Meet the Inky Beatles

Forgive the ostentatious name-drop, but when it comes to summing up
The Simpsons, Beatles comparisons are inevitable. There’s
simply no other reference point for pop art that’s simultaneously
scaled the heights of popularity and artistry, creating those golden
cultural moments when the most popular and beloved art is also the
best.

The Beatles analogy is made early and often in John Ortved’s The
Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, the salacious
subtitle of which is an empty tease. Dishy insider dirt is kept to a
minimum, and the “unauthorized” designation refers mostly to the
noncooperation of some key participants—show cofounder James L.
Brooks, the whole of the current Simpsons writing and
production staff—but Ortved doesn’t need any stinkin’
cooperation.

Fashioning his book as an oral history, Ortved frees himself to grab
Simpsons lore from all over—a single page may feature
excerpts from four different Matt Groening interviews, and even
Simpsons DVD commentary tracks are pillaged for insights. The
result is a compendium of information that feels sloppily
encyclopedic—rich and fascinating in parts, but also random and
gassy, with Ortved indulging some lackadaisical editing impulses and
space-filling repetition. “After the first season, when the show was
blowing up and the money started rolling in, [cocreator Sam Simon] felt
he was not being appropriately compensated,” writes Ortved in the intro
to chapter 10, following with this quote from Simon’s assistant: “I
think a big issue came up when the merchandising started rolling in.
And Sam was seeing a smaller portion of it than others, which wasn’t
really fair.”

Ortved’s strongest move is to concretely define his terms: When he
speaks of The Simpsons, he means the glory years, from season
2 through roughly season 7, when the show’s extraordinary success and
artistic ambitions chased each other ever higher, creating what Ortved
identifies as “the most powerful, lasting, and resonant entertainment
force television has ever seen.” His love for The Simpsons‘
golden era makes itself known in the book’s near hero worship of the
show’s key architects: its original group of writers (including the
much-lionized George Meyer, who’s represented through interviews given
to the Believer and the New Yorker) and the superstar
second-stringers (including the even more lionized Conan O’Brien, whose
willingness to talk to Ortved earns him a chapter to himself). Ortved’s
wholehearted devotion to the writers results in some of the book’s best
passages, which offer rich insights into how the hell they kept their
show so densely funny for so long. Here’s Simpsons writer/producer Tim Long:

There was a Homer line, and it was too late to change the animation,
but we didn’t like the joke. So we were pitching jokes that had to fit
the syllable rhythm of how he was speaking… I just remember these
eight geniuses in the room with me, all pitching jokes that had the
exact same syllabic format.

Corollary to the high comic art being forged in the writers’ room
was the show’s astounding early success, which Ortved’s book also
captures. Twenty years down the line, it’s hard to remember the scope
of early-’90s Simpsonsmania, but Ortved sends us hurtling back into
that heady time of “Do the Bartman,” Simpsons air fresheners,
and bootleg Rasta-Bart T-shirts (“Don’t have a cow, mon!”) for sale on
highway off-ramps. Truly, there’s no better way to reexperience
Simpsonsmania than through the testimony of the people who created it,
then watched in awe as their creations grew into something no one could
have predicted.

Unfortunately, in the end, chaos reigns in Ortved’s book, as his
slapdash approach presents itself as the book’s unifying theme. In a
perfectly telling turn of events, the book’s most eloquent commendation
of the show comes from another Simpsons book—2004’s
Planet Simpson, in which Chris Turner writes, “The truly rare
cultural force that The Simpsons tapped… was
resonance. Pop-cultural resonance is what distinguishes the
millions of records sold by the Beatles from the millions sold by Pat
Boone… When a pop hit has resonance, it isn’t merely consumed. The
audience connects with the resonant cultural object, identifies itself
with it, absorbs it.”

As audiences continue to connect with the peerless cultural object
that is The Simpsons, other, better books will be written
about the phenomenon. For now, Ortved’s oral encyclopedia is a
perfectly fine diversion.