Denis Avakov

“Our team of Korean animators hand-draws twenty-four thousand cels to make one episode of The Simpsons; these days, color is added by computer, but for the first decade of the show, each cel had to be hand-painted.”
― Mike Reiss, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons

“featured an eight-year-old boy who saved his friend who was choking to death. When asked where he learned the Heimlich, he said, “It was on a poster on The Simpsons.” True story.”
― Mike Reiss, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons

“We didn’t even have a real office at the time. The studio had so little faith in us, they housed us in a trailer. I assumed that if the show failed, they’d slowly back the trailer up to the Pacific and drown the writers like rats.”
― Mike Reiss, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons

“This was the tedious process by which I found great writers, like Greg Daniels (creator of The Office) and Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who three years later had my job running the show. In both cases, they had written pitch-perfect Seinfeld scripts. Greg’s was set entirely in a single parking space and was so good that Seinfeld actually produced it. Bill and Josh’s script had George Costanza accidentally swallowing a jagged piece of glass at a party; all the guests stay for hours, waiting to see if George “passes” the glass safely. It was cringe comedy at its very best.”
― Mike Reiss, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons