Thirty years ago this month, America’s favorite animated family made their debut as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. To celebrate, CoS will be broadcasting live from Springfield all week with a slew of Simpsons features. Today, Andrew Bloom looks back on the showrunners responsible for making The Simpsons so amazing, enduring, and endearing.

Too many talented writers have passed through the doors of The Simpsons to count. From folks who’ve gone on to create great television shows of their own like David X. Cohen (Futurama) and Greg Daniels (The Office, King of the Hill) to stellar longtime contributors like John Swartzwelder and George Meyer to those who’ve broken out as stars in their own right like Conan O’Brien, the writers’ room of The Simpsons has seen a nearly unmatched array of superb comic scribes contributing their wit and humor to the program.



But in the nearly 30 years The Simpsons has been on the air, only nine individuals (with one honorable mention) have served as showrunners for this hallowed and hilarious series. They’re the first names you see in the credits after the end of an episode, a sign that however a story began, however it may have changed and been shaped by the show’s fantastic team of writers, animators, and performers, the buck ultimately stopped with them. These nine people were responsible for shepherding each episode from the first pitch to the final cut, and it makes their contributions to The Simpsons unique, even among the scores of creative people who make the show possible.

Indeed, for the many cooks that have passed through The Simpsons’ kitchen, each showrunner’s tenure reflects the style and sensibilities of the people in charge. At a time before showrunners were notable as major figures in the world of television, these nine creative individuals left their distinctive marks on each season they supervised. From the down-to-earth family drama of the show’s early going to the more wild and wacky bent it would take on in its later seasons, each development can be traced back, in no small part, to the particular individuals supervising the process.

So, it behooves us to look back at these nine showrunners and see the ways in which the different eras of this seminal show bear their distinctive fingerprints. Whether they started in the world of cartooning, classic sitcoms, late-night talk shows, or The Simpsons itself, all of them would come together to collectively produce one of, if not the greatest television show of all time. These nine people each brought something different to the table but created a diverse-yet-unified series that each can call their own.

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Matt Groening, Sam Simon, and James L. Brooks (Seasons 1-2)

You may also remember them from: Life in Hell, Futurama, Taxi, Cheers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Terms of Endearment

Matt Groening was an underground cartoonist who managed to make waves with his cynical Life in Hell comic strip, suddenly finding himself with the chance to break into television. Sam Simon was a well-credentialed TV writer, with experience as a showrunner for Taxi and a writer-producer on Cheers. James L. Brooks was a well-respected writer-producer himself, having helped create pioneering series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Room 222 that offered different sorts of lead characters and broke new ground for television. Together, these three unlikely bedfellows set a new standard for what an animated show, a sitcom, and television writ large could be.

That achievement, however, took a combination of their collective sensibilities, and it was not always an easy mix. Groening and Simon would often clash behind the scenes. Groening was the anti-establishment disruptor, having made his way up through the world of alt-weeklies, ready to shake up what was acceptable in a sitcom setting. Simon was a TV stalwart who tried to mold Groening’s ideas into a package that would be bold, but still accessible to the average viewer.

That combination led to discord when things fell apart, but beautiful harmony when it worked. It was Groening who thought up the famous chalkboard and couch gags, while it was Simon who differentiated Lisa as The Simpsons’ brainy misfit and deepened the dynamics of the family as a whole. The two men never had a great relationship, but that push and pull — between Groening’s sardonic wit and novel take on the nuclear family and Simon’s sharp understanding of the importance of character and the demands of episodic storytelling — resulted in a show that fit the sitcom format even as it was transcending it.

Brooks, the veteran producer who already had a collection of big successes under his belt, also provided one of the most important elements to making The Simpsons into what it would eventually become — protection from network interference. He negotiated a provision that kept the show relatively free of FOX’s network notes, which allowed for the sort of creative freedom that made the great work from all the other people on this list possible. With the clout that came from having written and directed the Oscar-winning film Terms of Endearment, Brooks helped create an environment where the show’s writers could make unusual and uncompromising choices, just as his other earlier boundary-pushing shows had.

