Groening likes change of pace
Disenchantment challenges Simpsons creator to ‘tell a big story’ in a new way for a 2018 audience
SANTA MONICA, CALIF.— Speaking as someone who has created two hit animated TV shows and is about to introduce his third series, Matt Groening has some advice to ensure a successful pitch meeting.
“This is my Hollywood tip,” he said earlier this summer. “You can say, ‘It’s The Simpsons meets anything’ or ‘It’s anything meets Game of Thrones,’ and you’ve got a deal.”
Groening was gently ribbing his new show, Disenchantment, which Netflix will release on Friday. His latest series certainly shares a satirical sensibility and a distinctive curvy cartoon style with The Simpsons, his enduring Fox comedy that starts its 30th season in September. But while it takes place in a medieval realm of wizards and dragons, it is not exactly Groening ’s answer to Game of Thrones. Disenchantment is more like Groening’s comic amalgam of fantasy franchises such as Lord
of the Rings and the animated epics of Hayao Miyazaki, to name just two of its dozens of influences.
It is also Groening’s first show created for a streaming service — its initial 10 episodes can be consumed in a five-hour binge — as well as his first to have a serialized narrative.
“I’ve been working for 30 years in sequential, weekly, prime-time animation,” Groening said. “To suddenly have a bunch of episodes that go up at the same time, you have to tell a big story. And it’s been really fun. However, it’s its own torture.”
For Groening, part of the challenge in creating Disenchant
ment has been attuning it to the tastes and pacing of contemporary television.
And part of the difficulty — and part of the pleasure — is doing something different from
The Simpsons, the decades-old behemoth that is constantly judged by the standards it set, and against which every subsequent creation of Groening’s is measured. Groening, 64, has built Dis
enchantment into a series about the misadventures of a rebellious princess (voiced by Abbi Jacobson of Broad City), that aforementioned elf (Nat Faxon) and a mischievous demon (Eric Andre). Though each episode of Dis
enchantment tells a standalone story, Groening said: “Every single thing connects to things that will pay off later. There are moments from the very beginning — hints and clues and Easter eggs — that we lay in there for the people who really care.”
To construct and populate the show’s interconnected kingdoms, Groening had help from some trusted colleagues. Josh Weinstein, the showrunner of
Disenchantment, was previously a showrunner at The Simp
sons and a producer of Groening’s science-fiction followup, Futurama. When Weinstein joined The
Simpsons in the early 1990s, he said the show was starting to perfect its comedic voice.
“There were really big jokes, but there was also a comedy of realism and getting things just right,” Weinstein said, citing the rampant stupidity of Homer Simpson and the strange relationships between supporting characters such as Principal Skinner and his mother, Agnes.
He said that even that early in the show’s run, Groening, had already learned to navigate a straitlaced and demanding network-television environment.
“You might have thought Matt was Mr. Underground Cartoonist,” Weinstein said, “but he had a very organized mind for what he wanted.”
The Simpsons became a critical, cultural and commercial success, one that, in a pre-internet era, was largely insulated from the opinions of its audience.
“We had no idea, really, what people were thinking, so we had total freedom,” Weinstein said. On Disenchantment, he added, “We have that feeling again, of absolute freedom to do what we want, which is so rare.” The writing staff on Disen
chantment consists of about a dozen people, about half who are veterans from The Simpsons and Futurama, and half from animated shows such as Gravity Falls.
Bill Oakley, Weinstein’s former writing partner, worked with him as a Simpsons showrunner and a Futurama producer. He said the directive from Groening on Disenchant- ment is that it shouldn’t “require the viewer to know anything about fantasy or even like fantasy,” adding that Groening “wants the show to be about the characters, about them growing up and going forward.”
It’s a lesson Groening said he learned, in part, on Futurama, which was set in a 31st century cohabitated by robots, aliens and lobster-people, and which was as much a sendup of genre conventions as it was of human interaction. On Disenchantment, he said, “We have to get past the fantasy jokes and into real emotion.”
His imperative also highlights the emotional investment that fans of The Simpsons have made in that show. Justin Roiland, the co-creator of the Adult Swim animated series Rick and Morty, said that, when The Simpsons is at its best, “the characters are more important than the jokes.”
“As you watch those first 10, 15 seasons, they really wrote up to those characters. They wouldn’t sacrifice the integrity of a character for a joke,” he said. “You’d occasionally be surprised — oh, wow, I actually feel emotion for this cartoon.”
Groening said his interest in creating Disenchantment and showing it on a nontraditional platform came from a desire to try something new. “I just wanted to see what it was like to go someplace else,” he said.
But his colleagues suspect there is a bit more at stake for Groening, and that he wants to show he is as vital now as he was in past eras of his career. “If I had created The Simpsons and Futurama, I might retire,” Weinstein said. “But he’s somebody who loves to work, to his credit. He wants to be judged for what he’s doing now. He wants to keep contributing.”