"Cultural Icon Creator Comes to the Commonwealth" DOH!!!! An Interview with Mike Reiss
DOJ recently had an opportunity to sit down with one of America’s most influential minds: a man who has his pulse on America’s zeitgeist as well as its major social and political concerns, and then translates them for a huge popular audience. No, it wasn’t Bill Bennett stopping by for a secret game of seven-card stud on his way back from Atlantic City, or Homeland Security Director (and former PA governor) Tom Ridge, showing off his new designer pack of color-coded terrorist-threat greeting cards just in time for the Holidays. And since Hahnemann Medical Center didn’t offer Rush Limbaugh a freebie consultation in appreciation for his speech before the National Association of Broadcasters held in Center City, we lost the opportunity to pick the mind of the talk show guru’s expert views on such topics as professional sports or the evils of drug abuse.
Far more significantly, however, we did have the pleasure of meeting Mike Reiss, producer and writer for “The Simpsons.” Mike (you’d feel very weird calling him Mr. Reiss—he’s that kind of guy) doesn’t just write funny. He is funny. That’s what DOJ found out when we sat down with him for a little Q & A prior to a recent guest lecture he presented before several hundred Simpsonites.
Working in Hollywood on “The Johnny Carson Show,” “Alf,” “The Gary Shandling Show,” and a few others best left unmentioned, has not spoiled Mike’s innate, easy-going sense of humor and quick-on-the-draw wit. In fact, even more impressive is that after a couple of decades in Hollywood, Mike Reiss is a great guy! After being informed that DOJ was not the Department of Justice and this was not an interrogation, Mike relaxed into an armchair in a lounge at Drexel University in the heart of Philadelphia, and thus our conversation with the brains behind Homer, Marge, and the rest of the Springfield community began, with a few editorial comments along the way. (Please note: This interview has been slightly modified to fit the format of your computer monitor).
DOJ: How long have you been working on “The Simpsons”?
Mike: I’ve been with them the whole 14 years. It started as a lark, a summer job. I was writing for “The Gary Shandling Show,” the lowest-rated show on TV. Nobody thought the Simpsons would go anywhere. We figured it would be cancelled after three episodes. Who knew?
DOJ: What is the process for the development of a show? Does one writer come up with a concept or do you sit around brainstorming together?
Mike: That’s one of those interesting questions with a dull, technical answer. It goes like this. A writer comes up with a concept. A bunch of other writers revises the concept. Then the writer goes off and writes the first draft. We get it, and it gets rewritten over and over again. Even if you have a fantastic script, the final version won’t be more than 30% yours. So if you see that “Joe Blow” is credited as the writer, you can be sure a bunch of other writers put in as much work as he did.
DOJ: Are you always on the lookout for new ideas?
Mike: Now we are. We have basically covered all the themes we could come up with. Pretty much everything that happened to me as a kid has been put into a storyline. Nowadays we have our antenna out for new ideas—things we get from the news, current events, that sort of thing.
DOJ: How about guest celebrities? Do you say to yourself, "Hey, so-and-so would be great for this episode. Let's see if we can get him?
Mike: We have a few ways we find guest celebrities. Sometimes we find out a celebrity really wants to do the show, so we’ll call him or her and arrange it. There’s also a certain type of celebrity you know you can always get; for example, washed-up TV stars, current rock bands. Sometimes we’ll say to ourselves, Robert DeNiro has to play this part on an episode. But then of course, we can’t get him. So we’ll say it’s got to be Al Pacino. We keep going until we find the best fit from the people we contact.
DOJ: Any funny stories or experiences with guest celebrities?
Mike: We’ve had over two hundred guest celebrities on the show, and we’ve had great experiences with nearly all of them. Once in a while, though, we run into unexpected problems. Lyle Lovett said he wanted to do the show and we wrote a great episode for him. Then he suddenly decided he didn’t want to do it. We asked Pierce Bronson and he was great, lots of fun to work with. The only two other celebrities who really gave us a hard time were Jose Canseco and a very famous TV personality.
[Hint: Besides being — as Daniel Boorstein defined a certain type of celebrity as "well-known for their well-knowness— " this TV personality is the former President of the world's biggest book club].
DOJ: Is the fact that your show is animation allow you to get away with things other shows might have trouble with — for example, political and social issues?
Mike: Yeah, we do have a lot of freedom. We can basically get away with anything we want. We don’t have censors from the networks or studios looking over our shoulders. Another thing is that we’ve never been sued. That’s because anybody watching the show when it started 14 years ago—if they didn’t like it—they just went away. So our audience is pretty much established. They’re people who can take a joke and know that it’s all in fun.
DOJ: Here’s a question I’m sure you’ve been asked a lot. Why has “The Simpsons” been so successful for so long?
Mike: For the same reason anything is successful. Because there isn’t just one reason it’s successful. There’s a lot of reasons. It’s well-written. The cast is terrific. Our animators are great. It’s about a family. Families are successful on TV. Families like to watch families. It came on the air when people first got VCR’s so people could tape the show so they could watch the show over to catch some of the jokes they might have missed. Basically, we came along in the right place at the right time.
DOJ: How about the audience? It seems every age group watches the show.
Mike: Yes, that’s another reason for our success. Every kid in America watches the show as well as the college students. Half the 30 to 40 crowd watches us. In fact, we’d be the number one rated show on TV except for the fact that the 55+ audience doesn’t watch us, but God bless them, they can’t stand our show.
DOJ: What other countries is “The Simpsons” popular in?
Mike: We are incredibly popular in countries from the former British Commonwealth. They love us in England, Canada, Australia. It’s probably because they watch us thinking, “This is what America is like.” One European country they don’t like us in is France, for whatever reason. On the other hand Tony Blair made a guest appearance on the show, again because they love us in England.
[Note: The French displeasure with “The Simpsons” did not apparently influence their decision to oppose America’s invasion of Iraq; however, American politicians did pick up on a throw-away joke from a Simpson’s episode where the French were referred to as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and used it in some of their anti-French rhetoric. Mike mentioned he didn’t like politicians trolling for jokes on his show, and in fact can’t even remember who came up with the line. I was thinking whether these were the same politicians who rant about the “liberal media.”]
DOJ: Since we’re here in the faculty lounge of a large urban University, I thought this would be an interesting question. I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of academic interest in “The Simpsons.” I’m referring to conference papers with the usual convoluted post-modern terminology, also, Masters’ theses, Doctoral Dissertations and so on. Are these people reading too much into “The Simpsons.”
Mike: I think academia is the worst thing ever to hit “The Simpsons.” I’ve actually looked at some of them with some interest, and I suppose there’s something good and sensible to be written about “The Simpsons,” but I’ve come to the conclusion that the worst person to learn anything about “The Simpsons” from is a college professor. The fact is they’re all wrong. Misinterpretations, factual errors. They don’t get the jokes. “The Simpsons” is written by an amorphous group of 25 writers, people come and go. We’ll advocate one thing in one episode with an opposing view in the next. We don’t have an agenda. We don’t want to have one if only because a TV animation show on FOX is not the place where anyone should develop a point of view.
[Note to American Studies doctoral candidates: Don't let your advisor get a hold of this interview!]
DOJ: One last question. If you were interviewing a writer/producer for “The Simpsons” and you could only ask him or her one question, what question would you ask?
Mike: Simple. The question everyone asks me. “Where is Springfield located?” The simple obvious answer is it’s nowhere. No place is like Springfield. Can you think of anyplace where—like what happened in one episode—Homer is shoveling snow in the morning and in the afternoon is lounging on a hammock in the sun, sipping on lemonade? A better question would be, “What planet is “The Simpsons” on.
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