Courtesy of FOX.
Since its debut in 1989 - and even earlier if you count the shorts - The Simpsons has gone onto become a staple of not just television, but pop culture itself. Everyone knows the fictional yellow family from Springfield, and many generations have grown up with them. That place in the culture hasn’t waned over the years, either.
Most remarkable is that - with a few exceptions - the team working on the show today remains the same as those who have been there since the beginning. That’s because there’s a loyalty for the characters, and it’s fascinating to watch how they’ve adapted with the times. There’s both a timelessness and a constant evolution to this world that was created decades ago.
This year is the 35th anniversary of the show that broke new ground upon its premiere. To celebrate, we recently spoke to some of the creatives behind the show including Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson), former showrunner David Mirkin, and writer Mike Scully.
David Mirkin
Everyone always talks about predictions. Is there anything you’d like to see come true?
Lisa Simpson becoming President is a prediction that I think would be nice [to see come true]. Or at least a Lisa Simpson type becoming President would be very, very nice. That’s been a disappointment for sure. In the next 100 years for sure. That’s our next prediction!
How do you keep the job still feeling fresh after all these years?
The greatest thing about The Simpsons and comedy is it’s sort of based on things going wrong and falling apart. And the world has been so cooperative in continuing to fall apart and be a complete shit show over and over again. So we never run out of material. If people start getting it together and start behaving properly and everything starts to work, we’d be instantly canceled. That’s the only way to stop The Simpsons.
What do you attribute the longevity of the show to? Where it can be passed down from generation to generation?
It’s the most dense show in terms of jokes and moments. It moves faster than anything else. So there’s always something for everybody. So there would be lots of jokes for adults and then lots of jokes for kids maybe seconds after. It’s every kind of humor there is. Verbal humor, physical humor, satire. Everything is crammed in because life is everything. A show that’s about one thing or one tone never interested me. So one week the show can be murder mystery or a horror show or a romantic comedy. Completely it can change forms at all times, and that’s always what excited me about the show.
Yeardley Smith
Do you still feel excited when you get to the table and see a script for the first time?
We have the best writers in the business. And I really feel like in the last 6 or 7 years they’ve sort of found a new vein of storylines and ways to tell the story and get the characters to interact. So every week it’s like “What’re we going to do now?”
What’s the overall process like for you?
We get the script the night before, so there’s not a lot of lead time. And then it takes about 8 or 9 months to animate an episode. So while we don’t get a lot of time for the reading of the script, then there’s many pieces of the puzzle in putting an episode together. So we’ll go in and record ADR, record new dialogue if a joke didn’t work or if they get the animatic back and they go “Oh, we had to cut that so now we have to bridge the gap.” So it’s pretty involved.
Because it’s animated, are you able to watch the show every Sunday night and remove yourself and your performance from the equation? Do you enjoy watching it?
I love Lisa Simpson. She’s so sweet and cute and funny and charming. And so when I watch her, it’s not like watching myself. But if she does something that makes me laugh out loud, I’m like ‘Oh yeah. I was apart of that. That was really fun.’
Everyone always talks about predictions. Is there anything you’d like to see come true?
World peace. I think the joke is that we often predict things that are terrible that nobody wants. But we also predict things that don’t come true and nobody talks about those. They aren’t predictions per se, but when they come true in real life it feels like we predicted in. But it was actually part of some organic storyline or some crazy B story.
Mike Scully
The show spans so many generations. What do you attribute that to?
It’s a combination of things. First off, there’s always a new generation of kids coming along who discover the show. But as the years have gone on, there’s definitely a lot of parents who loved it as a kid. Even if they’ve stopped watching it, now they’ve got an excuse to start again because they’ve got their kids. And it becomes like a bonding experience.
During the pandemic, I was hearing from parents on Twitter. There was one guy maybe 40 years old saying “This was my favorite show when I was 8 years old. Now I’m watching it with my 8 year old.” And there’s always something new. Because the show has always been part satire of society and the world, there’s always new things going on to mine for stories. You’ve got new attitudes, new crazy shit. And the characters don’t age. You don’t wind up like on some shows where you’ve got a 40 year-old Urkel.
I’ve always wondered about that. Because they don’t age, the timeline has had to shift. For instance, originally Homer and Marge were in high school in the 70’s. Then more recently, we’ll see them in high school in the 90’s. When did you figure out that you had to make those types of changes?
We kind of ignore it. And then every once in a while, we’ll have an idea for an episode where we just kind of twist it and have it make no sense at all with other episodes. There was one episode set in the 90’s, and you just ignore the ages of everybody. But I think Homer and Marge, we established that they graduated high school in 1974, which is when I graduated. I’m 68 now and they’re still 37, 38. It just gives the show a timeless feel.
But we feel like we’ve earned the right to take those leaps of logic when we want to for the sake of the story or more fun for the audience to put them in a more futuristic situation. It took us forever to decide to give the family an answering machine. Like ‘I don’t know. Everyone in the world seems to have one.’ And the same thing when we finally went to the flat screen TV. Everyone had one, but we kind of liked the charm of the old one. At the same time we realized there’s kids watching it. They’re gonna be like ‘What is that?‘