the entire first 11 seasons being the era that I rewatched obsessively in syndication and pretty much know like the back of my hand. Had it ended there, with "Behind the Laughter" as the series finale, it would have been pretty much a perfect series. When I catch a new episode, it's generally still pretty funny, but you can't imagine the impact of the first few seasons of that show, when nothing on TV was remotely like it.

Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Part 4: Seinfeld

Part 5: The John Larroquette Show

Part 6: ER

Part 7: Newsradio

Part 8: The X-Files

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

Happy Independence Day!

Sorry, non-Americans, but as this Wednesday is the 4th of July, our Independence Day, pretty much everyone is out celebrating our great revolution against the Nazis that led to the freeing of the slaves.*

As such, I know that traffic to the site is going to be down most of this extremely long weekend, so I decided to postpone putting up the next video in the "12-Step Screenwriting" series.  Rest assured, your favorite puppet will be back next week, so look at this as a chance to catch up on all the writing you didn't do.

So I don't leave you high and dry, here's one of my favorite Simpsons clips, which just so happens to be related to the holiday.  Wherever you are, I hope you're having a good day.**



*Note: I went to public school and learned my history from a textbook approved by the Texas State Board of Education and a time travel episode of the Dennis the Menace cartoon, so all of that might not be accurate.

**And as David Letterman once asked Patrick Stewart, "How DO they celebrate the 4th of July over in England?"

Tuesday Talkback: Frank Grimes - commenting on characters

The A.V. Club has a great article on TV characters whom the writers use to comment on the oddities of the show's fictional universe.  Their template for this is "Frank Grimes," a guest character on the Simpsons introduced in the episode "Homer's Enemy"


TV fans who watch a series week to week will inevitably start to think of the characters in that series in somewhat intimate terms—as people they might be friends with if those people existed in real life. Yet most TV characters are extremely heightened versions of real-life types, and usually, they’re heightened in ways that would be incredibly irritating to encounter in real life. Enter the hapless guest star, forced to contend with the series regular, whose buffoonery becomes especially outsized for that episode. 

See: Frank “Grimey” Grimes, a work-a-day schlub who’s forced to share workspace with Homer Simpson in the classic Simpsons episode “Homer’s Enemy.” Homer’s lackadaisical approach to life and his extreme string of good luck drive ol’ Grimey off the deep end, with tragic results. It’s as if a realistically drawn character with constantly defeated hopes and dreams wandered into a cartoon universe and was punished for doing so, through absolutely no fault of his own. Episodes like this skew toward the dark, but “Homer’s Enemy” is one of the darkest. 

I love characters like this because they force the audience to look at their favorite characters with fresh eyes.  The A.V. Club article identifies 20 such characters. Do you have a favorite "Frank Grimes?"

Take me to the Pilot Season - Louis CK's master class

Pilot season is underway here in Hollywood and for those who work in television, that means two or three of the most nerve-wracking months of the year.  Scripts are purchased, pilots are cast, directors are hired.  All the while, writers tear out what remains of their hair while trying to accommodate network notes and do their best to restrain themselves when the exec covering their show says they have to meet with Katherine Heigl for the female lead.  And that doesn't even begin to describe the stress of knowing that odds are only half - if not fewer - of the pilots ordered will actually get picked up as a series.

For a slightly dramatized look at the pilot process, rent the little-seen film The TV Set, written and directed by Jake Kasdan.  David Duchovny plays a writer who struggles to keep his artistic vision for a serious dramatic show intact in the face of miscasting and clueless notes from the network president, played by Sigourney Weaver.  I once asked writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Andromeda, Alphas) if he'd seen the movie and his response was, "The TV Set is the most terrifyingly real movie ever made."  I have several friends who work in television, and much of what the film depicts is in line with their experience.  One friend even found the film too painful to laugh at because it was so true.

For a more first-hand look at the process of developing and selling a show, check out this excellent article from Third Beat, which reproduces an archived Usenet post written years ago by Louis CK.  In it, he goes step-by-step through the process of going from idea to network pickup.  Here's a taste.

So you are trying to get the best actors, director and writer in the world at the same time that everyone else in town is trying… Okay, so casting. First you have to hire a casting director. There are only a few good ones and everybody wants them. you have to meet with a lot of people who tell you some ideas of who they might cast in your show. If you click with someone you hire them (if you can) and start casting. You see thousands of horrible actors and hear your pilot script read over and over and over and over again. 

At the same time, offers are going out to very big named actors, none of which you think fit the parts at all, but you are told they will help your show get on the air. (In my case, HBO doesn’t give a shit about that, so we were able to cast people according to their funninness and acting. Hooray for me) At one point you’re told that your pilot is going to star Brendan Frazier and Jody Foster. At the last minute they both pass and you end up with Kirk Cameron and Shelly Biglachnataps. The way the casting works is that you make usually three top picks for every part in the show. You now take these people to the studio and they decide if they like your choices. If they do, you take those three folks now to network. THey sign what is called a test deal, which means they make their acting deal before the network even sees them.


So yo uhave to negotiate a deal with three actors per part, even though only one of them will be hired. So the three actors (per part) go to the network and audition for LEs moonves or whoever. He/she/they pick one person and you are cast. OR (and usually) they don’t like any of them and you have to start all over again and now time is fucking running out and every good actor is already on a show. 

Then, if you want a hint of the work that awaits each week once your show gets picked up, check out this fascinating article from Simpsons writer Bill Oakley about the process of writing what would become the Simpsons' 100th episode. It's called "The Lost Jokes and Story Arcs of "Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song"

This episode, from Season Five, had more changes than our normal episode. It changed a lot because there are some story problems which I think are still in the final episode. And you see through the different incarnations of the script, from the pitch, to the outline, to the script, to what aired — the story changes somewhat in each version. And I don't necessarily think it ever quite got there. I think the story really should have been a 45 minute story, and cutting it to 22 minutes caused it to suffer a little bit. 

