2024-10-01 16:35:02
In the run-up to last night’s Season 36 premiere of The Simpsons, Fox had been pretty cagey about what was in store for viewers. The official Twitter account only said that “it’s the episode fans have waited for since 1989,” and the TV promo heard Bart ominously saying, “Something super weird is going on!”
The surprise was a meta twist of sorts: The season kicked off with “The Simpsons Series Finale,” hosted by former writer Conan O’Brien. Conan explained that Fox has tried to end The Simpsons many times over the years, but that this was finally the real ending. He then introduced an A.I. bot that processed the dialogue of every episode of The Simpsons, plus every series finale in television history, and they were now going to run the “perfect” finale as written by A.I.
What followed was the story of Bart’s 11th birthday, which saw him encounter every series finale cliché — from businesses closing, to characters moving away, to babies being born, to shoehorned celebrity cameos. It was a pretty hilarious satire of an extremely tired trope, and it was the work of Simpsons writer Jessica Conrad as well as co-executive producer and episode co-runner, Michael Price, who jumped on a call last night after the premiere aired to discuss how it all came together.
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Where did the idea for a fake finale for The Simpsons come from?
Price: It came directly from (showrunner) Matt Selman. We were on strike last year for a long time, and during the strike, Matt took a trip overseas. Occasionally, he’s stopped by people who always ask, “How much longer will the show go on?” and “How will you end it?”
So, one of our first days back from being out on strike, Matt basically pitched this idea, saying, “People keep asking me how we’re going to end it. It’s always been a big problem, so why don’t we just do it now? Do a fake ending, and we’ll get that out of the way.” We thought Jess would be great to write it, and from there, we all started figuring out how we could do a fake series finale. We all felt it was a great way to make fun of series finales.
At one point, we had it where each act was a different finale, like Act One was going to be the finale of Cheers and Act Two was going to be the finale of something else. But that never quite had an organizing idea behind it. I think it was Matt who had the idea for A.I. He also said, “What if Bart is the only one who starts to feel like something weird is going on, and he starts fighting this?” So our finale story wasn’t just making fun of different types of finales, but it had an emotional story to tell, too.
Why was Bart chosen to tell this story?
Price: Because it hit on that thing of Bart always being 10 and the characters never aging. We talked about “What could the final scene of The Simpsons ever be?” So we hit on, “What if it’s his birthday?” and he’s turning 11. That’s when he starts to realize, “If I turn 11, I don’t exist anymore.” It got kind of metaphysical there.
How soon did Conan get into the mix?
Price: Pretty early. He has such a history with the show, being a writer on it and appearing on it.
Since it’s supposedly written by A.I., was it tough to write the finale “bad” but still have good jokes in it?
Conrad: We decided to really lean into the Hack GPT of it. Like when Maggie says her first words in the finale, we have her say the most hack line we could think of when she says, “Well, that just happened.”
Amy Sedaris was the voice of Maggie, and we just recorded that on Thursday. It was Nancy (Cartwright) for the whole run of it, and then, like a week ago, somebody said, “What if we get a celebrity to do Maggie’s voice?” Our top choice was Amy Sedaris, and she was like, “Yes, I’ll do it!”
Price: It was a balancing act because we really did want to lean into the corniness of it all and how sappy these things are, especially for comedy shows. The light-switch thing came from Cheers, but it’s in other ones as well. The Mary Tyler Moore Show did it as well. These shows are all so funny and great, but they get so sappy at the end, like the M*A*S*H finale. It was fun to lean into how emotional everyone gets. We watched a lot of final episodes of shows, but we mostly ended up hitting the emotional part, with everyone saying goodbye and turning the lights off. It also felt like that would be the thing that would make Bart be the most upset.
Conrad: There’s also the idea of the impossibility of wrapping up a show like The Simpsons that’s been on for so long. What would fans want out of a Simpsons finale? So we have all of these old guest stars, and everyone is there at the end — even the dead characters.
Like Danny DeVito as Unky Herb.
Price: That was fun, yeah. The one I remember pitching specifically was when the real Sgt. Skinner shows up, and Mrs. Skinner says, “My real son is home.” I thought the people would go crazy for that.
Anything you’d like to say about the ending?
Price: We originally had a much longer speech for Bart at the end there, where he talks about how no one in Springfield is happy, everyone is screwed up, everyone stinks, everyone’s stupid. Homer especially, the idea that Homer is suddenly this evolved, nice dad and Bart tells him, “You’re a big fat drunk loser.”
It actually ends with Homer strangling Bart. I was curious if you’d gone there because that’s become such a hot-button topic. Is that generally off limits now?
Conrad: No. That was just a throwaway joke in an episode, and it just took off from there.
Price: For that part, we had David Silverman, who’s been with the show since the Tracey Ullman days, he animated that moment himself because we wanted him to do it. Even in the script it said something like, “Homer strangles Bart in pure, David Silverman, Season One-style violence.”
Did any other episodes of The Simpsons help inform this one?
Price: We were aware that this was coming very soon after “Lisa the Boy Scout” and with a similar feeling, so we were careful not to make it too much like that. The other show that’s similar to this was “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase” in that Conan is sort of playing the role Phil Hartman’s Troy McClure played in that episode. We watched that one a lot, especially the wraparounds he did, which were so funny.
Was there anything that you hated having to leave out?
Price: We were hoping to get the biggest guest star of all time — we wrote a part for Barack Obama. There was going to be a whole thing where celebrities were doing tributes to the show. We had him saying something like how The Simpsons is like being the president, where he had eight great years, then a lot of bad stuff comes after it, something like that. But they said, “Thank you, but he’s kind of busy right now with the election.”
Before we wrap up, I, of course, have to ask: What should the actual finale of The Simpsons be?
Price: Boy, I can’t say. Who knows when that would be, or if it will ever be? My only thing would be that it shouldn’t be like what we just did. There shouldn’t be that closure with a story like “the Simpsons are moving away” or somebody dying. It should just be a really funny Simpsons episode.
