From the NY Times:


The Season Finale That Isn't a Season Finale
By ROBERT LEVINE

Published: May 23, 2004

HE episode of "The Simpsons" that will be shown
tonight at 8, the finale of the Fox hit's 15th season,
includes pointed social satire, Capraesque small-town
sentiment, broad physical humor and sly
self-referential jokes. What it doesn't have, in a
time when sitcoms like "Friends" and "Frasier"
featured plot arcs that played out over the course of
a year, is any reference to the fact that it's the
last show of the season.


In "The Simpsons," everything is neatly tied up at the
end of an episode. Whatever happens that week, whether
Homer buys a professional baseball team, starts an
Internet business or goes to Alcatraz with his family
on charges of treason — and he has done all of these —
is resolved in 22 minutes and conveniently forgotten
by the next week. Bart is forever in fourth grade, and
Maggie, the baby, will never talk. Whenever tonight's
episode is seen in syndication, it will be difficult
to tell that it's a season finale — or even what
season it's from.

That consistency is one reason the show is one of the
longest-running sitcoms in history. As actors on
live-action programs age, "the viewer looks at it and
says, `The show isn't the show I loved 10 years ago,'
" said Al Jean, the executive producer, who has been
with the series since it began and has supervised its
writing staff for three years. "That doesn't happen to
us."

But the lack of change also makes it challenging to
keep "The Simpsons" fresh: the writers will never have
to deal with Bart hitting puberty, but neither will
they be able to use it as a source of material. Since
the writers long ago used up the obvious stories about
the family, many plots now focus on the secondary
characters who populate their hometown, Springfield,
like the comically strait-laced Principal Skinner and
the Borscht Belt-damaged entertainer Krusty the Clown.

"One of the reasons for our longevity is that we've
been able to flesh out the town, so we have all these
characters we can bring in," Mr. Jean said. "If you
want a doctor, we have a doctor. If you want a mayor,
we have a mayor. It's harder to do a live-action show
with the same five people in a living room." Tonight's
episode involves Mr. Burns, the wraithlike Scrooge who
owns the town's nuclear power plant, as he buys up
Springfield's newspapers and television stations. But
whichever character drives the plot, "The Simpsons" is
a series about the family, so every main story must
involve Homer, Marge, Bart or Lisa. In this case, the
writers decided that idealistic Lisa would be the
little guy to Mr. Burns's corporate bully. "I pitched
it as a Frank Capra story for media consolidation,"
said Don Payne, who wrote the episode and has been
with the show for six seasons.

"The Simpsons" is structured in three acts, separated
by commercial breaks, and the actual plot plays out
over the second and third. "The first act is generally
a set piece," Mr. Payne said. "You want it to be
free-form and fun." Tonight it's a gathering of
everyone in Springfield, a device the writers use
often because it offers a reason to assemble the funny
secondary characters. The event, presided over by the
deadpan TV anchorman Kent Brockman, is a salute to
Geezer Rock — Springfield's version of the Old Man of
the Mountain, the New Hampshire landmark that
collapsed last year. The jokes are rapid-fire and
random: Brockman says the rock "will soon be more than
just a place for teens to have sex and commit
suicide," and the scene cuts to a teenager jumping
off, asking, "Why did they cancel `Futurama?' " — a
reference to another show created by Matt Groening,
the man behind "The Simpsons."

While Lisa reads a poem about Geezer Rock, Homer
causes an avalanche that buries Mr. Burns. He gets
trapped underground, and in one of the weird visual
riffs that are the hallmark of the show, he's seen
getting nourishment by catching bugs and suckling at
the breast of a mole. He makes it back to his mansion,
only to turn on his TV and hear Kent Brockman refer to
him as a greedy tycoon, so he vows to "change this
town's accurate impression of me." As he buys every
news business in town, he runs up against Lisa, who
has started a newspaper.


The narrative of tonight's show hasn't changed much
since he pitched the story in June, Mr. Payne said.
But the pace of "The Simpsons" requires writing and
rewriting to ensure that every minute of the show is
packed with jokes and pop culture references, and the
lengthy animation process gives the writers months to
do that. As with most comedies, the scriptwriting
process is highly collaborative; after Mr. Payne's
idea was accepted, the staff of 20 writers
brainstormed about how it might play out.
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The story was visually simple and full of dialogue, so
much of the work in the writers' room involved
punching it up. "If a show seems too talky, it's a
good idea to throw in a TV parody or a cartoon," Mr.
Jean said, referring to the way the series often cuts
to the television its characters are watching. One of
the recurring devices is "The Itchy and Scratchy
Show," in which an animated cat and mouse kill each
other in grotesque ways; tonight Mr. Burns takes it
over to shill for nuclear power. (Scratchy asks about
the relative safety of wind power and is promptly
decapitated by a windmill.) "It's a commercial for
nuclear power, so there's a satirical point," Mr. Jean
said. "But if you're 3 years old and you have no idea
what's going on, you'll still laugh at what happens to
the cartoon characters."

Because it's about the media, this episode has more
clever references than most. At one point, one of
Lisa's friends, Milhouse, admits that he filed a story
from Baghdad when he was actually in Basra — a sendup
of recent journalism scandals. "We try not to write
down to people," Mr. Payne said. "If you're in on the
joke, fine. If not, you might find it funny for some
other reason."

At the end of this episode, Lisa's example inspires
many of the residents of Springfield to start their
own newspapers. "Instead of one big-shot controlling
all the media," Homer says, "now there's a thousand
freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions." But in the
fall, when the 16th season of "The Simpsons" begins,
all those publications will be forgotten, neither Mr.
Burns nor Lisa will remember their feud, and the
Simpsons will be sucked into another great adventure.