The Simpson family values (part two)

Producing the volume of animation needed for the 13-episode first season was another hurdle. One problem was that much of the actual work would have to be farmed out to studios in Korea, which were used to animating Transformers and not sophisticated comedy shows. Another was that most of the staff—including Brooks and Groening—had little experience with animation.

Kent Butterworth, director of first Simpsons episode: Gabor Csupo had escaped from the Iron Curtain with a couple of his animator friends.… He had never done that volume of work, and had not worked with overseas studios, and he was concerned about his ability to deliver.

Michael Mendel: The first show came back from Korea and it was a complete disaster. It was unairable. We had to re-cast some voices. The director just went off and did a bunch of stuff on his own.

Gabor Csupo: It was a very, very raw first assembly of the scenes, and some of the scenes were still missing, didn't come back, wrong colours, wrong angles. So it was a disaster. Jim sort of got into it, started to laugh for the first five minutes, and then all of a sudden his face started to turn green and yellow, match the Simpsons characters almost. He got really disappointed because none of the jokes worked or nothing, and then all of a sudden he started to scream and yell, saying, "What is this?" He just went off and he even started to demand extra camera angles, which was the funniest thing ever—he never did animation in his life. He asked for coverage like when you're shooting a live-action movie. "So where are the other camera angles?" And [my producer] and I were just looking at each other, "O.K. … "

I was just so angry and embarrassed at the same time that they forced us to show this raw footage before we could even correct it. Jim was screaming and yelling that "this is not funny!" And I said, "Well, it may be not funny because you didn't write it funny." And then everybody looks at me: "Oh my God! You dared to say that to Jim!" But I felt I had nothing to lose.

Kent Butterworth: It was not fun. It was decided [by Brooks] to shelve this episode and get back to it later. Meanwhile, he would contact Fox and let them know that the delivery of the series would be delayed in order to get the quality they needed. Needless to say, my employment on The Simpsons was over!

The next episodes, directed by David Silverman and Wesley Archer, were less problematic.

Barry Diller: I remember when we screened the first episode, for a number of Fox executives, we all went down to their bungalows over at The Simpsons, and not a single person in the room was laughing, except for me and Jim Brooks. No one had done an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and it was just like, "What is this?" But we put it on, and it became more and more successful every week.

The show hit a ratings high at the end of its first season, in the spring of 1990, cracking the Top 10 (the only Fox show to do so that year). Fox struck a deal with Mattel, and talking Bart Simpson dolls began disappearing from department-store shelves. Bart T-shirts were selling at the rate of a million per day in North America. His catchphrases, such as "Underachiever and proud of it" and "Don't have a cow, man," became staples of early-90s lexicon. Bootleg merchandise was soon as ubiquitous as the real thing. "Black Bart" T-shirts were a popular phenomenon in African-American communities, with Bart's catchphrases altered to "Watch it, mon!" and, without irony, "You wouldn't understand; it's a black thing."

Matt Groening found endless amusement in these imitations.

Conan O'Brien, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1991–93); host, Late Night with Conan O'Brien: Friends of Matt's would be travelling and they would find bootlegged Simpsons merchandise. Sometimes they were funny and sometimes they were disturbing. Like a Marge made out of a lizard's skull … or T-shirts that were from some country—recently liberated from the Iron Curtain—that had Bart saying weird phrases that were mildly threatening or racist. I remember Matt cracking up once. "Did you see what they just found? Ceausescu had this in his basement."

Jay Kogen: I had not been a part of anything that was that huge, ever. Literally, people were selling T-shirts of the show I was working on on freeway off-ramps. Instead of oranges off the freeway, they were selling Simpsons T-shirts. All people were talking about was The Simpsons. It was gigantic!

With Bart omnipresent and Fox expanding its programming schedule from three nights a week to five, a bold plan was hatched: beginning with the show's second season, in the fall of 1990, it would be moved to Thursday nights, where it would take on the reigning television champion, NBC's The Cosby Show.

Barry Diller: We were at a scheduling meeting, so there were about 15 people there, and we were figuring out what to put up against Cosby on Thursday nights at eight o'clock. Cosby had been the biggest thing on TV for God knows how many years. Rupert leaned over and whispered to me, "What about The Simpsons?" And I stood up and went over to the board and moved the little magnet that said "Simpsons" to Thursday night at eight. And it took a solid minute before someone said, "You know what? That could work." And it was a big deal, little Bart Simpson going up against big Bill Cosby. So it was a dragon-slayer story.

Rupert Murdoch: We were sitting down with Barry, reviewing the schedule. We look at it and I said, "We gotta be more aggressive … Let's put it up against Cosby. Cosby must be coming to the end of his run—he's been there forever." And everybody in the room was horrified and sort of laughed at me. Except Barry Diller, who said, "No, let's think about this."

Wally Wolodarsky: None of the writers cared [about the scheduling move]. It was just an opportunity to make fun of Cosby and be impudent about it. The writers never had a stake in the ratings; you never cared about that. That was always viewed as a business decision.

Rupert Murdoch: And so we did it. And at the end of the first year, Cosby announced his retirement. We started behind him, but I think we'd caught up by the end of the year; certainly the writing was on the wall. [The shows were close in the ratings most of the season, with The Simpsons occasionally edging out Cosby.]

Donick Cary, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1996–99); creator, Lil' Bush: They invented a network. In a lot of ways, the Fox Network wouldn't exist without the longevity and the amount of viewers that The Simpsons has consistently brought to Fox.

