Thirty years ago this month, America’s favorite animated family made their debut as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. To celebrate, CoS will be broadcasting live from Springfield all week with a slew of Simpsons features. Today, Andrew Bloom looks back on the showrunners responsible for making The Simpsons so amazing, enduring, and endearing.
Too many talented writers have passed through the doors of The Simpsons to count. From folks who’ve gone on to create great television shows of their own like David X. Cohen (Futurama) and Greg Daniels (The Office, King of the Hill) to stellar longtime contributors like John Swartzwelder and George Meyer to those who’ve broken out as stars in their own right like Conan O’Brien, the writers’ room of The Simpsons has seen a nearly unmatched array of superb comic scribes contributing their wit and humor to the program.
But in the nearly 30 years The Simpsons has been on the air, only nine individuals (with one honorable mention) have served as showrunners for this hallowed and hilarious series. They’re the first names you see in the credits after the end of an episode, a sign that however a story began, however it may have changed and been shaped by the show’s fantastic team of writers, animators, and performers, the buck ultimately stopped with them. These nine people were responsible for shepherding each episode from the first pitch to the final cut, and it makes their contributions to The Simpsons unique, even among the scores of creative people who make the show possible.
Indeed, for the many cooks that have passed through The Simpsons’ kitchen, each showrunner’s tenure reflects the style and sensibilities of the people in charge. At a time before showrunners were notable as major figures in the world of television, these nine creative individuals left their distinctive marks on each season they supervised. From the down-to-earth family drama of the show’s early going to the more wild and wacky bent it would take on in its later seasons, each development can be traced back, in no small part, to the particular individuals supervising the process.
So, it behooves us to look back at these nine showrunners and see the ways in which the different eras of this seminal show bear their distinctive fingerprints. Whether they started in the world of cartooning, classic sitcoms, late-night talk shows, or The Simpsons itself, all of them would come together to collectively produce one of, if not the greatest television show of all time. These nine people each brought something different to the table but created a diverse-yet-unified series that each can call their own.
Matt Groening, Sam Simon, and James L. Brooks (Seasons 1-2)
You may also remember them from: Life in Hell, Futurama, Taxi, Cheers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Terms of Endearment
Matt Groening was an underground cartoonist who managed to make waves with his cynical Life in Hell comic strip, suddenly finding himself with the chance to break into television. Sam Simon was a well-credentialed TV writer, with experience as a showrunner for Taxi and a writer-producer on Cheers. James L. Brooks was a well-respected writer-producer himself, having helped create pioneering series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Room 222 that offered different sorts of lead characters and broke new ground for television. Together, these three unlikely bedfellows set a new standard for what an animated show, a sitcom, and television writ large could be.
That achievement, however, took a combination of their collective sensibilities, and it was not always an easy mix. Groening and Simon would often clash behind the scenes. Groening was the anti-establishment disruptor, having made his way up through the world of alt-weeklies, ready to shake up what was acceptable in a sitcom setting. Simon was a TV stalwart who tried to mold Groening’s ideas into a package that would be bold, but still accessible to the average viewer.
That combination led to discord when things fell apart, but beautiful harmony when it worked. It was Groening who thought up the famous chalkboard and couch gags, while it was Simon who differentiated Lisa as The Simpsons’ brainy misfit and deepened the dynamics of the family as a whole. The two men never had a great relationship, but that push and pull — between Groening’s sardonic wit and novel take on the nuclear family and Simon’s sharp understanding of the importance of character and the demands of episodic storytelling — resulted in a show that fit the sitcom format even as it was transcending it.
Brooks, the veteran producer who already had a collection of big successes under his belt, also provided one of the most important elements to making The Simpsons into what it would eventually become — protection from network interference. He negotiated a provision that kept the show relatively free of FOX’s network notes, which allowed for the sort of creative freedom that made the great work from all the other people on this list possible. With the clout that came from having written and directed the Oscar-winning film Terms of Endearment, Brooks helped create an environment where the show’s writers could make unusual and uncompromising choices, just as his other earlier boundary-pushing shows had.
The styles of all three men are reflected in those early episodes. While these were the show’s breakout years, where Bart became emblazoned both on thousands of bootleg T-shirts and on the minds of pearl-clutchers worried about the show’s influence on American society, it’s a quieter, more down-to-earth version of Springfield than would become the standard later on. There are fewer outrageous situations (though not none). Homer is dim, but not a dolt. And, most importantly, there are fewer laugh-out-loud moments, but more subtly funny, cutting observations about modern life.
