View from my window: Al Jean on Alf, Johnny Carson and 30 years with The Simpsons

Al Jean, executive producer and writer for The Simpsons in his office at Fox Studios. He has worked on the show for 30 years.

This window is in my office on the Fox lot, where I've been hiding out during the pandemic. We never missed a day of work. We went to Zoom in March of 2020 and carried right on.

It's corny, but what inspires me is that when I'm here I think about all the people that have been in this office working on the show - starting with Sam Simon [The Simpsons co-creator], Conan O'Brien was another one. You just go, "What a lucky place to have spent 30 years."

It doesn't feel that long. I saw a video the other day from backstage of season three and it feels like you could walk into that room and it wouldn't have changed.

Before The Simpsons I wrote on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The man himself, in a year-and-a-half, I met three times. I met him when I started the job, I met him when we did a spot with new products where he would meet with the writers and I met him at an anniversary dinner where all the writers performed at his request. At the dinner he said, "Keep your day job." Then we lost the day job a month later. That's my experience personally with Johnny Carson. But it was like meeting JFK or something. You were star-struck in his presence.

Working on [80s alien comedy series] Alf was a magical thing. There were actually two Alfs. There was a rehearsal Alf and an upgraded version. Rehearsal Alf was really funny, he was not politically correct. When he wasn't being filmed he was knocking around pretending he was drunk. That would've been a funny show.

Writing for season one of The Simpsons was two days a week. Most of my friends didn't want a job that only had that limited work time. But I thought it was really cool, loved doing animation for the first time and thought it would be a great show.

It was always a thrill to have you name on any show. Alf had 20,000,000 viewers. It'd really be something. The first name on the first Simpsons Christmas show is my name, ironically. That's where my first credit landed, so that was great. Luckily for me, my name has been at the end of about 600 episodes. It's this name that's subliminally registered, even if people have no idea who I am.

I was here during the quote-unquote "Golden Age" and if you'd said to me, "Season four, this is the Golden Age," I woulda gone, "What? Come again?" because a lot of people had quit to do other projects and we were scrambling to get episodes out one by one; Marge vs the Monorail, Last Exit to Springfield, Cape Feare. You do your best and see what happens.

I"ve run the show 22 years now and I've always been terrified that I would be the person who caused it to come to an end. That's probably not going to happen now. It'll go on long beyond me and I'm glad it will. But I feel that pressure every table-read immensely.

Sometimes people say, "Oh, you must've been so wasted when you wrote that." Only from lack of sleep. There was only one writer who even smoked cigarettes and he would go outside to do it. It's always been a pretty healthy group. A very sober, very hard-working bunch. I'd say the one vice was fast-food. But pandemic-wise, that's gone.

To think of a new idea that The Simpsons hasn't done is the hardest thing. Everything you think of just immediately goes to an episode. I'm always amazed when anybody comes up with an original idea or a way of treating something that's fresh. When we get that the rest is fine. But the original inspiration, that's the hardest part.

It's hard not to take the criticism personally but I always take constructive criticism in the spirit it's intended. We're always trying to do fresh shows about today's families and the problems they have. Certain things in the show don't look the same as they did in 1990 but I think the show holds up quite a bit from that era. When kids find it on Disney+ they still binge it. It's evergreen.

I'm always amazed by the power of something to children. I have things as a child that I loved, like Marvel comics. So I'll run into people, and this is the most amazing thing you can hear if you work on the show, "My parents were splitting up and I watched The Simpsons to cheer up." Nothing could mean more.

* As told to Karl Puschmann

All 31 seasons of The Simpsons are streaming on Disney+.