The styles of all three men are reflected in those early episodes. While these were the show’s breakout years, where Bart became emblazoned both on thousands of bootleg T-shirts and on the minds of pearl-clutchers worried about the show’s influence on American society, it’s a quieter, more down-to-earth version of Springfield than would become the standard later on. There are fewer outrageous situations (though not none). Homer is dim, but not a dolt. And, most importantly, there are fewer laugh-out-loud moments, but more subtly funny, cutting observations about modern life.

The show’s sense of humor was more in line with Groening’s Life in Hell comics, with wry commentary on family, politics, and religion that would set the stage for the show’s “no punches pulled, no target off limits” mentality. The characters themselves were more grounded, the situations they faced more typical, even as the show approached them in an anything-but-typical fashion. While to the modern eye, those first installments can seem like a test run for what we now think of as The Simpsons, these three men set a tone and developed those characters and their world with a balance of Groening’s cynicism, Simon’s character-focused comedy, and Brooks’s own devotion to groundbreaking TV.

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Al Jean and Mike Reiss (Seasons 3-4)

You may also remember them from: The Critic, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Queer Duck, Teen Angel

The Simpsons itself has joked about the number of Harvard alums in its writers’ room, but when Al Jean and Mike Reiss took over as showrunners in Season 3, it was the ascendance of two men who met there as freshman. Both wrote for The Harvard Lampoon, the school’s humor magazine, which would also provide a springboard for fellow Simpsons writers like Conan O’Brien, Jeff Martin, and Jon Vitti and offered a space for the two men to hone their comedic voices before they hit it big.

Their efforts as college students quickly led to jobs in television, writing for shows as diverse as Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, ALF, and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. That got the attention of Sam Simon, who brought the pair on as the very first staff writers hired for the nascent series. With the benefit of writing for the show from the very beginning, Jean and Reiss truly understood these characters and their offbeat ecosystem, which allowed the pair to take the show in familiar but novel directions when they became showrunners.

It was a daunting task. Jean in particular remarked on how much pressure they felt not to “screw up this thing everyone loves.” But that anxiety led to repeated, devoted script rewrites and some of the series’ very best episodes. Jean and Reiss presided over the era of the show where The Simpsons became The Simpsons, offering the defining take on Springfield and almost everyone who called it home.

Homer fully and finally became the well-meaning dope who could save the nuclear power plant with a game of “eeny meeny miny moe” and spend 10 minutes daydreaming about The Land of Chocolate. The family dynamic solidified with Bart softening a bit from his hell-raiser roots, Lisa doubling down on her plight as the nerdiest Simpson, and Marge seeking occasional escapes from her put upon domestic existence. It’s the era that cemented what The Simpsons was and is in the popular consciousness.

In short, this is the period of the show that Family Guy’s Peter Griffin was referring to when he drunkenly confessed, “We act like we didn’t take a lot from The Simpsons, but we took a lot from The Simpsons.” This is where the show’s penchant for classic movie parodies and cultural references of all stripes took hold. It’s the point where loonier gags and more absurd humor began to seep into the series’s DNA. It’s where guest stars started to become a more consistent presence, whether they were musicians like Michael Jackson, Tom Jones, and Sting; legends like Bob Hope, Elizabeth Taylor, and Johnny Carson; or a collection of MLB all-stars.

It’s also the incredible stretch of the show that gave us the Flaming Moe, Colonel Homer, Unkie Herb, Kamp Krusty, Mr. Plow, the Monorail, and “I Choo Choo Choose You.” In this era, the series found the creative voice that all future installments of the show would be measured against. As much as Groening, Simon, and Brooks set the stage for the show, it’s Jean and Reiss who took that stellar early work and carried it forward into one of the strongest, most-defining periods of the superlative series.

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David Mirkin (Seasons 5-6)

You may also remember him from: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Three’s Company, Newhart, Get a Life, Heartbreakers

The end of Season 4 saw a mass exodus from The Simpsons’ writers’ room, with the vast majority of those who had established and developed the series moving on to other projects. That left incoming showrunner David Mirkin with the unenviable task of not only following a spate of the show’s best-received episodes, but replenishing the cupboards with writers who could continue in the style that had proved to be so successful.