Barry Diller: In terms of ratings and financial terms it really built the network, but also in terms of giving Fox its attitude. Some of that was already there with Married … with Children, but The Simpsons is by far the most successful show.

The writers' room, assembled by Sam Simon, would come to be considered one of the great temples of comedy. Many of the original writers—including Wolodarsky, Kogen, John Swartzwelder, and the team of Al Jean and Mike Reiss—had substantial television credits. But Simon also found spectacular new talent in non-traditional locations, beginning a trend that would continue long after his departure. (David Mirkin, who ran the show in its fifth and sixth seasons, hired a mathematician and a lawyer.) Perhaps his key find was George Meyer, editor of a humour zine called Army Man— distributed sparingly in Hollywood in the late 80s—of which Simon was an enormous fan.

In 1991, Conan O'Brien, one of the many Harvard Lampoon veterans on the staff, and the writing team of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein would be the first writers to be added to the original room.

Conan O'Brien: It was as if that first Olympic Dream Team, with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson … it was like getting the call, "Do you want to come shoot baskets with us?"

Josh Weinstein: It was like walking into the pantheon of comedy gods.

Colin Lewis: If you talk to a writer on any show, somehow he'll guide you towards, "What do you do? What show are you on?" And with the Simpsons writers, it was the opposite. They were guys who were having fun, doing what they were doing and making a good show, but they were the geekiest, most unassuming guys.

Donick Cary: A lot of these guys had written on the Lampoon together in college, so they were sort of falling back into their college routine—which was, basically, to hang out all day and entertain themselves.

Bill Oakley, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): From Season 2 to Season 8, there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff.

Conan O'Brien was fresh from Saturday Night Live when he joined The Simpsons. When not cracking up his fellow writers, he managed to craft memorable episodes such as "Marge vs. the Monorail" (a takeoff on The Music Man in which a straw-hatted shyster sells Springfield a dilapidated monorail) and "Homer Goes to College" (Homer lives out his college fantasies, which have been informed entirely by 80s Animal House rip-offs).

Conan O'Brien: I was very nervous [when I started]. They showed me into this office and told me to start writing down some ideas. They left me alone in that office, and I remember leaving after five minutes to go get a cup of coffee. And I heard a crash, and I walked back to the office, and there was a hole in the window and a dead bird on the floor—literally in my first 10 minutes at The Simpsons, a bird had flown through the glass of my window, hit the far wall, broken its neck, and fallen dead on the floor. And I remember George Meyer came in and looked at it, and he was like, "Man, this is some kind of weird omen."

I think when I first got there I stood out a bit, because everyone sat still in the room and thought, and I don't think it was too long before I was climbing on furniture. I would pitch the characters in their voices, and I thought that's just what people did, but then Mike Reiss told me nobody does that.

Wally Wolodarsky: Conan used to do this thing called "The Nervous Writer" that involved him opening a can of Diet Coke and then nervously pitching a joke. He would spray Diet Coke all over himself and that was always a source of endless amusement amongst us.

Conan O'Brien: Everyone heard the news [when he was hired to replace David Letterman on NBC in 1993], and John Swartzwelder—he looks like someone who would arrest an anarchist for throwing a bomb at Archduke Ferdinand's carriage—was sitting there and smoke was trailing off his cigarette. He doesn't say much, and then he just looked at me and he said, "I'd watch your show." And that meant a lot to me, because he's not a guy who will say something he doesn't mean.

Some executive at Fox—who I don't remember, and that's probably for the best—said, "No, no, no. He still owes us money on his contract." And it was like a year's salary or something. So I think NBC paid half, and I paid half. I actually had to pay my way out of Fox, which always felt a little strange. I'm sure Simon Cowell has that money now. He's using it on hair gel.

George Meyer is still with the show, considered the godfather of the writers' room and the unofficial show-runner. In a 2000 profile of Meyer, The New Yorker claimed that he has "so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons can be seen as mostly his."

Richard Appel, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): One thing George does, in any room he's in, he sets the bar high just by being in it. One of the best things to have in a writers' room is a sense that you're trying to make the best person in the room laugh. And George was always that at The Simpsons in my time there, and I don't think it's presumptuous to say that's what he was before I got there and after I left.

Conan O'Brien: George Meyer has just such a discerning comedy mind, your biggest fear is saying something hacky or contrived.

Wally Wolodarsky: There's a darkness and lightness in George, both of which are surprising. For someone who could pitch such dark material, he also had a kind of hippie lightness of spirit that you wouldn't necessarily think go together.

Richard Appel: George did the most, of anyone I know, to sustain the voice of the show. And I think he had a huge hand in defining the voice of the show, but so did Jim Brooks and Matt and Sam Simon. I have heard everyone say it's just a thrilling experience to be in a room with Sam, and I think George really thinks the same things of Sam, and for me, my Sam was George.

John Swartzwelder has written far more Simpsons scripts than anyone—upward of 50, including classics such as "Krusty Gets Kancelled," "Rosebud," and "Bart Gets an Elephant."

Bill Oakley: If you look at the Swartzwelder scripts—it's like he comes from another dimension. He is a genius—his material is so strange you almost wonder how his brain works. The ultimate Swartzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode "Whacking Day." Homer is letting people park on his lawn, and he has a sign that says, parking: $10 per axle. And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, "Woo-hoo!" and the foreign man goes, "Hooray!" God, it just makes me laugh.