Not that ratings matter or anything, but last night's Simpsons episode got less viewers than the first episode of the quickly-cancelled Sit Down, Shut Up (5.11 million versus 5.2 million) [Simpsons Channel, Wikipedia]]]>
Not that ratings matter or anything, but last night's Simpsons episode got less viewers than the first episode of the quickly-cancelled Sit Down, Shut Up (5.11 million versus 5.2 million) [Simpsons Channel, Wikipedia]]]>
According to longtime director David Silverman's Twitter, The Simpsons did a Coca-Cola commercial for a sporting event called the Superbowl [Twitter]]]>
The Simpsons turn 20 today (that is, if you don't count the Christmas special as the first episode and completely ignore the original shorts from The Tracey Ullman Show), and there's been a number of retrospectives to mark the occasion. An oft-repeated claim in many histories is that creator Matt Groening, fearing the loss of his Life in Hell characters, came up with the Simpsons in fifteen minutes before a meeting with Ullman producer James L. Brooks. But the characters actually originated nearly 40 years ago, in an unpublished novel Groening wrote in high school:
Chat Transcript (April 6, 1999):
Question hobgoblin: How old were you when you first came up with the idea for "The Simpsons"? I know that the show has been on for a long time.
[...]
Matt_G "The Simpsons" originated in high school.
Matt_G I wrote a bleak little novel called "The Mean Little Kids" starring a teenage Bart Simpson with buckteeth and a very bad complexion.
How quickly did The Simpsons gel in your mind?I needed to come up with an idea really quickly. In the back of my mind was the idea of doing something that might possibly end up spinning off into its own TV show, so I created a family which I thought would lend itself to a lot of different kinds of stories. In high school I had written a novel, a sort of a very sour Catcher in the Rye, self pitying, adolescent novel starring Bart Simpson as a very troubled teenager. I took that family and transferred it, made them younger, and then drew. It took about 15 minutes to design the characters the first time out.
Were they all the same characters that we now know and love?
Yes, but they've been transformed.Why didn't you leave Bart as an adolescent?
TV does children really badly, and I thought there was room for something different. Teenagers are already running rampant on television, but kids are done very unrealistically in sitcoms. Sometimes, a particular character gels with an audience and becomes the star.Was Bart at the center all along?
Yeah. The rest of the Simpsons in my original conception were in a struggle to be normal and Bart was the one who thought that being normal was boring.
And now you know... the rest of the story.
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When asked how long The Simpsons has left, Fox bigwig Kevin Reilly said "We have it for two more seasons and then we'll sit down and see where we are," leaving the door open to the possibility that the show may not be renewed during the next contract renegotiations. [iF Magazine]]]>
Fox Entertainment President: "We've got one other show we're contemplating with Seth... but our plan is not all Seth, all the time." [Freakin' Sweet News]]]>
Simpsons Channel has returned from the dead, and it's mad as hell!!! In a departure from the normally staid tone of the site, site owner Adam Wolf posted 10 reasons why readers should not buy the recently released Season 20 DVD/Blu-ray set. He even encourages readers to BREAK THE LAW by providing a link to a torrent site. Is nothing sacred??? [Simpsons Channel]]]>
I'm going to go out on a limb and declare that The Simpsons will finally, mercifully end in 2011, after twenty-two seasons.
2009 was the year of "fixing" beloved Simpsons things that weren't broke to begin with, starting with the godawful new HD title sequence and ending with an iPhone version of the Simpsons Arcade Game from 1991, one of the very few Simpsons video games that is still remembered fondly.
What's different: The storyline (no more Smithers stealing Maggie for some bizarre reason), you can only play as Homer, you can slap him to revive him, new design (as far as I can tell, it looks like a modern episode and not all pixelated), and characters/locations that weren't around or as iconic in 1991 (including the Republican Party Headquarters and Rich Texan).
What's the same: The basic controls (I think?), and the dated Binky-with-a-ghetto-blaster level transistions (which I like). [United Simpsons]
]]>Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Morrie, who had a cameo in last week's episode:
[Detroit Free Press]]]>Months passed. Christmas. New Year's. And last Sunday, I was in the car on my way to a birthday party when someone called and said, "Hey, your 'Simpsons' episode is on."
And I said, "Again, please?"
They never called to tell me.
So I missed it.
The Simpsons has been on for so long now that the world itself has changed around them and as a result the characters no longer epitomize what they're supposed to be satirizing. Homer and Marge are exquisitely crafted late model Baby Boomers; they came of age in the seventies and became adults in the eighties. He's a union guy; she's a housewife; they have cranky World War II generation parents, they go to church out of a sense of duty and their kids lead unstructured, small town lives. They are run of the mill late 1980s Americans, that is when they were created and that is the context in which they best fit.]]>
[...]
The show is on Season 20, but culturally speaking it's going to enter its fourth decade next year. The characters can always be drawn the same way, but that doesn't keep them from showing their age.
Back in 1993, when David Letterman headed over to CBS to start The Late Show, The Simpsons paid tribute with a not-very-funny couch gag (see screenshot here). Why didn't they do a similar tribute when famous Simpsons alum Conan O'Brien took over The Tonight Show??? And don't give me that "they couldn't because it started in June" B.S. excuse. Also why did they choose Letterman over Conan for a not-funny-at-all segment last night?? (Don't give me that "because Letterman has the Top 10 list" crap.) These two things add up to one conclusion: The Simpsons is snubbing Conan!!! What is the reason? A source tells rubbercat.net/simpsons that producer Al Jean has had it in for Conan ever since Conan gave him a wedgie during a staff meeting in '92... No denial from Jean as of yet... Developing...]]>
"Nobody's perfect," Mr. Jean said in a telephone interview. "But I don't think we have terrible secrets to hide."
John Ortved, author of The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History:
The story ran in the August 2007 issue, and by the fall I'd signed on with Faber and Faber to expand the material into a book. When word of this got out, [executive producer James L.] Brooks sent a letter to every current Simpsons employee, and all the former ones he thought mattered, asking them not to speak to me. The writers' agents sent denial after denial for interview requests and eventually stopped responding altogether. When I asked a mutual acquaintance to put in a query with Ari Emanuel, chief of the Endeavor agency (now WME Entertainment) - where many of the Simpsons writers were represented - Emanuel told my friend he couldn't even begin to talk about it. James L. Brooks was on the warpath.]]>
L'Osservatore Romano on Tuesday congratulated the show on its 20th anniversary, praising its philosophical leanings as well as its stinging and often irreverent take on religion.
If you're making a supposedly subversive show and the Vatican praises it, you are doing something wrong [Chicago Tribune]
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