Quickie cut-and-paste job.
By Stephen Thompson
For 11 seasons and 250+ episodes, The Simpsons has been synonymous with
television's sharpest and funniest satire, a body of work with some of the
best moments in the history of the medium. In recent years, the show has
grown increasingly unpredictable, periodically lapsing into outright
absurdity rather than running the risk of recycling old storylines, but it
remains a treasure thanks to some of the best writers and voice actors in
the business. Appearing in Aspen for the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival--where he
appeared with Matt Groening as a host of "The Simpsons Live," the first-ever
public readings of the show by virtually the entire cast--executive producer
Mike Scully spoke to The Onion about the show and its place in his career.
Mike Scully
The Onion: How did you get involved with The Simpsons? You've been with the
show since 1993, right?
Mike Scully: Right. I joined after Season 4. David Mirkin was running the
show at the time, and he was kind enough to hire me. At the time, I thought
I was just getting in under the wire, because I figured the show would last
five, six years--you know, "At least I'll get a couple years in before it's
over." Now, here we are, getting ready for Season 12.
O: Did you ever think it would last this long?
MS: Nobody did. Five years is a good run for a sitcom; seven is good, but
usually it's a couple years of staying past your welcome. So, no, we never
anticipated this. Right now, there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. There
does for me, but not for the show.
O: There do seem to be a lot of people coming and going. How have you stayed
on board as long as you have? It seems like a great jumping-off point.
MS: I did a lot of really crappy sitcoms before I got to The Simpsons. I had
some pretty long stretches of unemployment, a lot of highs and lows, so when
I got there, I really appreciated it. Still, to this day, I savor every
moment: to be on a show that I'd watch anyway, and to actually be proud of a
show instead of lying to your friends when they ask you what show you work
on. There were times when I'd rather say I was unemployed than say what show
I was on. It's a writer's paradise. You have no interference from the studio
or the network, so you really get to do what you want. I know that once I
leave the show, it's not going to be that way. So I'm very happy kind of
milking it to the end. As far as turnover in the staff goes, there are
several key people who have remained with the show: There's [executive
producer] George Meyer. There's John Swartzwelder, who's written almost 50
episodes now. [Executive producer] Al Jean came back, which has been a huge
help. David Mirkin consults on the show, so that gives it continuity. And
people like [executive producer] Ian Maxtone-Graham and [story editor] Ron
Hauge have been there a number of years. They make a huge contribution, and
that keeps the continuity going and allows us to make other changes when
people leave.
"It's a writer's paradise. You have no interference from the studio or the
network, so you really get to do what you want. I know that once I leave the
show, it's not going to be that way."
O: It's weird: The Simpsons is on a major network, yet it still has this
unspoiled quality about it. How have you been able to maintain the integrity
of the show?
MS: Spoiled in what way?
O: Where the network comes in and says you need to bring in...
MS: Oh, bring in a puppy from outer space. [Laughs.] Yeah. Well, it goes
right back to the beginning of the series. When Jim Brooks set it up at Fox,
those were his terms: They couldn't come in and make suggestions. And that's
not to say that their suggestions would have all been bad, but he wanted to
do the show the way he wanted to do it. If he was going to go to the trouble
of launching a prime-time animated show--at the time, Jim was very busy with
movies--he really wanted to make it worth his while. And it paid off. To
this day, every time we start doing a story that I know is really crazy,
like if Bart and Homer think they have leprosy, and you know the network
would say no, it really opens up a lot of areas for you. It's great to have
that complete freedom.
O: You mentioned getting a little bit more outlandish, with leprosy and so
on. The show definitely has gotten a little bit more...
MS: Insane. Yeah. Part of that comes out of the fact that we've been doing
the show for so long--we've done so many stories--that, now, when we sit
down and try to think of new stories, we're constantly thinking of things
we've already done. It's so hard to come up with something a fraction
different. Then you stumble upon an area like leprosy, which everyone knows
is comedy gold. I remember when it was pitched in the room--as a joke, not
as a real pitch--and we all laughed. Then, about an hour later, after
pitching other possibilities for the third act, I remember sitting there
going, "Leprosy, eh?" So we decided to give it a shot.