The show’s sense of humor was more in line with Groening’s Life in Hell comics, with wry commentary on family, politics, and religion that would set the stage for the show’s “no punches pulled, no target off limits” mentality. The characters themselves were more grounded, the situations they faced more typical, even as the show approached them in an anything-but-typical fashion. While to the modern eye, those first installments can seem like a test run for what we now think of as The Simpsons, these three men set a tone and developed those characters and their world with a balance of Groening’s cynicism, Simon’s character-focused comedy, and Brooks’s own devotion to groundbreaking TV.
Al Jean and Mike Reiss (Seasons 3-4)
You may also remember them from: The Critic, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Queer Duck, Teen Angel
The Simpsons itself has joked about the number of Harvard alums in its writers’ room, but when Al Jean and Mike Reiss took over as showrunners in Season 3, it was the ascendance of two men who met there as freshman. Both wrote for The Harvard Lampoon, the school’s humor magazine, which would also provide a springboard for fellow Simpsons writers like Conan O’Brien, Jeff Martin, and Jon Vitti and offered a space for the two men to hone their comedic voices before they hit it big.
Their efforts as college students quickly led to jobs in television, writing for shows as diverse as Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, ALF, and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. That got the attention of Sam Simon, who brought the pair on as the very first staff writers hired for the nascent series. With the benefit of writing for the show from the very beginning, Jean and Reiss truly understood these characters and their offbeat ecosystem, which allowed the pair to take the show in familiar but novel directions when they became showrunners.
It was a daunting task. Jean in particular remarked on how much pressure they felt not to “screw up this thing everyone loves.” But that anxiety led to repeated, devoted script rewrites and some of the series’ very best episodes. Jean and Reiss presided over the era of the show where The Simpsons became The Simpsons, offering the defining take on Springfield and almost everyone who called it home.
Homer fully and finally became the well-meaning dope who could save the nuclear power plant with a game of “eeny meeny miny moe” and spend 10 minutes daydreaming about The Land of Chocolate. The family dynamic solidified with Bart softening a bit from his hell-raiser roots, Lisa doubling down on her plight as the nerdiest Simpson, and Marge seeking occasional escapes from her put upon domestic existence. It’s the era that cemented what The Simpsons was and is in the popular consciousness.
In short, this is the period of the show that Family Guy’s Peter Griffin was referring to when he drunkenly confessed, “We act like we didn’t take a lot from The Simpsons, but we took a lot from The Simpsons.” This is where the show’s penchant for classic movie parodies and cultural references of all stripes took hold. It’s the point where loonier gags and more absurd humor began to seep into the series’s DNA. It’s where guest stars started to become a more consistent presence, whether they were musicians like Michael Jackson, Tom Jones, and Sting; legends like Bob Hope, Elizabeth Taylor, and Johnny Carson; or a collection of MLB all-stars.
It’s also the incredible stretch of the show that gave us the Flaming Moe, Colonel Homer, Unkie Herb, Kamp Krusty, Mr. Plow, the Monorail, and “I Choo Choo Choose You.” In this era, the series found the creative voice that all future installments of the show would be measured against. As much as Groening, Simon, and Brooks set the stage for the show, it’s Jean and Reiss who took that stellar early work and carried it forward into one of the strongest, most-defining periods of the superlative series.
David Mirkin (Seasons 5-6)
You may also remember him from: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Three’s Company, Newhart, Get a Life, Heartbreakers
The end of Season 4 saw a mass exodus from The Simpsons’ writers’ room, with the vast majority of those who had established and developed the series moving on to other projects. That left incoming showrunner David Mirkin with the unenviable task of not only following a spate of the show’s best-received episodes, but replenishing the cupboards with writers who could continue in the style that had proved to be so successful.
Mirkin, thankfully, was used to facing challenges and proved up to the task. Though interested in writing from a young age, he originally went to college for electrical engineering, only to drop out and make his way into the entertainment industry through stand-up comedy. He would cut his teeth on network television, but ran into trouble when trying to get his own series off the ground. Mirkin squabbled with FOX over a pair of his own ill-fated shows: Get a Life, a sitcom starring Chris Elliott, and The Edge, a sketch show he created with his then-partner Julie Brown. Network executives didn’t quite understand Mirkin’s surreal sense of humor, and content objections and reduced budgets made both projects short-lived.
But free from such network interference, Mirkin brought The Simpsons to new, delightfully-out-there places and heightened the goofier and more irreverent side of the show’s comic stylings. In his only episode as the sole-credited writer, Mirkin sent Homer into space. That’s emblematic of his “take no prisoners” approach to the show’s reality and the outré gags that came to the fore under his watch.