Mirkin, thankfully, was used to facing challenges and proved up to the task. Though interested in writing from a young age, he originally went to college for electrical engineering, only to drop out and make his way into the entertainment industry through stand-up comedy. He would cut his teeth on network television, but ran into trouble when trying to get his own series off the ground. Mirkin squabbled with FOX over a pair of his own ill-fated shows: Get a Life, a sitcom starring Chris Elliott, and The Edge, a sketch show he created with his then-partner Julie Brown. Network executives didn’t quite understand Mirkin’s surreal sense of humor, and content objections and reduced budgets made both projects short-lived.

But free from such network interference, Mirkin brought The Simpsons to new, delightfully-out-there places and heightened the goofier and more irreverent side of the show’s comic stylings. In his only episode as the sole-credited writer, Mirkin sent Homer into space. That’s emblematic of his “take no prisoners” approach to the show’s reality and the outré gags that came to the fore under his watch.

This was the period in the show where Mr. Burns might go to increasingly outlandish lengths to recover a beloved teddy bear that had, in turn, been owned by Charles Lindbergh, Adolf Hitler, and the crew of the U.S.S. Nautilus. It’s the period where Bart won a pet elephant, the family managed to offend all of Australia, half of Springfield went on a crusade to recapture a treasured lemon tree, and The Simpsons themselves were attacked by a swarm of killer robots. It’s safe to say that the outer bounds for acceptable strangeness and surreal comedy on the show had been thoroughly stretched.

But Mirkin’s tenure as showrunner is underrated for the amount of emotion he and his cohort managed to pack in amid the wackiness. After all, Mirkin’s watch also included Homer pleading to Marge that no one could ever need her the way he does, Lisa leaving her fiancé because he could not understand how much she loved her family, the whole town coming together to sing “Que Sera, Sera” with Ned Flanders in the face of annihilation, and last but certainly not least, Homer remembering to “Do it for her”. While there’s little doubt that the show grew more willing to go big and go weird under Mirkin, his version of The Simpsons didn’t forget the real feeling that balanced out those memorable, outsized gags.

Perhaps most importantly, he brought on the next generation of great Simpsons writers. It was David Mirkin who hired the folks that would go on to run their own stellar animated shows like Greg Daniels and David X. (née S.) Cohen. He picked up future showrunner Mike Scully and made him a fixture on the writing staff. And though Mirkin inherited the pair, he was the one who recommended that Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein take over the show after Season 6. As much as Mirkin left his mark on The Simpsons with his sense of humor, he also built the team that sustained the show through the end of its golden years, and that is as much his Simpsons legacy as his off-the-wall jokes.

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Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein (Seasons 7-8)

You may also remember them from: Futurama, Mission Hill, The Cleveland Show, Portlandia, Gravity Falls

Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein have been making comedy together since they were in the eighth grade. The pair founded a humor magazine in high school and grew accustomed to making people laugh together from then on. Unfortunately, all that experience as a team didn’t help them find much success early in their careers. Each of them struggled to find work for several years, until eventually, a Seinfeld spec script caught the eye of Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who brought the pair onto the show’s writing staff in Season 3. The two men would go on to pen some of The Simpsons’ most iconic episodes as staff writers, including “Bart vs. Australia” and the “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” two-parter.

But it was not until The Simpsons’ seventh season that the pair became showrunners. In that role, they intended to pull back from David Mirkin’s wilder efforts and focus more on the family. While Mirkin, Jean, and Reiss had all expanded the world of The Simpsons and devoted many memorable episodes to side characters and guest stars who became just as vital to Springfield as The Simpsons themselves, Oakley and Weinstein wanted to turn that attention back to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. They aimed to tell more character-focused stories, founded on the relationships between the show’s central figures.

The two also oversaw some of the series’s most experimental episodes. Oakley and Weinstein idolized The Simpsons’ third season and aimed to emulate that era’s tone and sensibility. But they also carved out the time and space in the writers’ room to try different sorts of episodes that went beyond even Mirkin’s experimentation.

Sometimes, that innovation came in the guise of format-bending installments like “22 Short Films About Springfield”, an episode with tons of hilarious, semi-connected vignettes that gave each character their two minutes in the spotlight. Sometimes, it came in the form of a high-concept premise, like “Homer’s Enemy”, a dark but audacious episode where the show examined the Kafkaesque horror of what it would be like for a real person to experience Springfield and its most dimwitted yet improbably successful resident. Sometimes, it led to self-referential episodes like “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”, which laid bare the issues of network pressures and the show’s advancing age in comic tones for all the world to see.