O: You mentioned working on crappy sitcoms. I remember probably four years
ago, we interviewed [producer] Josh Weinstein, and he was talking about the
shows he'd worked on, like Sunday Best.
MS: I can top those. I did a show called What A Country, with Yakov Smirnoff
and Don Knotts. I used to write jokes for Yakov's stand-up act. I did a show
called Out Of This World, which actually ran for four years. We did almost
100 episodes about a girl whose father lived on another planet, and she was
half-alien. From there I went to a show called Top Of The Heap with Joe
Bologna and Matt LeBlanc. Six episodes, but it felt like 100. The Royal
Family. It was the show Redd Foxx was doing when he passed away. I came in
right after he died.
O: You were involved in the post-Redd Foxx episodes?
MS: Yeah, so I didn't even have a good story. I mean, you do a lot of those
kinds of shows. I did hidden-camera shows. I've been around the block a few
times. Like I said, I really savor The Simpsons, and any time somebody young
comes into the show, if I sense that they're kind of antsy, that they think
this is just a stepping stone and they want to move on, I usually try and
tell 'em, "Hey, it's awful cold out there. You should really appreciate
this, because you'll never have it as good as this again. Never. You might
make more money, but you'll never have this kind of creative freedom again."
O: It's amazing that, because people work on these bad shows, you don't
always know who's got talent and who doesn't.
MS: Well, you've got to pay the bills and you want to get your foot in. The
great shows usually aren't going to look for somebody completely untested,
so you have to kind of get your feet wet doing other shows. And you can
learn a ton of things on a lousy show: You can learn how not to do things,
and you still gain a lot of experience in terms of how to structure a story,
work with actors, and edit a show. You can still learn all that stuff; you
just hope that... The worst thing you can do is get sucked in, where you
take the job thinking, "Oh, this thing is a piece of crap, but it's gonna
pay the bills." But then, at some point, you kind of get sucked in and go,
"Hey, this is pretty good." You lose your perspective. You have to always be
aware when you're writing crap. I think as long as you have that, there's no
shame in doing it. At any given time, you might have five or six really
decent sitcoms on the air, and maybe there are 10 writers per show. That's
maybe 60 or 70 jobs, and you've got 5,000 people trying to get them.
O: If all you've done is crap, how do they know you're good?
MS: You hope they don't look at your résumé, first of all, and that they
just look at your material. Because I couldn't use any scripts from the
shows I'd worked on, I always had samples of other shows; I had a Seinfeld
and a Larry Sanders. The hardest part is to get them to open it, to ignore
your résumé and open the script anyway and take a look. There are a lot of
good writers who get stuck on bad shows, and there are a lot of bad writers
who end up having good careers because their first job was on a really good
show. Even if they get fired, it's on the résumé. You were on Seinfeld and
you just ride that to the next one.
O: One of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, and this would have been
during your tenure, was the "Poochie" episode. [In it, Homer gets a job as
the voice of "Poochie The Rockin' Dog," a new character on the cartoon Itchy
& Scratchy. --ed.] There's that incredible scene where the comic-book guy
refers to the "worst episode ever," and Bart says, "They've given you
thousands of hours of entertainment for free; what could they possibly owe
you?" Watching that, it was like 100 voices behind The Simpsons shouting the
line in unison.
MS: We do that once in awhile. Usually, it's just a shot at the Internet
group, who I've never understood. There are some really passionate fans, and
you always appreciate that because that's what keeps the show going, but I
don't understand the ones who keep watching year after year, only to say
every episode stinks and that the show should be canceled and that I should
be fired. It's like, "Why are you still watching? You've hated it for five
years. I'd give up if I were you, if it's that much of a chore." So, yeah,
we do it. We nudge them once in a while. All done with love, though.