This was the period in the show where Mr. Burns might go to increasingly outlandish lengths to recover a beloved teddy bear that had, in turn, been owned by Charles Lindbergh, Adolf Hitler, and the crew of the U.S.S. Nautilus. It’s the period where Bart won a pet elephant, the family managed to offend all of Australia, half of Springfield went on a crusade to recapture a treasured lemon tree, and The Simpsons themselves were attacked by a swarm of killer robots. It’s safe to say that the outer bounds for acceptable strangeness and surreal comedy on the show had been thoroughly stretched.
But Mirkin’s tenure as showrunner is underrated for the amount of emotion he and his cohort managed to pack in amid the wackiness. After all, Mirkin’s watch also included Homer pleading to Marge that no one could ever need her the way he does, Lisa leaving her fiancé because he could not understand how much she loved her family, the whole town coming together to sing “Que Sera, Sera” with Ned Flanders in the face of annihilation, and last but certainly not least, Homer remembering to “Do it for her”. While there’s little doubt that the show grew more willing to go big and go weird under Mirkin, his version of The Simpsons didn’t forget the real feeling that balanced out those memorable, outsized gags.
Perhaps most importantly, he brought on the next generation of great Simpsons writers. It was David Mirkin who hired the folks that would go on to run their own stellar animated shows like Greg Daniels and David X. (née S.) Cohen. He picked up future showrunner Mike Scully and made him a fixture on the writing staff. And though Mirkin inherited the pair, he was the one who recommended that Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein take over the show after Season 6. As much as Mirkin left his mark on The Simpsons with his sense of humor, he also built the team that sustained the show through the end of its golden years, and that is as much his Simpsons legacy as his off-the-wall jokes.
Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein (Seasons 7-8)
You may also remember them from: Futurama, Mission Hill, The Cleveland Show, Portlandia, Gravity Falls
Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein have been making comedy together since they were in the eighth grade. The pair founded a humor magazine in high school and grew accustomed to making people laugh together from then on. Unfortunately, all that experience as a team didn’t help them find much success early in their careers. Each of them struggled to find work for several years, until eventually, a Seinfeld spec script caught the eye of Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who brought the pair onto the show’s writing staff in Season 3. The two men would go on to pen some of The Simpsons’ most iconic episodes as staff writers, including “Bart vs. Australia” and the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” two-parter.
But it was not until The Simpsons’ seventh season that the pair became showrunners. In that role, they intended to pull back from David Mirkin’s wilder efforts and focus more on the family. While Mirkin, Jean, and Reiss had all expanded the world of The Simpsons and devoted many memorable episodes to side characters and guest stars who became just as vital to Springfield as The Simpsons themselves, Oakley and Weinstein wanted to turn that attention back to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. They aimed to tell more character-focused stories, founded on the relationships between the show’s central figures.
The two also oversaw some of the series’s most experimental episodes. Oakley and Weinstein idolized The Simpsons’ third season and aimed to emulate that era’s tone and sensibility. But they also carved out the time and space in the writers’ room to try different sorts of episodes that went beyond even Mirkin’s experimentation.
Sometimes, that innovation came in the guise of format-bending installments like “22 Short Films About Springfield”, an episode with tons of hilarious, semi-connected vignettes that gave each character their two minutes in the spotlight. Sometimes, it came in the form of a high-concept premise, like “Homer’s Enemy”, a dark but audacious episode where the show examined the Kafkaesque horror of what it would be like for a real person to experience Springfield and its most dimwitted yet improbably successful resident. Sometimes, it led to self-referential episodes like “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”, which laid bare the issues of network pressures and the show’s advancing age in comic tones for all the world to see.
At the time, Oakley and Weinstein believed that the show was winding down, not realizing it was merely rounding out its first 10 years of what will be a minimum 30-season run. That assumption meant they were willing to try new ideas that broke the mold for typical Simpsons episodes and tested the limits of the format. But it also meant that they wanted to do justice to the family and to the series that they’d admired before they were ever a part of it. Their reign may have offered exaggerated events like Homer working for a Silicon Valley-tinged Bond villain or experiencing hallucinations brought on by Guatemalan insanity peppers, but it also addressed social issues like vegetarianism, immigration, and homosexuality, while taking time out to give Homer an emotional reunion with his mother and having Bart cheer on his sister in the biggest challenge of her life.
While occasionally the cracks in the foundation would show during this period, it was the era of The Simpsons where the different sensibilities of the prior six-year run were distilled into one incredibly diverse but cohesive whole. Oakley and Weinstein combined the down-to-earth bent of the show’s early years, the family-focused comedy and emotion that gave the show ballast thereafter, and the ballsy, absurd humor of their immediate predecessor. The result was two seasons that wonderfully represent all the different shades of The Simpsons.
