A dissident view of life on the show
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - 2 Comments
The Simpsons’ first warts-and-all history may be better thanks to the producers’ gag order
John Ortved says that the people quoted in his new book The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History are mostly those who “had stories to tell, or axes to grind,” or who are “too successful to care.” Fortunately, that’s a lot of people. Ortved, a Canadian journalist who wrote an oral history of The Simpsons for Vanity Fair in 2007, has now expanded that piece into the first book about behind-the-scenes conflicts at the world’s most successful animated show. (Unfortunately, it went to press too early to discuss Marge Simpson’s upcoming Playboy spread.) The book contains observations from Simpsons veterans like Conan O’Brien, Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and even one-time guest voice Tom Wolfe, but the list of people who wouldn’t talk to Ortved is just as impressive: he told Maclean’s that executive producer James L. Brooks asked “everybody who worked on the show not to speak to me.” He got no participation from Brooks, creator Matt Groening, most of the people who have run the show, or the cast (except for a few quotes from Hank Azaria, voice of Moe and Apu). The book offers many Simpsons anecdotes, but they’re from the point of view of people who have nothing to lose.
In some ways, this may be a more candid history of the show because we don’t hear from Brooks, Groening and their supporters. Ortved thinks Brooks “decided to cancel all co-operation when he found out I was asking questions about Sam Simon,” who ran The Simpsons originally and hired most of the staff. Many people feel that Simon, who left in 1993 after feuding with Brooks and Groening, is not given enough credit for shaping the franchise; Brian Roberts (now a director of such shows as Little Mosque on the Prairie) says in the book that Brooks “fell in love with the myth and the legend” that Groening was the sole creator. Ortved compares them to Walt Disney, who wanted us to think that “he created everything that was Disney.” Continue…
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Weekend Viewing: PHENOM
By Jaime Weinman - Friday, April 10, 2009 at 2:49 PM - 7 Comments
James L. Brooks, the grand old man of American television, was very busy in 1993-4. Not only was he working on a new movie, As Good As It Gets I’ll Do Anything (a famously troubled film that reached theatres after brutal re-cutting), but he moved his TV operations from Fox to ABC and got two new shows on ABC’s schedule, one for mid-season, the other for fall. The mid-season show is the one everybody remembers: The Critic. The fall show is the one nobody remembers: Phenom, a comedy for ABC’s mighty Tuesday night lineup.
It was the story of Angela, a teenaged girl (Angela Goethals, the sister from Home Alone), a tennis prodigy; the show was about the pressures of trying to build an athletic career while not letting it consume your whole life. Angela is pulled in two directions: her single mother (Judith Light) wants her to be a regular teenager with a strong family life, and her coach (William Devane) wants her to focus all her energy on becoming a tennis star. Most of the episodes focused on the way her athletics conflict with her regular teenage life: should she go to the dance or train for a tournament; should she become a more aggressive person in order to play more aggressively. It’s a theme that most teen shows explore in some way, whether it’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Hannah Montana.
Brooks put many good people on the show, including co-creator/showrunner Dick Blasucci (SCTV) and writer-producer Jon Vitti (pulled off the staff of The Simpsons). One of the other co-creators was Sam Simon, Brooks’ showrunner on The Simpsons, but Simon wasn’t involved after the pilot because he quit Brooks’s company after some kind of dispute. (That’s why Simon has been billed as Sam “Sayonara” Simon on subsequent Simpsons Halloween episodes.) It was highly uneven, but it got good reviews for the Carly Simon theme song, the good cast, and the occasional injections of off-kilter lines that Brooks came up with (referred to by the Simpsons staff as “Jimmies”).
ABC initially treated the show well, giving it the 8:30 Tuesday time slot beetween Full House and Roseanne. It actually did fairly well, ranking # 28 for the season and holding most of its lead-in audience, but ABC canceled it, and the cancellation was controversial enough that the Los Angeles Times did a whole article on it, suggesting that ABC dumped it because Brooks wouldn’t take the show in the direction the network wanted. Brooks’s official statement was “I have no comment while I’m developing the muscle to lie about my reaction to what ABC did.” Judith Light, a member of my personal Academy Of the Underrated (you try keeping some measure of dignity after acting with Tony Danza for eight years), told the Times that the show hadn’t really been all it should have been, but might have gotten there with another season.
It can be a long process to find the voice of a show. This is a show that was particularly hard to define. For Jim Brooks, complexities and nuances can be as automatic as breathing, and he brought in some very original writers. But he was also working on a film, and, though he was with us as much as he could be, he was in and out.
One can argue that any show in the top 20s should get a second season, but then one can also argue that maybe we should have distilled the show faster. Obviously, I’m sad that we couldn’t develop these characters further, but, in this case, I really think both sides are right.
This episode, the second of the series, features a Jon Vitti script, some ’90s pop music I’m not familiar with, and a rather obnoxious audience.
Part One:
Part Two:
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Weekend Flop Viewing: THE ASSOCIATES
By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 4:30 PM - 7 Comments
This show ran on ABC in the 1979-80 season. It was created by the same team that did Taxi: James L. Brooks and his gang had been hired away from MTM by Paramount, which gave them immense freedom and large budgets (by sitcom standards). Taxi won four straight Emmy awards for best comedy and was a hit, at least at first; this show didn’t even last a full season.
The concept was, simply, a white-collar version of Taxi: it’s about a law-school grad, played by the young and then-unknown Martin Short, who goes to work at a big law firm on Wall Street. Taxi was about people who had to come to terms with the fact that they weren’t going to get the lives they dreamed of, and The Associates had the same theme, in an upscale way: it’s about an idealistic young professional who has to adjust to working for The Man. (One episode had Short working for a network and watching as they censor all the funny stuff out of a sitcom episode; the episode was actually more depressing than funny.) The cast was good, not as good as Taxi — the cast just didn’t seem to have the same kind of chemistry — but it had Short, Alley Mills (The Wonder Years), Joe Regalbuto (Murphy Brown) and, for sex appeal, model Shelley Smith. The best-known actor in the cast was the veteran Wilfred Hyde-White as the dotty senior partner; he was almost the Latka Gravas of the show, giving out with long, rambling monologues that suggested he either hadn’t rehearsed or wanted us to think he hadn’t rehearsed. Earl Pomerantz wrote several other episodes, and the lion’s share of the 13-episode run was written by the great David Lloyd. But while the show had a cult following, and was certainly a quality product, it was hard to sustain much interest in these people; Taxi had that Honeymooners vibe of rooting for the underdog losers, but who can root for the employees of an evil law firm?
This episode is the pilot, whose writing was nominated for an Emmy. It was written by Michael Leeson, one of the Brooks team’s favourite writers on Taxi. The theme song was written by Albert Brooks (yes, that Albert Brooks) and sung by B.B. King.
Act One:
Act Two:
