by John Ortved
A second issue between the network and The Simpsons, where Fox has exerted far less leverage, relates to the content of the show. Network notes are the bane of many a showrunner and writer’s existence. The creative content of most network television shows can be dictated by network execs, who want to channel a show’s direction to maximize profitability (“The eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds like it when the cat murders people. Can you add some more scenes with Mr. Meowser?”). The Simpsons has long claimed that one of the keys to its success is that, under the protective umbrella of Jim Brooks, it has never had to deal with network notes. While the show is certainly autonomous in a way no other network shows are (cable shows have different standards and controls, which is why most innovative and well-written programming can be found on HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, etc.), there are some different opinions on how much influence Fox has held.
BRENT FORRESTER, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1993–97); writer/producer, King of the Hill, The Office: Jim Brooks, when he established the show, said, “There’s gonna be none of that.” And the executives, in fact, are not invited to the table reads. Unheard of—but he had the clout to do that. And I think you can see that it didn’t hurt The Simpsons.
GARTH ANCIER, former president of entertainment, Fox Broadcasting: My style with someone like Jim—I can’t say it’s my style with everybody, but my style with someone as talented as Jim—is to give very broad notes. I don’t give more than five of ’em (a rule I learned from Brandon Tartikoff, when I was a child in television). If you have to give more than five notes, you have the wrong producer.
LARRY DOYLE: When you have a table read with a regular sitcom, you go in there and there’s always a sense of fear, because those people at the network are unpredictable. They can come back and say, “No, we don’t want you to do that,” and then you’ll have a day to write a new script. That never happens to us.
BRENT FORRESTER: [Recently] Mike Reiss finally decided that he was secure enough in his career to publicly say what he’d always thought, which is that executive notes are the bane of television comedy. If people asked themselves, “Why does TV comedy suck?” the simple one-line answer is “executive interference.”
That’s Mike’s opinion. I don’t know enough to disagree with him. And I certainly have seen enough to say there’s a lot to that.
The Simpsons never had notes—maybe of any kind. Typically with a television show, you submit the scripts, you get notes on the scripts; if they come to the table, you get notes on the table; if they come to the rehearsals, you get notes on that.
JOSH WEINSTEIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1991–97): Working on The Simpsons felt like being in the graduate school of comedy, or a great comedy lab, where you could try and do anything and no one would stop you, as long as it was good or funny. That had an amazing feel.
BRAD BIRD, executive consultant, The Simpsons (1989–97); director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: There were discussions with the network, but they were over pretty quickly. I think people felt good being under the titanium shield of Jim Brooks. The studio might get upset and might make notes, but we didn’t have to take them unless Brooks said we had to take them.
He was inclined to do whatever was necessary to make the best episode and the best comedy. And he protected his showrunners and his writers and allowed good work to flourish.
I think all of my best experiences, for the most part, have been from behind some sort of titanium shield, whether it’s The Simpsons, or up here at Pixar, where you don’t get affected by the kind of mentality that runs most of Hollywood.
BARRY DILLER, former CEO, 20th Century Fox: Anything with Jim Brooks has a level of independence in it, but it’s not exclusionary. Jim’s not about being exclusionary, and in this case couldn’t be—there was just too much strife going on between Sam Simon and Matt Groening. Were we engaged in the early development of it, Fox network people? Yes. Did we give line notes? Not ever. I never gave line notes in my life.
GARTH ANCIER: You can’t produce a show from the network. It has to be that the person who’s actually making the show has a vision and a voice to make it. So you know we did kick around, was it possible to make this show? How would we make it? Was it economically possible to make with the lead times? How would we order a back ninen (which is why we started it midseason, so we wouldn’t have to worry about back nines and all those kinds of things)? But at the end of the day, I don’t think we did give much guidance to Jim and the team because it’s Jim Brooks.
AL JEAN (Season 2 DVD commentary): Very early on we had difficulty [with the broadcast standards people] saying “butt” or “ass.” And of course now NBC’s logo is “kiss our ass.”
BRIAN ROBERTS, editor, The Simpsons (1989–92): I came up with this idea that Marge paints this picture of Mr. Burns and he’s got the world’s tiniest dick. And when it’s unveiled, I said, “The very top of a feather obscures his tiny dick,” or whatever it was, and then the last line of the show is “By the way, Marge, thanks for not making fun of my genitalia.”
It was at a time at Fox where the envelope was still being pushed and Barry Diller and the network and the studio guys were saying, “We absolutely cannot allow the word ‘genitalia’ to be on Fox.” This was actually kind of a big deal because this was the first time that Fox had tried to control the content on The Simpsons … I still have this. This is one of my prized possessions. There’s a letter.
It says, “Dear Mr. Diller, We respect and support Brian Roberts’s use of the word ‘genitalia’ at the end of ‘Brush with Greatness.’ We will not remove it under any circumstances.” And then it’s signed Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Sam Simon, and the rest of the writing staff. It was at that time that the power shifted and Fox realized that The Simpsons was just gonna do whatever it fucking wanted to do and that Fox was the recipient of a whole bunch of good luck. It was a really great compliment that they backed me up and stood by me.
Al Jean has said that, in the episode where Bart was hired by Fat Tony and became a mobster, the broadcast standards people had a huge problem because they believed it would influence children to join a gang. “But this is an Italian, mafia gang,”18 Jean told the network folks, who were afraid the gang Bart was joining would be like the Bloods or the Crips. At the time, Jean was apoplectic that they had to spend so much time meeting with the network on this topic—there were six pages of notes on that episode alone.
DONICK CARY: There was this one joke where Homer’s making new inventions, and one of his inventions is a whore gun. It’s basically a gun you point at your face, and then pull the trigger, and it blasts makeup onto your lips and eyes. The combination of “whore,” “gun,” and “point a gun at your face” drew some red flags at Fox legal. And then we got to the point where we all really, really loved the whore gun, and the feeling was, No, they can’t take that away!
Essentially, on some level you’re dealing with a bunch of class clowns. So as soon as someone tells you you can’t do something, it becomes even more imperative that you do it. As soon as they say, “We don’t really like the whore gun,” the response is “Yep—the whore gun’s gotta stay.”
TOM MARTIN, writer/producer, The Simpsons (1999–2001): My Super Bowl episode, we wanted to do a joke about the silly commercials they have and how weird they are. And so we did this commercial where a guy’s driving down the road, and you can see the heat coming off of the asphalt. The guy pulls into an abandoned gas station and runs over the thing, ding, ding, and it turns into this sort of ZZ Top commercial where all these beautiful girls come out and they clean the car and they pump the gas and it’s really sexually suggestive, and then it zooms in on one girl’s cleavage, and there’s a crucifix there, and then the voice-over says, “The Catholic church. We’ve made a few changes.”
And then they cut to Marge and Lisa watching the Super Bowl at home and saying, “I don’t get these commercials. They’re getting stranger and stranger.” We thought we were making a joke about
the type of attempts they make to make an impact with their commercials on Super Bowl Sundays. What we didn’t realize was there was this organization called the Catholic League, I believe, that was going to organize forty thousand e-mails and letters from fourth graders and third graders and second graders to say this was offensive to them.
Mind you, there was no official Catholic institution that was offended—it was the Catholic League, which is a lay organization. And it worked. For the rerun, they insisted that we take out the part about the Catholic church, and Fox wanted us to say, “the church. We’ve made a few changes.” Mike Scully just refused. He wasn’t going to do it. And I think that, on the first rerun, someone at Fox dipped the volume down during “Catholic.” Since then, I don’t know what’s happened with that episode.
But what struck us as strange was that of all the Catholic countries love The Simpsons; there were no complaints from anywhere in South America or France or Italy or Ireland or any of these other places. But the Catholic League in America thought this joke was offensive, and Fox buckled.
One of the great episodes would not have existed without network interference. For “A Streetcar Named Marge,” in which Springfield’s community theater puts on a version of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the writers originally merely had Marge and the other actors performing scenes from the play. Naturally, the Williams estate wouldn’t let them rip off entire scenes from the copyrighted work, so the writers had to change it. Even though they couldn’t replicate the play, they were allowed to parody it. Hence: A Streetcar Named Desire: The Musical. Unfortunately, that episode still managed to land The Simpsons in trouble. In opening number of the musical, New Orleans is referred to as a “town of drunks and whores.”
In New Orleans, where Quincy Jones owned the local Fox affiliate, The Simpsons was pulled off the air for several weeks. Bart Simpson, who was supposed to be the king of the Mardi Gras parade that year, received a death threat. Someone from New Orleans called up Mike Reiss and told him, “When your friend Bart comes down here, we’re gonna kill him.” Reiss informed the real-life Sideshow Bob that there was in fact no real Bart Simpson, and that the Bart Simpson in the Mardi Gras parade would be a midget in a foam and rubber costume. “Well,” the man replied, “we’re gonna kill him.”19
Around the world, when it is played in different languages for wide-ranging cultures, foreign audiences often appreciate The Simpsons as a satire of American life. Yet when other countries are satirized on the show, they can have less of a sense of humor about themselves.
The Simpsons was also pulled off the air in Japan and condemned in the Australian parliament. When The Simpsons went to Rio de Janeiro in 2002, the show was sued by the Brazilian Tourist Council. According to Mike Reiss, their complaint was “When The Simpsons came to Rio, they encountered grinding poverty, rat-infested slums, pickpockets, kidnappers, and wild monkeys. There are no wild monkeys in Rio.”20
The tiff with Brazil, which had just spent $18 million on a tourism promotion campaign, was smoothed over when Jim Brooks said, “We apologize to the lovely city and people of Rio de Janeiro, and if that doesn’t settle the issue, Homer Simpson offers to take on the president of Brazil on Fox’s Celebrity Boxing.”21 Since then, the Simpsons have gone to Africa (where they were chased by a hippo, engaged in tribal dancing, and witnessed political strife), London, and Toronto without incident.