At the time, Oakley and Weinstein believed that the show was winding down, not realizing it was merely rounding out its first 10 years of what will be a minimum 30-season run. That assumption meant they were willing to try new ideas that broke the mold for typical Simpsons episodes and tested the limits of the format. But it also meant that they wanted to do justice to the family and to the series that they’d admired before they were ever a part of it. Their reign may have offered exaggerated events like Homer working for a Silicon Valley-tinged Bond villain or experiencing hallucinations brought on by Guatemalan insanity peppers, but it also addressed social issues like vegetarianism, immigration, and homosexuality, while taking time out to give Homer an emotional reunion with his mother and having Bart cheer on his sister in the biggest challenge of her life.

While occasionally the cracks in the foundation would show during this period, it was the era of The Simpsons where the different sensibilities of the prior six-year run were distilled into one incredibly diverse but cohesive whole. Oakley and Weinstein combined the down-to-earth bent of the show’s early years, the family-focused comedy and emotion that gave the show ballast thereafter, and the ballsy, absurd humor of their immediate predecessor. The result was two seasons that wonderfully represent all the different shades of The Simpsons.

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Mike Scully (Seasons 9-12)

You may also remember them from: Parks and Recreation, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Pitts, Complete Savages, Napoleon Dynamite (The Series)

Mike Scully may have been destined to work on The Simpsons. He was born in Springfield, though thankfully for him, it was in a hospital in Massachusetts rather than in the elusive state where The Simpsons live. Scully did not have the ivy-lined path to the writers’ room that many of his colleagues did. Instead, he worked as a department store clerk, a janitor, and a (non-robotic) driving instructor to make ends meet before moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s.

There, Scully would get his start writing jokes for Yakov Smirnoff and performing at amateur stand-up comedy nights. He served on the writing staffs of several forgettable sitcoms for many years before impressing David Mirkin with a collection of his spec scripts. That was enough to land Scully a job on The Simpsons in the show’s fifth season. As a staff writer, Scully wrote about what he knew, whether it was “Lisa on Ice”, which stemmed from his love of hockey, or “Marge Be Not Proud”, which was based on his own experience being caught shoplifting as a child.

When he took over as showrunner, Scully faced the same predicament the man who’d hired him did — a mass exodus of the writers who’d sustained the show over the most recent stretch of greatness. In the course of his first year, Scully lost not only Oakley and Weinstein, but David X. Cohen, Greg Daniels, Dan McGrath, not to mention future Incredibles director Brad Bird and the dearly departed Phil Hartman, among many other talented people.

The show’s ability to replenish itself after the first big exeunt in Season 4 was already nigh-miraculous, and the second attempt could not quite match that feat. Mike Scully has become, somewhat unfairly, the mascot for The Simpsons’ decline in quality. The truth is that whatever his faults and foibles, Scully inherited an aging show that once again needed to be remade after its second wave of superb creative minds had moved on. That he could not fulfill this Herculean task is no sin.

Still, there’s no denying that regardless of who’s at fault, Scully presided over the era of The Simpsons where it not only ceased to be the best show on television but, at its worst, became something unpleasant and almost unwatchable. This is the dawn of the so-called “Jerkass Homer.” It’s the point at which the show forgot how to tell a cohesive story, instead jumping schizophrenically from plot point to plot point with little rhyme or reason. It’s where the show’s already fraying tether to reality became thinner and thinner, until it was easy to forget the Simpsons were originally meant to be real people, not just cartoon characters. It’s where “anything for the sake of a gag” became the rule rather than the exception.

It’s also where the show started to seem more and more mean spirited, its characters crueler and uglier. The Simpsons was not entirely devoid of heart under Scully, but those touching moments became fewer and further between, giving way to jokes and story beats where the Simpsons, Homer in particular, could be harsh, crude, or callous to friends and family alike. Characterization started to slip. Traits that had been accents to a character’s personality became the sum total of who they were. While, in retrospect, many of the laughs are still firmly present in Scully’s output as showrunner, the substance of the show, the elements that made it more than a weekly, weightless gag fest, gradually dissipated.

