I Will Not Waste Chalk

Tim Riley reviews Alan Siegel’s “Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of ‘The Simpsons’ Changed Television—and America—Forever.”

By Tim RileyJuly 30, 2025

• Television

“TELEVISION IS THE ONLY industry that eats its young,” Johnny Carson famously told Rolling Stone’s Timothy White in 1979. That was before Rupert Murdoch’s upstart network Fox leveraged its 1989 runaway hit The Simpsons to compete with the big three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC)—prefiguring the cable revolution, the rise of reality TV, and today’s streaming glut. Predictably, this lured us all into paying monthly fees to watch ads. Amazon Prime Video interrupts shows with this blunt-force oxymoron: “Our program will continue without interruption after this short break.”

Democracy proves as fragile as its leaders, but TV’s expanse has led to all kinds of unintentional consequences. The Simpsons found such immediate success that it took on NBC’s The Cosby Show Thursday prime-time slot for a ratings tie and led, in at least some small way, to Murdoch’s News Corp owning The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins books, and Fox News. That The Simpsons wins consensus as one of the medium’s greatest creations defies industry gravity.

The Simpsons grabbed hold of rock music’s subversive energy and twisted TV against itself. It spoke to that collective hunch that nothing in public life deserved reflexive respect, that adulthood’s absurd compromises bait mockery, and that kids prize ridiculousness and irreverence beyond all reason. Earlier indie efforts like Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976–77) and Fernwood 2 Night (1977) sported cartoonish pretense, but The Simpsons brought a more kinetic sense of itself from the start—a self-contained, never-aging world as a fun-house mirror reflecting not just George Bush Sr. and the Clinton nineties but also Bush Jr., 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama’s 2008, and 2016’s plunge into … immodesty. During the opening credits, as they scuttle around their daily routines to gather on that living room couch, you sense how much the Simpson family has always been there. Alan Siegel’s admirable yet breezy new account, Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television—and America—Forever, describes how the show’s tone sprouted straight from TV’s collective id, and how this family unit came to seem fully imagined, abstract yet absolute, boob tube history in psychedelic color. In early April 2025, after 36 seasons, 37 Emmys, and two Peabody Awards, Fox renewed it for four more years.

“The Simpsons helped turn Fox into the fourth major TV network,” writes Siegel, “while also poking fun at the institution of network TV.” Many still watch the opening credits just for Bart’s evolving chalkboard gag, from “I will not waste chalk” and “I did not see Elvis” to “I will not belch the national anthem.” After The Simpsons Movie came out in 2007, written largely by the show’s core crew, Bart took to the chalkboard: “I will not wait 20 years to make another movie.” Then there’s a parade of celebrity guest stars that included three Beatles (first Ringo Starr, then George Harrison and Paul McCartney). “We had Tony Bennett, but we got a Beatle,” writer Brian Roberts tells Siegel. The show’s insolence flattered its guests, instead of the other way around.

Its beginning had fitful turns, and it took a couple seasons to anchor its voice. Its early popularity now looks puzzling for the alarm that circled Bart, the perpetual 10-year-old mediocrity. Siegel’s best passages detail this period when Fox gave the creators unprecedented license and they found themselves tied with that “wholesome” vehicle, The Cosby Show, by the second season (oh, irony). Siegel details a completely different TV world of stereotypes, clichés, tired plots, and how stiff middle-American taste had grown under Ronald Reagan. Once the show hit big, it earned its rebel stripes from George Bush Sr., who singled out Bart as a “menace.”

“[W]e need a nation closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons,” Bush said in his speech at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in January 1992. He sought “an America that rejects the tide of incivility, and the tide of intolerance.” Bush’s speechwriter Curt Smith describes that passage to Siegel as “pure Bush. It reflects the kind of moderation and decency that he would bring even to a discussion as partisan as both sides were in this case.” An early writer on the show, Jon Vitti, gives Siegel the writers’ response: “The Republican president of the United States was unhappy with us. It kind of showed that we were doing what we were trying to do: show parts of growing up that weren’t being shown on TV.”

With today’s Republican leaders in contempt of the Supreme Court and arresting international students off the street, American public schools’ banning of Bart Simpson T-shirts in the 1990s looks rum. It was as if the writers had set loose an irresistible satire that uncannily renewed TV as a subject both for itself and for real life. Matt Groening, who created these characters based on his own family members’ names, worked as an alt-cartoonist and found modest success with his Life in Hell rabbits and near-rabbits. The comic strip, with its slantwise tone, ran in Los Angeles’s Wet magazine starting in 1978, and led to a contract with the Los Angeles Reader and wider syndication. By 1984, Life in Hell books and merch drew ample coin. Soon, Akbar and Jeff, Groening’s pudgy fez-bedecked BFFs, coaxed dry yet sharp yuks simply by exchanging blank looks. A favorite bit included the two trading brand names and ordinary objects as vampish pillow talk: “Jimi Hendrix,” “big sturdy boxes,” “Mocha Almond Fudge.” In the final panel, both hats fly off their heads. You felt the sexual energy nowhere and everywhere.

Every cartoonist’s moon shot involved liberating a cartoony otherness from its Saturday morning ghetto. Groening got tapped to provide short clips for The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–90), developed by James L. Brooks to follow Fox’s minor gauche hit Married… with Children (1987–97). Brooks updated the Carol Burnett variety show formula for Ullman using her freakish mimicry and bewigged exuberance. “[D]uring Ullman’s extended costume and makeup changes,” Siegel writes, “the producers got the idea to occupy the antsy crowd by playing a bunch of Simpsons cartoons in a row.” After the creators pitched a stand-alone pilot dubbing the family “the Simpsons,” the breakout series suddenly made Fox a player for network ad revenue.

“The basic hybrid that creates The Simpsons is Batman crossed with actual emotional stories of The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” writer Vitti tells Siegel. Of course, Brooks had produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show throughout the 1970s, directed Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment (1983), and introduced Holly Hunter in Broadcast News (1987). In Simpsons lore, he gets typecast as the father figure who insists on the Simpsons as people, not cartoons. The family bond that right-wingers choose not to see has sometimes nudged the comedy dangerously close to sentimentalism. But as Siegel points out, this oversimplifies things: comedy angles off contrast, and none of the zanier setups would work if the characters didn’t. And “caring” about abstract cartoon figures gets closer to the show’s conundrum. Siegel lands the defining quote: “Jim Brooks actually had a really nice one-liner for the show at the beginning,” Vitti tells Siegel. “He called it, ‘The American family in all its horror.’”

From the start, the writers zeroed in on TV’s sprawl and scope as a metaphor for the rest of pop culture: the font of our shared vocabulary, plots, genres, types, and attitudes. As a group of male comedy obsessives set loose in ideal conditions, they wrote for people like them: those who had grown up watching toons and reruns and who treasured how superior most of us feel while handling the remote. “The first woman on the writing staff, Jennifer Crittenden, got hired before Season 6,” reports Siegel. “Just in terms of being denied the opportunity to participate in something that became that big is kind of a drag,” Crittenden says. “And then having to explain this over and over is the biggest drag of all.”

Bush and his voters refused to admit how stable this fictional family unit proved to be. Led by the imperceptive patriarch, ironically named “Homer,” the family traced routine types: a doting wife, Marge; a “Dennis the Menace”–style 10-year-old son, Bart; his younger sister, Lisa (brilliant, and nearly invisible); and the infant Maggie, who channeled Harpo Marx with pacifier squeaks. In important ways, The Simpsons drew from The Honeymooners (1955–56, a Talmudic 39 episodes). Jackie Gleason’s tubby élan anticipated Homer beyond just body type and mental capacity. At first, Bart seemed like the breakout antihero. But as seasons stretched out, each family member grew alongside a circle of regulars. Fresh yet instantly recognizable, every citizen of Springfield had secrets and some kind of wacko backstory, as if we all inhabited the same joke.

