"Come, Family. Let Us All Bask in Television's Warm Glowing Warming Glow"

An interview with Alan Siegel, author of "Stupid TV, Be More Funny," a new history of "The Simpsons."

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Now having wrapped its mind-bending 36^th season, The Simpsons is one of our television institutions. It is also something akin to a national treasure, a weekly treat many of us middle-aged folks have been granted for the bulk of our lives. The Ringer staff writer Alan Siegel has written a history of the show’s first decade called Stupid TV, Be More Funny, that places the legendary animated series in the context of 1990s popular culture and justifies its place on television’s Mount Rushmore. With fresh interviews with everyone from Conan O’Brien to George Meyer, Stupid TV is a treasure trove of Simpsons study. We spoke with Siegel on a recent afternoon via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles.

What inspired you to want to write a book about The Simpsons?

It's always been my favorite show, since I was six or seven years old. I was looking to get to the heart of what made the show great, particularly in the first eight to ten years of the show, because to me, nothing beats it. And The Simpsons has been around for so long, it's really become an institution. I think people still see it as funny, which it is, but I don't think they realize how influential, how edgy it was at that time. I think it's something people can read as a companion to those early episodes, and hopefully make them appreciate it even more, if that's possible.

How did you decide on the frame for the book?

It's subjective. I think everyone has their own opinions on when the golden age of the show was, but I tie the show very heavily to the ‘90s, and I think that most of the excellent work they do is in the ‘90s. I think that was really a tidy narrative, to start at the beginning of the ‘90s and end at the end of the ‘90s.

I've always really liked the oral-history pieces that you do for The Ringer. Are there ways in which doing those stories prepared you to write this book?

The thing I learned from doing oral histories is there are always flash points or key moments, where something's either on the verge of getting canceled or not getting made or it's right on the edge of surviving or not. Another thing I learned is the big voices are really important, but you want to get a lot of behind-the-scenes people. I was trying to do that with The Simpsons book, too.

And to add to that a little bit, Conan O'Brien said something which I've been repeating a lot. People will ask him, because he's a very smart guy, to take them back to these moments of inspiration or creativity or genius, and he's like, ‘Yeah, it's sitting around in a room eating fried food, writing longhand, just spending hours on these things, and the magic is what comes later.’ He looks back on those years so fondly. But I do think it's less romantic than people like myself would ever think.

What was it that was so special about The Simpsons writers’ room that allowed for this sense of freedom?

I'll try to break it down for you. You had James L. Brooks, who was a romantic comedy guru and sitcom guy. You had Sam Simon, who was this young, really smart, already-jaded TV guy who basically saw The Simpsons as his way to stick it to the TV industry that he found got really boring. He had this mandate, at least to himself, that was like, ‘You know what, we're probably going to get canceled after 13 episodes. So fuck it. Let's just go all out, do weird shit, do whatever we want.’

And you had young, hungry writers, most of whom went to Ivy League schools [like] Harvard, who were pretty new to sitcoms, but they were so obsessed with being funny that you throw them all in one room, and it was like the Lampoon all over again. All they cared about was making the funniest joke.

Some of them had come from SNL. And SNL was competitive in a different way than The Simpsons, where writers would fight to get their material on. They were very siloed, whereas The Simpsons was very collective. [There was] one name on [each] script, but every script got run over by the lawn mower meticulously. [Also,] James L. Brooks informally negotiated that there would be no [network] feedback on the show.

Is there one particular early decision that allows The Simpsons to flourish?

The episode that was supposed to be the premiere was [“Some Enchanted Evening”], where Penny Marshall was a guest star. They sent the project to Korea to be animated, because it was cheaper. But when that episode came back from Korea, it was a complete mess. The sound was off; the animation was off. it was a disaster. They really thought they were dead in the water. Even James L. Brooks was worried about it, and the decision that they made was, ‘Let's see what else comes back in.’ The next episode was the Christmas special. It looked better, it sounded better, the jokes hit better. Starting with the Christmas episode and treating it as a special to pique everybody's curiosity was really, really important.

I was reminded by the book of the avalanche of Simpsons merchandising, especially in the early seasons. What's the strangest Simpsons-related product that you came across in your research?

I talked to a marketing guy, and he said they wanted to make Simpsons toilet paper, which never happened. Also, someone wanted to make Simpsons condoms, which, for a show that appealed to kids, they couldn't do.

The real interesting stuff was not the official merch; it was all the bootlegs. I talked to a guy who had a Bart Simpson Nelson Mandela-themed T-shirt that was on sale when Mandela spoke at Yankee Stadium. The statistic that I've repeated a bunch, because I think it's wild, is the first year of the show, they sold 15 million licensed T-shirts.

You mentioned Sam Simon. I had no idea that not only was he one of the creators of the show, he had also done illustration work on the show and was responsible for the look of some of the characters. Is it accurate to see Sam Simon as the secret weapon of the show?

