The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

by John Ortved

  With its bright colors and sight gags, not to mention a view of the world (where teachers, bosses, and parents tend to be the obstacles in life) that corresponded with young people’s, the show was an instant hit with kids. But as Groening and others would repeat constantly, this was a sitcom that happened to be animated—a cartoon for adults—and it drew in teens, college kids, and ultimately their parents, as well.

  RICKY GERVAIS, guest voice, The Simpsons; creator, The Office, Extras: Like all my favorite things, I didn’t like it immediately. I was put off by it. I think I saw that video “Do the Bartman” and I thought it was an awful, brattish, American thing for whiny kids. Then when I saw [an episode], I thought, Well, how is this a kid’s show? It’s one of the most intelligent things on television. It’s fantastic.

  I think it’s one of the most remarkable TV shows of all time. It’s a beautiful setup, the characterization’s amazing, it takes that dysfunctional family and looks at every single aspect of life. It’s wickedly satirical. It’s audacious. The subject matter is on two levels, so brilliantly, for kids and adults.

  BARRY DILLER: In terms of ratings and financial terms, it really built the network, but also in terms of giving Fox its attitude. Some of that was already there with Married … with Children, but The Simpsons is by far the network’s most successful show.

  JAY KOGEN: A lot of care and love went into the show, to make something really special and interesting. Same thing is true for Cheers—a lot of people cared for it and loved it—but I don’t think it had quite as wide an audience adoring it. And it wasn’t that fresh because it wasn’t that new. Having a cartoon like this seemed very new.

  After the first regular episode aired, on January 14, 1990, there was already buzz. The Simpsons “scored second in its time slot nationally … With a wave of merchandise almost ready to go, there is every indication of fadish success,” wrote John Stanley in the San Francisco Chronicle a week later.

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–92): To be honest, we thought the show was going to be successful. Months and months before the show premiered, we were seeing the raw episodes and we all thought they were really, really funny. So we felt other people were going to respond to it. Its success was not a surprise, but nobody anticipated just how successful it was going to be.

  Initially reviewers were cautious, comparing the show to its live-action Fox neighbor, the raunchy, over-the-top Married … with Children. This was a comparison at which Matt Groening bristled. “I suppose there’s some similarity,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “I guess the big difference is that Married … with Children is more cartoony.”8

  Groening might have been right; the writing on The Simpsons was slick, smart, and poignant, while the Bundys went for gross-out or sniping jokes whenever there was an opportunity. Where the comparison was apt was in its grouping of a new brand of very successful sitcoms that displayed a darker, more caustic, and less idealized interpretation of the blue-collar American family. The very idea of what it meant to be a family was at question in these new series—something that Will and Grace would also invoke, though much more safely, many years later.

  JONATHAN GRAY, author, Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality: In terms of its cultural importance, it was part of that triumvirate along with shows like Roseanne and Married … with Children. It really came in and blasted domestic sitcoms out of the point that they were in.

  Reagan was the ultimate optimist, right? And it’s one of the things that a lot of people liked about him—and still like about him even if they didn’t agree with his politics. But you can only have so much optimism before you need to start making fun of it.

  TOM WERNER, creator, The Cosby Show, Roseanne: I think America was ready for a more dysfunctional and weird take on family. The whole history of television was creating families that were safe and comfortable, so I think that both [Roseanne and The Simpsons] were trying to create some more dissonance over what the family could be.

  It may have been that America was ready for that five or ten years earlier and the networks weren’t. I always feel the audience is more comfortable with something fresh and something honest. There were millions of women who were balancing their role as mother and their role in the workplace, something like 50 million women who were not being represented on TV.

  Roseanne was a mother whose mantra was “If the kids are alive at the end of the day, I’ve done my job.” To say the least, this was a different mother than on Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. She was living in an economic position very different from that of the Huxtables. We had one episode where the [Conners] were kiting checks to put food on the table. We were trying to capture what the real challenges of a two-income family were: kids who wanted expensive sneakers, but their parents weren’t going to pay for them. There was a whole swath of the working class not really being represented on television, and they were portrayed in a very blunt way.

  The Simpsons were lowbrow in their form (cartoons after all are traditionally part of “low” culture), lowbrow in their family dynamic and the problems they faced, and definitely lowbrow in terms of their own tastes and the culture they embraced.

  D. G. ARNOLD (from his essay “‘Use a Pen, Sideshow Bob’: The Simpsons and the Threat of High Culture”): For Homer … and the rest of the family (except perhaps the precious Lisa), culture functions at a very low level [Arnold cites, as an example, Homer watching a finance drive for public access, hosted by a Garrison Keillor type, and responding by smacking the TV and yelling, “Stupid TV. Be more funny!”]. They have acquired this minimally functioning culture, the show suggests, as a result of a slipshod educational system, an all-encompassing environment of consumerism and commodification, careless and misguided parenting, and, of course, television.

  AL JEAN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1989–) (to media analyst David Rushkoff, 1992): Some of the most creative stuff we write comes from just having the Simpsons watch TV.

