"The Simpsons" returns to Fox on Sunday night with a season premiere that starts in typical hellbent fashion. Springfield's "first booze-free St. Patrick's Day Parade" includes a sparsely populated float of "Straight Catholic Priests" and quickly devolves into sectarian violence as Bart laments, "Where's the IRA when you need 'em." The orange-vs.-green melee includes a cameo bout from the Thing and the Hulk. And all this while the opening credits are still rolling.
Eventually it opens out into an episode that finds Marge talking a job outside the home - baking erotic cakes - while Homer launches a new career as a bounty hunter in partnership with Ned Flanders (!). The wordplay ranges from pastry perversity (the bakery offers "day-old wangs") to the nearly brilliant ("You hang onto resentment like a confederate widow," Homer says at one point).
Awesome. Still. Even a B- episode of "The Simpsons," which this is, manages to be about three times as smart as most of what passes for funny on TV. And much of the credit goes to executive producer Al Jean, who has been with the show from the beginning and is now more or less in charge. He got on the horn with a bunch of us on Wednesday to talk about the show's 20th season, which ties it with "Gunsmoke" for longest-running entertainment program...
Question: So you guys are just trying to stay ahead of Law & Order, now?
Al: You know, I hate to admit it; we actually do count episodes. I think we’re about 12 ahead of them. They started a little later and they do slightly fewer per year. In number of episodes, we’re ahead of them, but we’re still behind Lassie and Gunsmoke, and Gunsmoke did 600, they used to do 40 a year, so that’s a tough one, we are up to 445 in terms of records.
Question: That’s quite a lot. Speaking of that, you’ve been doing the show for a very long time. How do you stay interested? Does it just become a job now?
Al: No, it’s never just a job and it’s a great job. What keeps me interested is when you see something that is a good idea, you’re able to take the writing staff and translate it into something that is funny and a pleasure to watch. It’s the greatest way to vent what you feel about life, it’s just a wonderful place to be, and I’m really happy to be there.
Question: The “Treehouse of Terror,” people look forward to that
every year. After 19 years of doing all of the horror, are you guys
going to have a tough time coming up with that big episode every year,
and what can we expect this year?
Al: No, in fact this year is a really fun one, it airs November 2nd.
The opening we do a little thing about the election where Homer tries
to vote for Obama, but the machine keeps changing it to McCain and then
finally kills him. We do a satire of the fact that they can take dead
celebrities, put them in commercials, and do whatever they want, so
Homer starts killing living celebrities so they can use them in
commercials. We have a parody for the first time of "It’s the Great
Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," where our character, The Grand Pumpkin - totally different legally - comes to life and he’s so mad at the way humans treat pumpkins that he tries to kill them all.
Question: You mentioned it takes about a year to flip one of these over.
Al:
It does, between the original concept and the final airing. In the
early years, there was a show where we did a joke about the Soviet
Union and before the show was completed, the Soviet Union broke up.
Question: That’s why I was curious. Is it frustrating for you that you probably can’t do something about Sarah Palin right now?
Al:
You know, it’s not, because, again, I don’t know what people are going
to think about her in six months. She may not even be in office as Vice
President. I’ve already seen since that Tina Fey sketch, which was I
thought was very funny, a big flip in the last week in terms of what
people think. We prefer to do things that you can watch five years
later and still appreciate them and not think, what was that in
reference to.
Question: As far as all the celebrities you’ve had on the show,
is there anybody you just have never been able to get for whatever
reason, either in the past or currently?
Al: Yes, it’s one
group, it’s U.S. Presidents. We’ve tried to get them going back to – I
think Richard Nixon was actually the first when he was still alive.
They’ve all said no. Ronald Regan, or his assistant, wrote us a very
polite no, but that was the closest we got.
Question: I’ve heard that you have Anne Hathaway, Jodie Foster, and Seth Rogen already down for this season.
Al: That’s true and this week, we also recorded Alan Page.
Question: Would you be able to tell me a little more about what each of them are doing with the show?
Al: Jodie Foster – sometimes we do these trilogy episodes, and this one has powerful women through history and we do a parody of "The Fountainhead," the Ayn Rand book, where Maggie Simpson is in a preschool where she’s trying to build these beautiful block buildings and the preschool teacher keeps knocking them down because it’s too creative. At the end, she goes on trial, like the end of "The Fountainhead," and Jodie Foster does Maggie’s voice.
Question: For the big speech at the end like Gary Cooper did, right?
Al: Right, and then Anne Hathaway, we do a show where Bart meets a girl who is really sweet and thinks he’s really a nice kid and not a brat, so he tries to hide his true identity from her and then she finds out what he’s really like and they break up. She was very funny; she’s really hilarious to work with.
Seth Rogen actually co-wrote with Evan Goldberg the episode that he’s in. Comic Book Guy creates a superhero called Everyman, and his power is that any comic book that he touches, he gets the powers of the hero of that comic. They make a move starring Homer and Homer is overweight and doesn’t look like a superhero, so Seth Rogen plays a personal trainer who is going to get him in shape.
Question: I just watched the new Godfather trilogy, the extras where Joe Mantegna talks extensively about his role on The Simpsons, Fat Tony, and the history of it.
Al: Yes, he’s been doing it since the beginning, and every time – he said, “If Fat Tony burps, I want to do it,” so he’s been doing it for 20 years, and even the film.
Question: He said it was his longest running role, he loved it and he talked extensively about it. I wanted to know, for you, who are some of your favorite long-running side characters, maybe some anecdotes, and why.
Al: In terms of guest stars like Joe, who is one of them, I’d say Kelsey Grammer is always just hilarious and can sing really well. It’s so funny to have someone who is trying to kill Bart who is so erudite and smooth, and at the same time violent. Another favorite of all of us was Phil Hartman, once he passed away; we retired his characters because no one could ever do them. Jon Lovitz is always somebody I’ve felt is really – he just makes me laugh and he would ad lib so much that you’d try hard not to laugh while you were sitting in the room while they were recording; it was almost impossible. Then of course, characters that are done by our regulars, I love Comic Book Guy, I can’t believe … on the show, Moe, Krusty, there are so many that you can do a particular show about you almost think you can never run through them.
Question: Everyone loves Spider Pig and you’ve done a couple cameos with him. Could we ever see Spider Pig again, or maybe a whole episode devoted to Spider Pig?
Al: We might. The biggest thing with the movie was we wanted to make it as a stand-alone, we really hoped that if people had never seen the show, they could enjoy the movie and we also didn’t want it to be one of those things where the movie required you to watch the show. We wanted the movie to come to a complete end, but everyone liked Plopper, so we’ll try to bring him back. We’ve had cameos and if we have an episode; we’ll do it. ... I think he was the breakthrough character of the movie.
Question: (With) your success of the movie, with another Emmy this year, do you guys ever think that there should be an end date for the show or will you keep doing it as long as there is still this kind of popularity for it?
Al: I’ll tell you, we signed the cast for four years, including this one, just recently and the Emmy was wonderful, and I really feel, creatively, we’re still doing terrific work and I don’t see an end for a while. The movie and the ride were both huge successes, so I think people still really want "The Simpsons" in their lives.
