In 1989, Al Jean took a job as one of the first writers on a show about a yellow cartoon family. Sure, the show was immediately successful as it was controversial (then-First Lady Barbara Bush called it the "the dumbest thing [she] had ever seen"), but none of the creators never thought it would last.
"I was afraid that it would be a flash in the pan because I wondered how anything could sustain that much attention," Jean told me last week.
By Season Three, when the show had won a half-dozen Emmys and Jean had taken over as showrunner, he was a little more optimistic: The Simpsons could "maybe" go 20 seasons, Jean told an interviewer in the early -'90s. Ten seasons later, the episode "Gump Roast" ended with the joke, "They'll never stop The Simpsons."
"What's funny is that that episode aired at a time when people were saying we were probably near to the end," Jean said. Fourteen years later, The Simpsons has just been renewed for a historic 29th and 30th season, making it the longest-running scripted TV show of all time. To put that in perspective, FXX is airing every single episode of The Simpsons consecutively in the longest TV marathon of all time. It will take 13 days.
That's nearly 300 hours of non-stop Simpsons beginning at 12 p.m. ET on November 24 and ending at 12 a.m. ET on December 7. That's all 600 episodes in order. Homer will become a monorail conductor, an astronaut, a plow driver, a boxer, a Kwik-E-Mart clerk, the voice of Poochie, a bodyguard, and a smuggler of various vices (beer, sugar, prescription drugs). Marge will groan and gamble and go on the lam. Lisa will become a vegetarian. Bart will avoid death at the hand of Sideshow Bob on multiple occasions. Maggie will shoot Mr. Burns. Bleeding Gums Murphy will die. Maude will die. Hundreds of stories making thousands of jokes and a literal lifetime of laughs will be condensed into 13 days.
Ahead of the marathon, I caught up with Simpsons executive producer Al Jean to talk about what's in store for the show's historic 29th and 30th season, how the show predicted President Trump, and the one thing he refuses to let happen to the world's favorite yellow family.
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65Gh-DgO92k&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
ESQ: Thanks for chatting with me today. I'm going watch as much of the marathon as I can next week.
Al Jean: We did studies of the last one, which did great in the ratings, but they showed that people who watched it maybe watched maybe 20 episodes maximum.
In a row? Or total? Like, did they take breaks?
The average person watched 20 total. I mean, people weren't really watching every single one. It would be very hard to. So you can just catch a whole different chunk and it's going to have all of the first 600 episodes, which is exciting. I think Thanksgiving is a holiday where you get the time off but there's not that much to do. People shop online now, so just put The Simpsons on in the background.
I know that's our plan. How long do you think you could watch The Simpsons total with no breaks?
I think the record is 85 hours or something?
You personally?
We did—well, I didn't—the show did at the 500th and, you know, they had bathroom breaks and stuff. But after 85 hours, the doctor said, "okay, that's enough." [Laughs]
That's hilarious you had a doctor on hand for that. Also, congratulations on 30 seasons. I mean—that's a historic moment for you guys. How do you feel about that milestone?
It's very exciting, and I guarantee that we'll be doing an Episode 666, which will air right before Halloween. It'll be a Halloween show, so that'll be great. And then, in terms of 30 seasons, it might be the end, but it very well might not. So I have no idea what we'll be doing. We always just want to make the show funny and keep its future open for anybody that comes along. So that's my plan so far.
So back when you were starting out, would it have ever crossed your mind that you'd be at this point?
Never. Never 30. There is an interview I did when it was, like, Season Three when I said maybe 20 years. What happened in the beginning was that the show was so immensely popular. I had worked on Alf, that show was on Season Season when it was Top 10, and after four years it was off the air. There was another show, Mork and Mindy, that had an audience of a lot of kids. And that was a huge hit, but then disappeared. I was afraid that it would be a flash in the pan because I wondered how anything could sustain that much tension. We were running Seasons Three and Four, and the people that followed—I mean, we just paid so much time and attention to the show that I guess helped make it live as long as it has.
When I saw the news about 30 seasons, I immediately thought of "They'll Never Stop The Simpsons," that song from the clip show. And that was, like, a decade ago.
