Last Exit to the Writers' Room

The Simpsons writing room, circa 1993

The year is 1993, production on the fourth season of The Simpsons is drawing to a close, and the show's original writing team is beginning to break up. Al Jean and Mike Reiss - a writing partnership who have been with the programme since the very beginning, and have been in charge of the show for the past two production seasons - are giving up the reins of the show to develop their own animated sitcom, The Critic, for ABC. Many others are on the way out: Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky, another duo around since the start, have already left before this production season has even finished. Also gone are Jeff Martin, David M. Stern, Jon Vitti and, most notable of all, series developer and creative supervisor Sam Simon (following pressures on his relationship with co-developers Matt Groening and James L. Brooks). George Meyer hangs around, but in a reduced capacity as 'creative consultant'. Two others stay on full-time, but extremely briefly: Conan O'Brien leaves after only a few episodes of the fifth season when he gets a gig elsewhere, and Frank Mula stays for around half of it. That just leaves John Swartzwelder as the only writer/producer from the original team sticking around full time (the following season he obtained special dispensation to work from home and his credit changed to 'consultant').

However, this would not be the last time most of these people worked on the show. The Critic lasted only one season on ABC, but then got a second chance on FOX, meaning Jean and Reiss were soon working for their old channel again (although they had still stuck around as consultants on The Simpsons). At the time, the makers of The Simpsons had to produce 25 episodes per production season, and this was proving a gruelling task, so two of these episodes were farmed out to the writing team of The Critic (including a highly controversial crossover episode to herald Jay Sherman's arrival on his new network). Jean and Reiss would also produce four episodes as part of a special production cycle in Season 7 (but broadcast as part of Seasons 8 & 9) to help the show reach its annual quota. (Clip shows were also a way of making up the numbers, as were other 'special' episodes not worked on by the usual production team, before ultimately the number of episodes per season was reduced.) Finally, Jean would return to the writing staff permanently in 1998, and took over as showrunner again in 2001; Reiss also continues to work on the show on a part-time basis.

Jeff Martin has returned in the last two years to write episodes on a freelance basis. David M. Stern and Frank Mula were both amongst an influx of old writers brought back early in Mike Scully's reign as executive producer, and Stern has also recently made a comeback on the show as a freelancer for a 2017 sequel to 1992's "Kamp Krusty", "Kamp Krustier" (he was also part of the tiny writing team that worked on the 'special' Jean and Reiss episodes produced during Season 7). George Meyer returned as a full-time producer/writer for Season 6, and continued to be involved in the show in some capacity until 2005, also co-writing the screenplay for The Simpsons Movie. Jon Vitti wrote several of the aforementioned clip shows, was brought back as a staff writer by Jean between 2001 and 2004, and also worked on the movie.

But back to Season 5. David Mirkin took over as executive producer and showrunner, and he needed to restock the writing team for the first time since the show's inception. Mirkin himself arrived from outside the show, and in his own words arrived to find he had to "pretty much build the show up from the ground again". Apart from those mentioned, the only other people who had stuck around after the fourth season were Bill Oakley & Josh Weinstein and Dan McGrath, who had been with the show for just one year. Amongst his finds were David S. Cohen (who stayed with The Simpsons for over six years and became one of the show's most senior writers before leaving to co-create Futurama with Matt Groening), Brent Forrester, Greg Daniels (later to find fame for creating King of the Hill and developing the American version of The Office, where he would work again with several other Simpsons writers), and Jonathan Collier (latterly better known for working on crime dramas such as Bones and Monk).

There are also one or two slightly more fleeting presences in Season 5's new roster of writers, perhaps indicating a rather chaotic production as members of the writing team come and go. Harold Kimmel stays for one year and one year only, and is not credited with writing a single episode; David Richardson only lasts for half a season, and his only script ("Homer Loves Flanders") is produced after he has stopped being credited; Bill Canterbury gets two writing credits but also leaves after just one year; and perhaps most curiously of all, Gerry Richardson is credited as a producer on only 6 episodes before his name vanishes, again without writing a single episode! I'd love to know what was going on there, especially since it seems Gerry Richardson never worked on anything else, before or since, and he's credited on that year's Treehouse of Horror as "Unimaginative Gerry Richardson"...

Most significantly, Gerry Richardson's replacement was Mike Scully (it does not seem any of the other mid-series departures were replaced, perhaps suggesting a "see who sticks" policy of hiring writers or a desire for consistency that might have been spoiled if more new writers had come in halfway through), a controversial figure in Simpsons fandom who would go on to run the show just four years later. If the assembling of that season's writing team had gone differently, the whole show's history could be very, very different.

After the first great reshaping of the show's writing room, high turnover continued to be an important part of The Simpsons' production, with most writers generally staying for three or four seasons, and new ones being brought in on an annual basis, meaning there was never really a full-scale restocking in the same way as Season 5's again, more a gradual transition as the older writers left, and the occasional infusion of new talent coming in to replace them. Even in Season 13, where around half a dozen writers leave the show as the showrunner changes from Mike Scully to Al Jean, more than half of them stay on. Amongst other notable names to come and go over the years include Jennifer Crittenden (a staff writer and story editor on Seasons 6 & 7, and later known for Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond and Veep), Matt Warburton (Seasons 13 through 23, before leaving to showrun The Mindy Project) and Daniel Chun (seasons 15 through 21, and British readers have since probably seen his name on various US sitcoms imported by E4).

However, somewhere along the line (it's hard to say exactly where, but somewhere in the mid-noughties I reckon), this changes and the writing team is generally more 'static' these days - most of the show's current writers (such as Matt Selman, John Frink, J. Stewart Burns and Michael Price) joined somewhere between 1998 and 2002! There is an occasional infusion of new talent, but it's far and few between these days (the two 'newest' names who work on the show full-time are Dan Vebber and Ryan Koh, who both joined in 2015). There are arguably only two really notable changes to the make-up of the writing pool after Al Jean initially takes over as showrunner in Season 13 - one is in 2007, when the drain on resources caused by The Simpsons Movie requires several former writers to be rehired or promoted back to full-time positions having only worked on the show in a consulting capacity for some time, and the other is around 2003-04, when Futurama was cancelled by Fox and several writers on the show (J. Stewart Burns, Bill Odenkirk and Jeff Westbrook) all make their way over to Our Favourite Family.

Perhaps I could make some comment about freshness and new dynamics being necessary. But I'm not going to. (It would also be worth meditating on the fact that the lack of turnover means that the writing staff is considerably older these days than it was in the 90s - Mirkin was succeeded as showrunner by Oakley & Weinstein, who weren't yet 30 when they took over and had been working on the show for just three seasons, and most of the other writers were around the same age and level of experience. These days, it seems the average age of the writers' room is around two decades older, and some of them have been working continuously on the show for up to twenty-one seasons. Conversely, of course, it would be foolish to suggest that the writers' room of the 90s didn't also benefit from the presence of those who had been around longer - it seems the show really lost something when George Meyer left.) But the show is widely considered to have its renaissance period at some point in the mid-to-late noughties, a period which seems to end around the same time the turnover of the writing staff slows to a relative crawl, and I do wonder what might happen if some of the names who have been working on the show for some 15-20 years were to leave and more new faces were brought in.

(The show's "renaissance period" also begins around the time the man who wrote the episode where Homer gets raped by a panda leaves the writing staff, and debatably ends around the time that man is rehired. An argument for another day, perhaps.)