O: It seems like the comic-book guy is there to serve as a little voodoo
doll representing those people.
MS: We actually just used him a week ago, in the episode where Homer and
Bart got the racehorse. When we were breaking the story, we realized we were
in dangerous territory, getting close to the episode with Lisa's pony from
years ago, and we wanted to acknowledge that. So, when it looked like the
Simpsons were going to take the horse home, we had the comic-book guy stand
up and point out how it had happened once before, and Homer just says, "Does
anybody care what this guy says?" Everybody says no, and then we're off and
running with the episode. We used it later in the same episode: At the
racetrack, Marge has a fistful of tickets that she's bet and Lisa says, "I'm
worried that you're getting a gambling problem." And the comic-book guy pops
in again with, "I'm watching you." [Laughs.]
O: How many episodes have you done now?
MS: About 250. Number 250 hasn't aired yet, but we've done 252, I think.
O: Is there ever a point where you see an end to it?
MS: I used to predict, and I was wrong so many times that I just stop now. I
never anticipated seasons 11 or 12. There's talk about going on past 12,
depending on the ratings and if we can keep the quality up.
O: And salaries.
MS: Well, that's another issue. Yeah, so I don't know. My thing is, I always
hope we know when to get out before America is screaming at us to get out.
Once they turn on you, they turn hard. I saw them do it with Seinfeld. That
last season, there was so much Seinfeld-bashing going on: "He's lost his
touch, get off the air, pull the plug." And then Jerry finally says, "We're
gonna take the show off. This'll be it." And all of a sudden, everyone's
like, "No!" [Laughs.] What do you want?
"My thing is, I always hope we know when to get out before America is
screaming at us to get out. Once they turn on you, they turn hard."
O: Every once in a while, shows do sweeps-month gimmick episodes. You just
did a someone-will-die episode.
MS: Oh, yeah, it was probably the worst-kept secret in show biz. Too many
people had access to it. The intention was never to keep it a big secret.
Actually, Al Jean had suggested a promotional campaign saying, "Next Sunday
night, someone will die on The Simpsons. Will it be Homer? Bart? Or Maude
Flanders?" [Laughs.] "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" was a lot easier to keep a
secret, because it was revealed in the very last scene of the show. With
this one, she dies in the first act, so the whole show revolved around it.
O: When did Dr. Marvin Monroe die?
MS: I remember that very well. I was in the room, and we just needed a name
for a hospital. Somebody pitched "Marvin Monroe Memorial Hospital," and we
laughed and put it in the show. Then, later, somebody said, "Well, this
means he'll have to be dead from now on." We just kind of shrugged and said,
"Okay." We didn't see a lot in his future anyway. But it kind of happened in
reverse. We had the joke of the hospital first, then decided he would have
to die because of that.
O: I figured it was Harry Shearer [who played Marvin Monroe] throwing his
weight around and saying, "I don't want to do this one anymore." I remember
reading that it was hard on his voice.
MS: No, no. They never do that. They never complain. And we throw a lot of
stuff at them, not knowing if they can do it or not. Last year, we did our
Super Bowl show, and we needed somebody to do a Vincent Price impression. We
didn't know if anyone could do it, but we just wrote it in and put Dan
[Castellaneta]'s name next to it and said, "Okay, Dan will do it." Not only
did he do it, but it was an amazing impression. It was so funny, we actually
wrote more lines after we heard him do it.
O: You guys do the read-through and then tweak the scripts?
MS: Yeah. They're rewritten throughout--after the read-through and then,
once we get the first animation in, we rewrite again. Later, once it comes
back in color, we rewrite some more.
O: You do rewrites after it comes back in color?
MS: Yeah. It's much more limited at that time, for financial and time
reasons, but we also change some jokes. If we can match the mouth movement
that's already there, we can get rid of one joke and put a new one in.
That's how we sometimes get lucky and can stick in a topical joke. People
are always wondering how you get topical when you're done nine months in
advance. We just get lucky.
