Jon Vitti wrote some of the very best episodes of The Simpsons, including “Radio Bart,” “Mr. Plow” and “Cape Feare,” which, of course, included the iconic Sideshow Bob rake gag. But it turns out that Vitti isn’t proud of every single episode he wrote.
Vitti, who also wrote for King of the Hill, The Office and The Critic, recently guested on Nancy Cartwright’s podcast Simpsons Declassified and discussed working on the show’s early seasons including a Season One episode that seemingly haunts him to this day.
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Vitti pointed out that his very first episode, “Bart the Genius,” was “a really easy story, where you just write what would happen if Bart cheated on an intelligence test.”
His second script, “Homer’s Night Out,” didn’t go quite as smoothly. The episode finds Marge taking the extreme action of throwing Homer out of the house after he’s caught dancing with an exotic dancer at a bachelor party.
According to Vitti, it was “a very problematic story” because “if you go too far it gets too mean, and you don’t want (to do) character damage,” adding, “I was in way over my head with that. I mean, that was horrible.”
Part of the problem was the show’s schedule, which gave writers just two weeks to come up with an outline and another two weeks to hammer out a draft. “Four weeks is not enough for me to write a 25-minute episode in which I’m happy with everything I’m turning in,” Vitti said.
“I was so unhappy with ‘Homer’s Night Out,’ I just basically decided on the next one, ‘Simpson and Delilah,’ that I would rather be fired for non-delivery of script than ever turn in anything like ‘Homer’s Night Out’ again,” the writer continued. “I took like three months to write it. If Sam (Simon) had fired me for that, he would have been completely within his rights.”
Vitti, who recalled that “every episode was a desperate attempt to keep your episode from stinking,” noted that the “flip side” of the show’s continued success is that “the episodes that you would like to forget never disappear.” And he admitted that he never rewatches episodes that he wrote because “the mistakes are just so horrible.”
Clearly he’s forgetting that he can just blame wizards for any and all past mistakes.
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