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Comment by patorjk | Hacker News Reader

One possible problem with this - I listened to the Simpsons commentary tracks a long time ago and one comment the writers gave was that episodes were hashed out in the writers room, and everyone contributed jokes. Once an episode was hashed out, one or two people would then be assigned to put it together. This would mean an episode could be listed as written by a specific person, but the best jokes in that episode could have been written by someone else. One of the writers mentioned they'd often get comments about how funny their episodes were, but then the person they were talking to would bring up jokes that were written by the other writers.

However, the graph at the end kind of shows this, the earlier people had the best episodes. It may have been that they had better chemistry.

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Futurama got cancelled and they made 3 straight to DVD movies which was supposed to be 26 episodes worth of content, and IIRC you could see it, each "movie" had 4 stories. The bad thing was, the humor got so so bad, with predictable lame one liners (Big Bang Theory-level lame). I wonder what sort of groupthink thought those jokes were funny, and what sort of dynamics the early Simpsons/Futurama writers group had to be able to output high quality humor...

I wonder how much of that was a format issue, though?

The Futurama movies were definitely weaker than the episodes, but I remember the Comedy Central revival being better than most or all of the movies. Maybe not up to their Season Four heights, but definitely enough better to make me think the movie style was causing them problems in either writing or editing.

I have the opposite experience. I find the Comedy Central reboot episodes, for the most part, to feel strange and 'off'. I can't even put my finger on it. Even the animation seems wonky to me.

Eh, to be honest, the movies weren't great, either. Seasons 1-4 really were kind of 'Futurama's run, I guess.

You're right, I kind of acknowledge this limitation, and am aware I'm doing many of the writers a massive disservice. But, the data that only showed credited writers, and those credited must have done _something_ to be the ones with their names on it.

What if the later writers just got worse reviews because they were in the later seasons? In other words, something else caused the decline so the later writers got worse ratings.

Your wording here suggests that the later episodes were simply rated lower because they were later. However, I think your point is that the later episodes got worse ratings for something beyond the writers. Certainly possible. Even if nothing else changed, it must be much more difficult to write a fresh, funny episode when 200+ episodes have already been done. There were also external factors which might have driven a change in the comedy of the show, the beginning of Family Guy, e.g.

I mean, you could just have producers forcing you to do something that's not good, like celebrity cameos and other stupid things.

It was the style of celebrity cameos that made things worse. In recent years, the cameos served more to showcase the celebrity, in ways that didn't contribute to the show, rather that utilizing the talents of the celebrity to make a good show, like they did in the past.

You only need to look at the Lady Gaga episode, the worst-rated episode by far (and for good reason) and compare it to any cameo in the first 9 seasons, and a good number of cameos in the next 10.

>were talking to would bring up jokes that were written by the other writers.

When asked about her favorite joke on 30 Rock in an interview, Tina Fey could recite the joke, but couldn't remember who wrote it for a similar reason

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