I think before, it was secret. Now, as comedy culture has become more mainstream, people know Sam Simon's work, but he was an incredible force on the show. Without him, that show is not the way it is. He ran the show in the first couple seasons, and he really shaped the sensibility of it. I asked [a writer] what made Sam so good? And he said he just was really good at making TV.

Jon Vitti, another writer, told a story about [how] they were trying to come up with Mr. Burns, Homer's boss, and the original idea was to make him like Mr. Spacely from The Jetsons, this little, squat guy. Sam Simon was like, ‘No, no, no. He should be like a bird.” He did a little doodle, and that was the look of the character. Mr. Burns really doesn't look like a lot of the other characters. All the writers talked about [how] pleasing [Simon] and pleasing James L Brooks were like the best feeling in the world, and they didn't want to disappoint them.

I was intrigued by the ethos you mentioned in the book, that every Simpsons episode should be like no other Simpsons episode we've ever done. How do you see that playing out over the course of the early seasons of the show?

That's the thing with The Simpsons’ world. At the very beginning, it was smaller because they wanted to make it like a realistic sitcom. Very quickly they realize, we have this 360-degree world where if we want to cut to an airplane flight, we can do that, or a football game, or anything outside of the home. A great example of that, which is in the book, is about the episode where Bart wants to jump Springfield Gorge on his skateboard. At the end of the episode, Homer takes the fall for Bart and tries to jump the gorge. Homer falls in the gorge, and he has to be extracted by an ambulance, and it's brutal. Homer keeps falling. It's bloody, and an early cut of the episode was even bloodier. They loved playing with those tropes, or the format, like, ‘Yeah, we're going to do a horror anthology for Halloween.’ That's not something you could do on Cheers.

You mentioned in the book that Mimi Pond, the writer of the first episode, didn't get hired for the show’s writing staff. How do you understand the ways in which female writers are marginalized in the early years of The Simpsons?

Yeah, it's pretty bad. I think it was in the air at the time. Not a lot of women were hired on sitcoms, and The Simpsons was no different. This is certainly not a defense of it at all. I think Sam Simon had his guys. Jennifer Crittenden was the first [female] staff writer, and she got hired in the mid ‘90s. These aren't things that gradually happen, they needed to forcefully happen, and it didn't in the early years. The writers at the time talk about how, if you look at the characters, Marge doesn't have any friends, and Lisa only has a couple. There's a reason for that. It's a bunch of nerdy white guys. And that did create blind spots, for sure.

How does the show change when the center of attention shifts away from Bart and more towards Homer?

Homer kept getting dumber. He just kept getting stupider. Bart was really good to start with, because he was a character that kids loved. But he's a child, so it's a bit limiting in terms of what the stories can be. The writers, as they got older and more mature, [Homer] became a vessel for them to get weirder, crazier, funnier, more madcap. As the show goes along, the world gets bigger, and to just focus on the Simpsons, they probably felt limited by that. I actually don't know that it's at fault of anyone, it just becomes a little less realistic.

And do you see that as a downside, that the show becomes less realistic over time?

I think so. The show, to me, is a victim of its own success. The first eight to ten years were incredible, maybe the best show of all time. It's really hard to sustain, especially that edginess it had at the beginning. I think the show is still good. It's just not quite what it was. And I don't know that that's replicable.

I really hadn't seen most of the episodes past season 10 or 11, until I recently started watching with my kids. Having heard so much negativity about it, I ended up being pleasantly surprised by how good the average episode was, and how many really good episodes there still were, even this far into the show.

You think about the most influential comedies in the last 50 years. Saturday Night Live, it's still going on 50 years. But you can refresh the cast of SNL. You can be hyper-topical, and every episode is different, and The Simpsons doesn't really have that luxury,

So much of your book is an ode to the incredible and weird and wonderful people who wrote the show. Who is your favorite Simpsons writer, and why them in particular?

Man, that's a really good question. I think I'm going to go with George Meyer, just because his jokes were so pure. He might not have written as many episodes as John Swartzwelder, but the jokes he came up with were the most simple, funny, straightforward things. One of the ones that I love is, Homer's at a honky-tonk bar. And these two rednecks bump heads. One says, ‘Hey you, let's fight,’ and the other guy says, ‘Them's fighting words.’ It's the kind of joke that you think, ‘How has this not already existed?’

You're in a room full of people that you have to convince of the wonder of The Simpsons. What's the episode that you're going to show to them to make your case?

A couple years ago, I would have said “Last Exit to Springfield,” where Homer becomes the union president, because he needs to get Lisa braces. It's a high-minded episode, and it's hilarious, and it's one of my favorites. But I think to introduce people to the show, I would say watch “Mr. Plow,” which is incredibly ridiculous. It's Homer and Barney engaging in a battle for the snowplow supremacy of Springfield. It's silly. It's heartbreaking, in a way. There are a million pop-culture references, and there's a lot of action in it. I think it's a good combo of everything that makes the show great. And it works when it probably shouldn't.

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