  Roseanne, which premiered in 1988, was the number one show by 1990.9 While The Simpsons wasn’t quite there in the ratings, the critics were seeing something worthwhile. The first review appeared in Newsweek, on Christmas 1989: “Wild, acerbic, and sometimes deeply cynical, The Simpsons is hardly the stuff of Saturday-morning children’s programming.” USA Today asked, “Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains? Crammed with sly visual and verbal gags … [The Simpsons is] adult entertainment that’s just as hip for kids.” And the Associated Press called it “Well animated … cutting humor … clever writing.”

  Much of the early press about The Simpsons focused less on reviewing the program than on profiling Groening and his remarkable ascendance from cartoonist for alternative newspapers to TV big shot. They quoted the cartoonist widely, on everything from the inspiration for the show’s insouciantly cynical humor to his ambition to make audiences forget they were watching a cartoon.

  The New York Times got around to writing about the series midway through February with a mixed but positive review by John O’Connor: “The record so far: impressively on target.” O’Connor was, by turns, astute in his criticisms: “The show can fall flat … There is, admittedly, a fine line between being hilariously perceptive and just plain, even objectionably, silly. While habitually teetering on that line, The Simpsons has shown a remarkable ability to come down on the right side most of the time,” and wildly reductive: “Bart’s spike haircut suggests he has been profoundly influenced by Jughead in the old Archie comic books” (which is like saying that Homer’s hefty carriage meant that he is heavily influenced by Mr. Weatherbee or The Penguin). A little late to the game, like its older, more sophisticated readership, the Times was ready to accept The Simpsons.

  As the larger population was swept up in the show’s first season, the media began to see its sophistication and potential. Tom Shales described what he considered the emergence of new family television institution, signified by The Simpson
s’ dominance of the prime-time Sunday ratings, which, over the decades, had bowed to the likes of The Ed Sullivan Show, Lassie, and Candid Camera. “Sunday night is what we watch. Sunday night is who we are.” Shales called the cartoon “sparkling” and the animated family “crazed, wonderful and bitterly funny … “They’re the flip, dark side of the Nelsons, the Andersons, the Bradys and all other sitcom families from the dawn of television … The show inhabits a rarefied realm that enables it to be both fiercely funny and absurdly poignant.”10

  Of course, there was the occasional exception to the praise: “The Simpsons … is strangely off-putting much of the time,” wrote Time magazine. “The drawings are grotesque without redeeming style or charm (characters have big beady eyes, beaklike noses and spiky hair), and the animation is crude even by TV’s low-grade standards.” 11 One couldn’t have expected much more from a magazine that still dedicated a number of its covers, every year, to questions like “Is the Bible True?” As Rupert Murdoch would later point out to me, The Simpsons was first popular on the two coasts—it took a little longer for Middle America to catch on.

  By the end of the first season, though, the expansive appeal was clear-cut: “Young viewers love the show’s exuberant humor, its aggressively crude drawings, its false-to-life colors,” wrote Joe Morgenstern. “Grown-ups relish its broad gags, just as the kids do, but also respond to its emotional complexity and its wickedly deadpan social comments—The Simpsons has some of the most incisive writing on TV.”12

  JAY KOGEN: Sam kept saying to write things that were funny to us. We took him at his word and came up with things that we thought were funny.

  BRAD BIRD, executive consultant, The Simpsons (1989–97); director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: When we first started that show, the studios in Asia that were doing the episodes didn’t know us from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So they gave us the same attention, or lack thereof, that they’d give any other show. And they’d ignore a lot of our instructions, because it slowed them down. When we got a little more successful, we were better at either figuring out ways to trick them into doing what we wanted, or saying, “Come on, you gotta do it right if you want our business. We’re gonna be on the air for a while now.” That’s another reason the quality improved; we had more clout to make them follow instructions.

  Critically, comedically, monetarily, in every way possible—from ratings to fans to marketing—by the end of their thirteen-episode run, The Simpsons was an unbridled success. An April 23 Newsweek cover story perhaps summed it up best: “The Simpsons has emerged as a breakaway ratings hit, an industry trendsetter, a merchandising phenomenon, a cultural template and, among its most fanatical followers, a viewing experience verging on the religious.”

  Ratings were so good, in fact, that the network was at a loss for what to do when the thirteen episodes had finished playing. Murdoch and Diller wanted to keep rerunning them all summer, while Sam Simon, Matt Groening, and Jim Brooks were worried that the momentum they’d created would be exhausted by the repetition before the new episodes were ready to go the next fall. “It’s not a happy situation,” Matt Groening told The New York Times.13 This was an instance where the executives were proved right. They reran the episodes, fans kept tuning in, and word of mouth brought new viewers with them.

  For the fall of 1990, while expanding Fox’s programming schedule from three nights a week to five (the baby network was still not quite ready for seven days of programming), Murdoch and Diller hatched a bold plan: beginning with The Simpsons’ second season, it would be moved to Thursday nights, where it would take on the reigning television champion, NBC’s The Cosby Show.