COLIN A.B.V. LEWIS: David Mirkin was the first showrunner who said, “Why do we have to change it? We’re The Simpsons. We’re in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won’t deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them.” I remember episodes where they gave us a list of changes to make and where stuff needed to be cut, and Mirkin’s telling me, “No. Don’t change it. Colin, do not change it.”
For Mirkin, taking a stand against the network didn’t end with censorship.
BRENT FORRESTER: One of the things that Mirkin was most proud of was that we were allowed to eat at the most expensive restaurants, always. Mirkin really felt that was something cool he had done for us. He would brag about it, saying, “They told me I had to bring this food budget down. I said, ‘Well, you know what, then? The scripts will be a week late. ’Cause I cannot deliver the script on time if my people are not fed with the most expensive food.’” And they caved. Or maybe he was lying about that, but that certainly was the myth he created about himself.
The Simpsons’ people see these victories as major, but speak to the execs and you get the idea that, for them, the important thing was to let the writers think they were getting away with murder.
RUPERT MURDOCH: What happens with every show is the producers and different people discuss and debate things and the people on the cutting edge of the product side are always saying, “I’m carrying around the network, and they bring in suits, and aren’t they horrible,” but that’s all right.
When The Simpsons made fun of Fox News with a scrolling banner that included such fake news items as “Rupert Murdoch: Terrific Dancer,” “Study: 92 Percent of Democrats Are Gay,” and “The Bible Says Jesus Favored Capital Gains Cut,” the writers were forbidden from ever doing it again. According to Matt Groening, the network was afraid people would think the news items were real.22
The Simpsons’ “subversive” brand of humor was ultimately very profitable for Fox. Rupert Murdoch would broadcast Marxist propaganda if the ratings were high enough. The volume at which The Simpsons’ staff broadcast their relative freedom betrays their tacit knowledge that their content fits right in with the Fox system, and that the decision to leave them alone comes from News Corp, not the Gracie bungalow. For the last ten to twelve years, the point has been nearly moot; the content of the show has hardly been racy, even for network TV. If the network had the power to interfere with the show, and I believe they do, they wouldn’t need to. The Simpsons people are falling over themselves to make episodes promoting 24— what reason would Fox have to censor The Simpsons? More than ever, they’re playing for Fox’s team.
As they demonstrated by green-lighting The Simpsons and then leaving them alone, occasionally network executives make smart decisions.
MATT GROENING (to Rolling Stone, November 28, 2002): It’s tough to run a network these days, but just to show how misguided they are: I pitched a spin-off of The Simpsons—imagine the idea of Teen Homer or Li’l Homer’s Adventures. Fox wasn’t interested, which is baffling … Rupert Murdoch might not have been happy with his henchmen, if he knew about it.
One forum where Fox has been able to effectively assert dominance is the Internet. Like most television, film, and music executives, the suits at Fox failed to catch on to how they could use the Internet to their advantage. They saw it only as a new way for people to infringe on their copyright, pursuing the smallest fan sites for using sounds or images from the show. While Fox has relaxed in recent years, realizing the benefit and free advertising the web has handed their products, they are still vigilant and resolvedly behind the times. While all of South Park’s episodes are offered for free online viewing by Comedy Central, Fox still aggressively prohibits YouTube and other video-sharing services from showing even Simpsons clips, never mind entire episodes.o
JOUNI PAAKKINEN, administrator, The Simpsons Archive: Fox did not greet this fan enthusiasm [on the Internet] with pure joy. In fact, they started to send out cease-and-desist letters, demanding site owners remove all the material they considered infringing. Usually this meant multimedia, especially video and sound clips, but sometimes even links to other Simpsons sites were regarded as illegal. This action left many sites crippled. For a while, the atmosphere was really grim and fans didn’t feel that they were appreciated at all.
ERIC WIRTANEN, founder, NoHomers.net: I had a huge fan site from 1998 to 2002, and I received probably seven cease-and-desist letters. The wording in some of those letters was just so frightening I eventually had to give up. I had screen grabs, sound bytes, wallpaper.
Gradually I removed everything, bowing to their wishes, but they just kept going after me until I couldn’t take it anymore. They forced me to remove the advertisements I had on the page, which kept it afloat. I wasn’t making any money; I had no other way to pay for the site. I did not want to be involved in a lawsuit, being a poor college student. I had no choice but to take it down.
JOUNI PAAKKINEN: Eventually, instead of banning everything, Fox laid out some ground rules and the sites that have followed them have lately been left in peace.
Wirtanen’s current site, NoHomers.net, the go-to discussion group for Simpsons fans, has had no such problems. The only letter he received was due to Simpsons fans posting screen grabs with their comments, a problem quickly addressed by the webmasters, who had not even seen the offending post. The more interesting aside here is that Fox is obviously monitoring for the most minute infringements. They are literally scanning discussion forums on the web, to see if a fan is posting an unlicensed image of Bart with his or her comment on an episode.