Well, what's funny is that that episode aired at a time when people were saying we were probably near to the end. And now that less than half-way through the tunnel. I mean, some things that seem forever have come and gone. But I'm just glad. It's a terrific cast, it's a terrific place to work, I can't imagine a better writing environment, so that makes me happy. You don't say, "Oh, I'm going to grab another five years." You just say, "I just want to make the next episode really good." And the ratings are actually up this year from last year. The whole landscape has changed, what's considered a good rating is obviously different for everybody than it was 30 years ago, but our numbers are really good.
Yeah, and one thing I always think about—especially watching some of those early episodes, and like you were talking about—is if the show had debuted in 2016. Do you think you would have been able to do a lot of what you did?
Well, but it will be running—this marathon—and people will, I think like last time, be watching it. It holds up surprisingly well.
Oh, totally.
I mean, not everything. But as opposed to one of my favorite shows, The Honeymooners, where there's this incredible sexism, where he's gong, "I'm going to hit you and you're going to go to the moon." I don't think we have that much that has that sort of datedness to it. There are shows that were talking about current events, like South Park, but we were always trying to talk about things that were going to be true in a year or two years. And I think it makes the show a lot more timeless.
Right, yeah. Like especially so many of those stories I watch now, and you can connect with those any time.
Yeah, like the monorail story. I think we would do it again today if it hadn't been done.
I loved that you guys pointed out that you were right about Trump the other week. How did you guys feel about inadvertently being right about that?
You know, it's a little sad. I hope for the best. I love America, but it's a little sad that something you put in a show as a joke because it was so crazy came true. I'm not even making a comment there— I'm just telling you the fact. This whole year has been just things I never thought I'd see. I mean, the whole campaign. So I just, I hope for the best and we'll continue to do what we do.
I know that Homer's voted for Obama and Romney and was leaning toward Hillary this season, but I feel like people would kind of compare a lot of those Trump supporters to Homer.
Well, we had a joke in the one where Marge said, "You've got to vote for Hillary," where he was like, "Of course we know who we're voting for. Trump, right?" And then Marge said, "No." And, yeah, I think that is a representation. I know some studies show that people who voted for Trump didn't tell pollsters. But if they said, "Who's your neighbor voting for," they would say Trump.
I feel like a lot of people could compare Homer to Trump himself. You know, the kind of guy who "fails up" or does something so ridiculous.
Yeah, except Homer wasn't born with $20 million, so.
I mean, statistically, after 600 episodes, you're bound to say something that will come to happen. But obviously a lot of people like to talk about how often you guys get things right. What would you attribute that to?
You know, I think it is a little bit of what you said before, just in seeing coincidences. There's usually a logical explanation. For Trump, it was that he was talking about running for president as a reform party candidate in 2000. So the idea that he would be running for president was not a complete [fiction]—it was a joke that had a basis. And, you know, we predicted that Germany would win the World Cup because we thought it would be funny if Brazil lost in our show. And then, if they lost, Germany was the likeliest winner. So that made sense, too. The one that was really odd—and I can't understand how this happened, it was so bizarre—in our New York show before, in 1998, there was a pamphlet that said, "New York on $9 a day," and then the World Trade Towers were right behind the nine, and it looked like 9/11. If you had designed something to reflect it, you couldn't have made a design that would've made it look any clearer. So that one—that spooks me to this day. That is really odd.
So it's like a combination of just randomly being right and also stuff that you kind of saw coming.
Well, here's an example. I wrote an episode where I included a book, Curious George and the Ebola Virus. But there was a movie called Outbreak about Ebola that I had seen. So that's where I got the idea. It wasn't like I had, you know, discovered this disease that no one had ever heard of [Laughs] and put it in the show. So there's a lot of things like that. But as I said, that one inadvertent 9/11 reference is the one that's really bizarre.
The episode where Apu gets his green card seems so perfect for this last election. Quimby is re-running for mayor, I think, and he makes it all about immigration. And it just seems so perfect for this current election, and past elections too, where that's become an issue.