  BARRY DILLER: We were at a scheduling meeting, and there were about fifteen people there, and we were figuring out what to put up against Cosby on Thursday nights at eight o’clock. Cosby had been the biggest thing on TV for God knows how many years. Rupert leaned over and whispered to me, “What about The Simpsons?” And I stood up and went over to the board and moved the little magnet that said “Simpsons” to Thursday night at eight. And it took a solid minute before someone said, “You know what? That could work.” And it was a big deal, little Bart Simpson going up against big Bill Cosby. So it was a dragon-slayer story.

  RUPERT MURDOCH, chairman, News Corp: We were sitting down with Barry, reviewing the schedule. We looked at it and I said, “We gotta be more aggressive … let’s put it up against Cosby. Cosby must be coming to the end of his run—he’s been there forever.” And everybody in the room was horrified and sort of laughed at me. Except Barry Diller, who said, “No, let’s think about this.”

  The media, already smitten with The Simpsons, was intrigued by the possibility of Bart toppling Cos:

  “Bart Vs. Bill”—Los Angeles Times

  “Simpsons to Compete with Cosby”—The New York Times

  “The Simpsons: They’re Scrapping Again—But This Time It’s a Ratings Fight”—The Washington Post

  Tom Shales, in his Washington Post column, elaborated, “Much has been written about this supposedly monumental face-off. The Cosby Show, it’s been said, embodies the optimism and materialism of the ’80s, whereas the Simpsons personify the sadder but wiser pragmatism of the ’90s. Thus, Their Time Has Come.”14 Johnny Carson even alluded to the coming battle in a monologue, seemingly siding with The Simpsons when he commented that the cartoon family was closer to the real thing than the perfect Huxtables. Cosby took all the attention in stride—during an episode of The Cosby Show that season, one of his kids surprised him by wearing a Bart mask. Some twenty years later, however, Cosby commented, somewhat ruefully, that Bart Simpson was “sent to destroy The Cosby Show.”15

  WALLACE WOLODARSKY: None of the writers cared about the scheduling move. It was just an opportunity to make fun of Cosby and be impudent about it. The writers never had a stake in the ratings; you never cared about that. That was always viewed as a business decision.

  The same could not be said for the producers, who saw all their success slipping away with schedule changes, which never did positive things for a show’s ratings.

  JAMES L. BROOKS (to Tom Shales, Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1990): Suddenly a show that was a hit is fighting for its survival … There have been two weeks in my life when a show I was associated with was number one in the ratings, and on Sunday night, we had a chance to be the number one show in the country.

  The Fox execs knew what they wanted, though. This was about more than The Simpsons to them—this was about taking on the Big Three, moving up to five nights of programming, and becoming a real player in the network game. Peter Chernin, who had taken over as Fox Entertainment president, told the Los Angeles Times, “There’s no one in this company who looks at this as ‘Let’s take on The Cosby Show.’ We think that if we’re really lucky and very fortunate we’ll come in second place to them because the other two guys [CBS and ABC] aren’t as strong. We’re hoping to establish a little bit of a foothold there.”

  BRIAN ROBERTS: In Fox’s great wisdom, they decided they were going to go against Bill Cosby, take him out. And a lot of people on The Simpsons weren’t very happy about it, least of all Sam. Sam thought it was the stupidest move ever. So in typical Sam Simon fashion, he created a character by the name of Dr. Hibbert, who is always wearing a Cosby sweater, who’s always going “heh heh heh,” and is an idiot doctor. This was The Simpsons sort of like fastball over the plate at Bill Cosby.

  And we had a lot of fun with Dr. Hibbert that year.

  RUPERT MURDOCH: So we did it. And at the end of the first year, Cosby announced his retirement. We started behind him, but I think we’d caught up by the end of the year; certainly the writing was on the wall.

  From late August 1990 until October, The Cosby Show was running first-run episodes of their new season against reruns of The Simpsons and was inevitably beating Fox in the ratings (as was CBS, with the short-lived The Flash, based on the DC Comics hero). When the big night of The Simpsons premiere arrived, Bart did his parents proud
(this would be daddies Barry and Rupert, and maybe Jim too), finishing with an 18.4 rating share behind Cosby’s 18.5,16 and even taking first place on the West Coast. “Simpsons Edge Cosby in Overnight Ratings,” trumpeted the Los Angeles Times the next morning. Cosby was still number one on Thursday nights, but it was clear who the real winner was. Fox Broadcasting still reached only four-fifths of the country—add that 20 percent to their numbers and it was once more a Simpsons victory. Even if The Simpsons failed to achieve the 27 percent audience share that sponsors had reportedly been guaranteed,17 by capturing Cosby’s younger viewers Fox could declare Mission Accomplished (in the classic sense of the term). The Simpsons officially beat Cosby at Thanksgiving (by three-tenths of a ratings point, tying it for thirty-seventh place18), but by then the competition was over. It was official: The Simpsons could compete with anyone—Fox and their skateboarding scamp of a mascot had come to play, and come to stay.

  DONICK CARY, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1996–99); creator, Lil’ Bush: They invented a network. In a lot of ways, the Fox Network wouldn’t exist without the longevity and the amount of viewers that The Simpsons has consistently brought.