In retrospect, I think we should have tried to figure out some way to prune out some of the complicated things in the story to make it cleaner. Because what the story really was, in this pitch, was a funny and very clean first act and two subsequent acts that never quite approached the level of the first one. I think the jokes in every version of this are pretty solid, but what happens with Skinner and what he does when he's gone changes in each draft. And what the repercussions of that are, was that the Flanders and Homer B story got cut entirely in the broadcast version.

 Enjoy folks!

Cowboys & Aliens? I'm laughing already! Oh, it's not a comedy.

Rainer Wolfcastle on his new movie, "Help, My son is a Nerd!"

Wolfcastle: "My son returns from a fancy East Coast college and I'm horrified to find he's a nerd."

Kent Brockman: "I'm laughing already!"

Wolfcastle: "It's not a comedy."

This quote was going through my head many times during my recent viewing of Cowboys & Aliens. You might recognize "It's not a comedy" as the talking point that ended up in virtually every promotional interview given by a member of the C&A team, pretty much from the point that the marketing campaign started. It's easy to see why that happened, "Cowboys & Aliens" is a whimsical title that suggests camp, or at least B-movie hijinks, much in the way that "Help, My Son is a Nerd!" primes the viewer to expect comedy.

I'm going to join the chorus on this one and agree that Cowboys & Aliens was a mostly disappointing experience. It's not a terrible movie, but it's not a particularly good one either. Genre mash-ups are hard because the filmmakers have to take two flavors that don't usually go together and make them taste appealing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes you let down fans of both genres. Take it from a guy who tried to mash up a Grisham courtroom thriller with a Superhero movie.

Unfortunately, Cowboys & Aliens plays it straight, trying to mesh the tones of True Grit with Predator. It's a fundamental miscalculation of everything appealing that the title promises. I have a hard time thinking of a successful mash-up film that didn't include some measure of comedy, as that sort of self-aware winking usually is what allows viewers to suspend their disbelief.

The first 30 minutes or so attempt to be indistinguishable from any other western. It wants us to accept this as the world of Unforgiven and Wyatt Earp. I'm not inherently against this verisimilitude. Just to name one example, the Nolan Batman films have worked remarkably well in their attempts to be more reality-bound than their predecessors. The Western aspect could have worked as the "straight man" in this routine. Where it goes wrong is in making the alien elements just as serious. The idea of gunslingers taking on H. R. Giger rip-offs is so inherently ridiculous that it's a crime the film doesn't even attempt to have a little fun with it.

This movie needed to be more in the vein of Tremors, an underrated Kevin Bacon film that tipped it's cap to the B-movies of the 50s and 60s while still being sophisticated enough for the early 90s. C&A seems scared to really cut loose and go over the top for fear of being cheesy, and that unfortunately makes the entire affair feel too earthbound.

And again I return to the message of "Know what your audience wants to see." If you entice an audience with a title, then what you give them had damn well come close to - or better yet, exceed - their expectations. I'd say this is especially true when trying to get someone to read your script. As much as we might mock the profanity and the whimsy often seen on the Black List scripts, those titles are memorable - and they tell the reader exactly what they're about to experience.

To Wit:

Your Bridesmaid is a Bitch
He's Fuckin' Perfect
Dirty Grandpa
Sex Tape

As Scott Myers pointed out in announcing last week's sale of The Incredible True Story of Jessica and Drew Who Accidentally Boned on the Way to the Wedding, American Pie was once called, "Untitled Teenage Sex Comedy Which Can Be Made for Under $10 Million Which Studio Readers Will Hate But We Think You Will Love."

How ticked would you be if you picked up ANY of those titles expecting to laugh and instead ended up with something deep and emotional such as "Like Crazy?" The only way to overcome that potential hurdle is to deliver a damn good story - and Cowboys & Aliens definitely isn't up to the task. The film looks pretty, but with Jon Faverau directing and Steven Spielberg producing, how could it not?

I've got a host of other issues with Cowboys & Aliens, but that might be best left for another post.  I'll just say that it would be nice to get some original creature design and not have aliens that look like generic versions of Predator or Independance Day critters.

Friday Free-for-All: Stephen Hawking

Well, November sweeps are upon us in television and we all know what that means - gratuitous "Special Guest Stars" as every show tries to boost its ratings. Frankly, this practice disgusts me, especially when the same actors continue to whore themselves out by making cheap cameo appearances as themselves.

But there's one gratuitous guest star who is the very definition of "fame whore" - one Professor Stephen Hawking, a man apparently not smart enough to feel shame for all the gratuitous guest spots he's done over the years. You couldn't get a more apt example of producer pandering to a low brow audience than the series that have hosted Dr. Hawking over the years.

Here's Hawking appearing as himself on Star Trek: The Next Generation.



And here's a clip of Dr. Hawking discussing his work on The Simpsons. (Sorry, I couldn't find an unedited clip of his cameo.)



What's next? A shot on Entourage where he and Vince go after the same chick? Or perhaps he could get into a fight with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm after Larry parks in a handicapped spot.

Ever notice how this guy always plays himself? What an ego. He needs to get over himself fast.

Friday Free-for-All: The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror

Halloween is upon us and that means a new edition of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" will air this Sunday at 8pm on Fox. So many of my favorite episodes are Treehouse of Horror eps, though I've felt the quality dip in recent years. YouTube doesn't have too many clips of a high quality but these are some of my favorites:

From the Shining parody. Homer goes crazy ala Jack Nicholson:



Another classic moment - Homer sells his soul for a donut:



Homer time travels:



When Mr. Burns proves to be a vampire, Homer attempts to live out the American dream: