You Should Not Have a Cow.

"The Simpsons. An Uncensored Unauthorized History"
By John Ortved

I seem to recall vague chatter a few years ago about Matt Groening writing a book chronicling his version of Simpsons history. Maybe the mildly unflattering portrait presented here will get him off the couch. If what I hear is true, the couch is made of thousand-dollar bills woven together with the finest 24-karat gold thread. So it's understandable if a guy gets a little comfortable.

The standards set by contemporary oral histories - say Legs McNeil's "Please Kill Me" or George Plimpton's seminal "Edie"- invite a minimum of first-person incursions by the author. John Ortved injects his own point-of-view way too often and with a fist full of ham. It doesn't help that his insights tend to be a tad bush league and snarky. It's like the Comic-Book-Guys have taken over the asylum. Or maybe it's exactly like the comments section on a Simpsons website. I have never seen an episode of "24" but does it really "endorse" torture like Ortved says? And Homer Simpson mistaking Stephen Hawking for Larry Flynt is pretty goddamn funny but is it the "best single joke they ever came up with?" Was there a voter referendum about that? Maybe I missed it. It's OK if Douglass Rushkoff wants to hold the Simpsons crew responsible for funding the uber-conservative Fox News Network (d'oh!) but subsequently loading the text with others who parrot that overambitious trope is a bit of fair and unbalanced mongering that would make Bill O'Reilly proud.

An array of familiar names from Conan O'Brien to Rupert Murdoch go on record but notably absent are the folks who also take the biggest lumps; Groening, James Brooks and long-departed producer Sam Simon. Predictably no one is exactly rushing in to defend them.

The idea that Groening hogs too much credit (and makes too much money) has been internet fodder for years and it's not entirely fair (even if Matty-boy owns up to it in his "aw-shucks" regular guy way.) The show has obviously grown to be quite a mammoth, collaborative undertaking that no single person can take credit for it. Still, it started with Groening's aesthetic, his quirky voice and his clean, deceptively simple drawings.(1) It's the TV equivalent of an internet start-up. Simon and George Meyer et al may have made the show a powerhouse of yuks but they jumped on the bus a few exits down the turnpike.

And day-to-day music guy(2) Alf Clausen rates a single mention? WTF? Likewise, the various efforts by the voice cast to up their remuneration gets a lot of ink but other than that they are not really part of the story here. It's really about the writers and a truckload of them have contributed through the years. And that is probably the way it should be. The Simpsons might be a cartoon but it's a writer-driven show and this book makes that abundantly clear. The book (expanded from a Vanity Fair piece a few years back) feels rushed. Typos and redundancies appear a bit too often.

I'm still waiting for Groening's take but I'm not holding my breath. Reservations aside, this is a good enough read. I plowed through it in a single evening. Problem is that this book will probably be the final word for a while - a lackluster effort like this is likely to discourage anyone else from attempting to do a "fair and balanced" look at the show. Too bad.

Footnotes:
(1) Saying Groening can't draw - stated more than once in the book - is idiotic and missing the point. It's like saying Charles Schulz can't draw because Charlie Brown was just a circle and a couple squiggly lines or that Walt Disney was a fraud because he didn't actually draw Mickey Mouse.

(2)Danny Elfman is responsible for the wonderful theme song but Alfie is what it's all about when it comes to actually scoring the series episodes...and he contributes much to the various parodies and diegetic music that you hear in each episode.