In May 2015,
The Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer – who plays a number of key characters including, quite incredibly, both Mr Burns and Waylon Smithers – announced that he was leaving the show.
By then, the animated series had been running for more than 25 years, and the pay of its vocal cast had risen from $30,000 an episode in 1998 to $400,000 an episode from 2008 onwards. But Fox, the producer of
The Simpsons, was looking to cut costs – and was threatening to cancel the series unless the voice actors took a 30 per cent pay cut.
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Most of them agreed, but Shearer (who had been critical of the show’s declining quality) refused to sign – after more than two decades, he wanted to break out of the golden handcuffs, and win back the freedom and the time to pursue his own work. Showrunner Al Jean said Shearer’s iconic characters – who also include Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders and Otto Mann – would be recast.
Noteworthy – OUR HIDDEN HUMAN TREASURES
Mar. 04, 2021 at 6:00 am
YOU’VE SEEN HER AROUND TOWN
You can’t miss her, with those outfits exploding with color on her very diminutive frame. And always a hat to match or add to the effect. A rainbow palette in motion.
She loves her hats, since junior high school. “I never leave the house without a hat.” How many? “I think I had more than 200, but I recently donated about 100 of them to a thrift store.”
Or you may have noticed her front yard, a raucous yet genteel fairyland tableau of tiny structures and statues of critters and the occasional mythical humans. “During holidays I have the best yard displays in town,” she claims.
The Simpsons still just about turns a profit for Fox (and provides new content for Disney +, which holds streaming rights). Alas, audiences have long since fled. Season 12 drew a US viewership of 15 million. Last year, it was a paltry 3.5 million. Enough to justify its continuation if one sets aside the moral imperative to finally put it out of its misery.
It isn’t true to say that The Simpsons no longer engages with the zeitgeist. Every so often it rises up from obscurity and grabs a headline or two. Unfortunately these moments in the sun tend to be connected to its history of racial insensitivity.