That one. And there's one somewhat recently that I'm proud of called "Coming to Homerica" where they built a wall. It was built by Ogdenville people. And that one holds up really well. But, again in both of those cases, these issues existed at the time they were writing.
And, as you were saying, it's kind of a timeless problem, but audiences can go back and be like, "The Simpsons were right about this again."
One really funny article I read during the last marathon was someone who watched the episodes from the beginning said, "I think the writers always hated Maude Flanders and were planning to kill her, because she's always spoiling everybody's fun. She's really unpleasant and never does anything particularly helpful." And it wasn't that we were planning it from the beginning, but it was really funny to read.
So when did that come in? Killing Maude.
That just came up in the episode as it occurred. It wasn't before. But the guy thought... Well, the other thing that people go, when Homer went into a coma during the first clip show, he's been in a coma the whole time. I can categorically say that's not true.
Speaking of fan theories, I saw a great one on Reddit suggesting that the final episode of The Simpsons could be leading into what the intro is: they're all going home to watch a TV show.
Oh, I saw that, too. Well, my idea that I tweeted the last marathon was that, at the end of the last show, whenever that would be, should be that they're going to the Christmas pageant that they went to in the first show. So that the whole show is a loop and that there is no end—it's just a continuous story.
Oh, that's genius. You can still do it now.
Good. No, I just—you know, I'm just trying not to ever have it end.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, how long do you think, feasibly, you could go until you have to make this loop episode for the final episode?
Oh, I don't know. Definitely through 30. And then, what would happen after 30 is they'd look at the ratings and negotiate with the cast—assuming the cast still wanted to do it. And if they did, then I would bet they'd do another four seasons, like 34. But if, for some reasons, the ratings were down—which certainly doesn't look like that's going to happen—or the cast didn't want to do it, which is beyond my control, then that would be the two reasons why it would end.
So considering it keeps going, after 600 episodes and 30 seasons, where do you turn to material that you wouldn't have a decade ago?
Well, as they say, this year has seen so many thing I never saw before. You know, we have an episode where Burns starts a for-profit college, Burns University, and was ripping people off. There's a lot of things that happen that give us ideas.
Is there anything that, assuming maybe The Simpsons goes for 60 seasons, is there anything that it will never do?
Well, the biggest thing about the show is that Homer loves Marge and Marge loves Homer, so they're never really going to break up. I don't think in the run of the show that we will ever permanently age them or change the template. I think that we'll do an episode where they're older or younger, but I wouldn't do anything that would really make the show seem different from the one it's always been. I also think, say the show ended in season 30, I would say everything else gets rebooted, so I'm sure that The Simpsons would in 10 or 20 years, at least. But in terms of the show, I wouldn't see changing anything about it. I would just do it as long as everybody wanted to in the same format until we finished.
So there'd be no Poochie?
No, to me, you very occasionally have a sad fact, like Marcia Wallace passes away. But other than that, it really is very similar to the show in Season Four—the characters, the relationships. There isn't much difference in the way the template works.
And for the hour-long show, obviously that's brand new for you guys, but even just production wise, what challenges does that introduce?
The biggest challenge is always having a story that sustains your interest for an hour. You know, the movie was only 80 minutes long [Laughs], and when we had the dome coming over the town, we thought, "OK, so here's something you'll have at the 20-minute mark, so it'll seem like more than just a show about the environment. It'll actually have a real problem that they'll have to solve." And that's the heart of it—just having a story that sustains interest.
Are there any other firsts like that that you've always wanted to try or that you'd be willing to do in the next few seasons?
We're always open. This year we did VR, which was just a general first for any television show. And we did live animation, which is also a first. This year we've really experimented, and so there's no reason we won't continue to.
I thought it was great when Frank "Grimey" Grimes came back this season. Is there anybody that you personally would want to see come back, even if it was just in a Treehouse of Horror capacity?
It's too bad that the actor that played "Bleeding Gums" Murphy passed away, because I would've loved to do one more with that character. It's too bad even Marcia Wallace is gone. And those are the ones that I miss. But in terms of characters from old shows, if we really want to see them again, we do.