From his stint as a rank-and-file writer on The Simpsons to his stellar work on Parks and Recreation, Scully has thoroughly demonstrated that he is a talented writer and comedian. But there is little doubt that he oversaw the show’s creative decline, and that will always make him something of a scapegoat (possibly one in the care of jockey elves) in the eyes of the fans.

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Al Jean, featuring Matt Selman (Seasons 13-Present)

You may also remember them from: Seasons 3-4 of The Simpsons

Al Jean returned as showrunner in the show’s 13th season and hasn’t let go of the reins since. Jean came back to The Simpsons after having been burned when departing its cozy confines. His critically successful but ratings-challenged cult classic The Critic, starring frequent Simpsons guest star Jon Lovitz, fizzled out in two seasons on two different networks. And ABC dropped his follow-up with Mike Reiss, Teen Angel, from the T.G.I.F. lineup after only 17 episodes. It was as though Jean had seen the fickle, feckless nature of television beyond the nurturing borders of Springfield and vowed never to leave so awesome a job for such misery and uncertainty ever again.

Given the length of time it spans, it’s much harder to sum up or categorize the second Jean administration, but the gist of his current, lengthy term in office is simple — while the quality of The Simpsons has waxed and waned in the last decade and a half, the show has more or less solidified, arguably even ossified, over that stretch. Each season under Jean’s watch offers a handful of very good episodes, a handful of very bad episodes, and a sizeable middle of solid-but-not-overwhelming material.

That’s turned Jean into a something of a steward, a caretaker managing this vast machine that churns out television and books and video games and other assorted gougables. But one notable unifying development has been his willingness to offer headline-grabbing lures and gimmicks. Whether it’s a special hour-long episode, the show’s first live improvisational segment, a virtual reality couch gag, a fan vote concerning Ned Flanders’ and Edna Krabappel’s romantic life, or an ominous “which character will die?” tease, Jean has kept the show in the headlines each season with some form of attention-grabbing shtick.

Still, Jean deserves credit for employing a little formal audaciousness of his own in the show’s later years, with flights of fancy like a riff on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a Lego-themed adventure, and the series’s first non-Treehouse of Horror Halloween special. But the show’s most inventive segments these days tend to be outsourced. Under Jean’s reign, the show has been willing to turn over its famed couch gags, which had already ballooned into mini-stories of their own, to a series of talented guest animators. The likes of Bill Plympton, Banksy, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (Rick and Morty), Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time), and Seth Green’s Robot Chicken team, among others, have all turned The Simpsons’ opening salvo into their own unique canvases. Jean even let Oscar-nominated visionary Don Hertzfeldt go wild in a bizarre but affecting couch gag.

He’s also been willing to hand things over to this list’s lone honorable mention, Matt Selman. Given the hectic schedule of guiding 22 episodes per season through the production process, Jean sporadically enlists Selman to run a few episodes in his stead. Selman, who joined the show in 1997, has written some of its best double-digit season installments, including “Behind the Laughter” and “Trilogy of Error”. Selman’s carried that same aptitude for late-era greatness as a substitute showrunner, with standout episodes under his supervision including “Brick Like Me”, “The Book Job”, and “A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again.” The episodes produced under with him at the helm seem better able to capture the spirit of the show’s classic years.

Nonetheless, in the decade and a half that Al Jean has been in charge of the show, The Simpsons has completed its transformation from being the disruptive little upstart on a fledgling network to being the thing that Matt Groening so frequently railed against — an institution. While the show can no longer match its best years in terms of sheer quality, Jean has done his best to keep this lumbering giant of a franchise robust and relevant, even as it continues to repeat stories and grow ever more self-referential.

Under Al Jean’s watch, The Simpsons developed into a sturdy fixture on network television, one sure to continue producing episodes until the heat death of the universe. That is the irony of all rebels, outlaws, and proud underachievers — if you stick around long enough, inevitably you will become a part of the establishment. But to paraphrase Marge, at least as Don Hertzfeldt imagined her in the series’ distant future, we’ll never forget him, or the eight other individuals who made this singular show so amazing, endearing, and enduring.