According to a now-infamous New Yorker profile of writer George Meyer in 2000, the writing team hated the tired sitcom tropes embodied by All in the Family (1971–79), with its bloated patriarch and jabbering wife. According to Meyer’s sister,

He used to dislike the show […] partly because he could see the jokes coming a mile away. There was one episode where Archie is tempted to have an affair with a waitress, and then Edith finds a piece of paper with the waitress’s phone number written on it and asks him, in this trembling voice, “Archie, whose phone number is this?” We all used to repeat that line, and George would crack us up by screeching it, in this quavering imitation of Jean Stapleton’s voice. At Thanksgiving dinner one year, my mother made us all write down what we were thankful for, and three of us, completely independently, wrote “Archie, whose phone number is this?” My mother was exasperated, because she was reading these things aloud. Meanwhile, we were all laughing so hard that we were crying.

Meyer and his crew lampooned these tired setups: The Simpsons slingshotted that empty concept of Republican “family values” right back at the electorate.

Meyer arrived on the scene with an insider reputation from his humor zine Army Man (“America’s Only Magazine”), which ran from 1988 to 1990. This self-published compendium of jokes was “a 150-proof distillation of Meyer’s sense of humor,” Siegel writes. It still circulates in comedy circles. “We wanted to go a step farther and we wanted to have our own stance about life,” Meyer tells Siegel. “Which is that it’s absurd, and punishing, and undignified. But it might be worth living.”

Many of these writers went on to create future hits. Greg Daniels, a National Lampoon vet, later worked up King of the Hill (1997–2010) with Mike Judge, and then The Office (2005–13), the American spin on the UK hit created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and finally Parks and Recreation (2009–15), alongside Michael Schur. Vitti wrote the “Hank’s Sex Tape” episode of HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show (1992–98). Siegel spoke with many writers, and the book bulges with money quotes.

The most notorious Simpsons alum, Conan O’Brien, wrote only three episodes, including “Marge vs. the Monorail,” a Music Man parody with Saturday Night Live’s greasy Phil Hartman as the slick traveling salesman (Hartman voiced more than 20 characters across 52 episodes). But Siegel and many insiders view some of its lesser-known scribes, like Meyer and John Swartzwelder, as more legendary. “Swartzwelder alone wrote fifty-nine episodes,” Siegel writes, “still by far the most in the history of the series.”

Recent attention has focused on how accurately The Simpsons (alongside HBO’s Veep) foretold the United States’ current slo-mo crash, as if the sharpest parodies somehow mutated directly into vivid reality. This smacks of objects-larger-than-they-appear rearview mirror stuff: the reference to a louche NYC real-estate tycoon presidency comes from a flash-forward in season 11, when Lisa sits at her Oval Office desk and mentions having “inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” This now rings less prescient than flippant, but still.

Because it slightly preceded the internet, and then exploded in chat rooms, on blogs, and on forums like Reddit, The Simpsons overlapped seamlessly with digital culture, where everybody still argues about peaks, valleys, and jumped sharks. Most count O’Brien’s “Marge vs. the Monorail” as an early crest (it opens with Homer singing new lyrics to the Flintstones theme), but over the first 20 seasons, many titles crowd anybody’s top 10. Season seven’s “A Fish Called Selma” (written by Jack Barth and directed by Mark Kirkland) features the musical Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off! where Phil Hartman plays the Charlton Heston role as a washed-up actor, Troy McClure, who sings “You’ll never make a monkey out of me,” which soon turns into “You finally made a monkey out of me …” Other highlights include season 11’s “Missionary: Impossible,” with Homer’s “Save me, Jebus!” refrain.

Siegel quotes Lisa Hanawalt, the graphics lead on BoJack Horseman (2014–20), The Simpsons’ obvious heir: “I mean, [the show] is a huge influence,” says Hanawalt. “Just the sense of humor and the little details that would make me laugh. I wanted to capture that same kind of energy.” Like TV, failing democracies also eat their young, and those metaphors just keep turning in on themselves beyond abstraction, and beyond all hope. Save us, Jebus.