The writers strike loomed large over the ATX TV Festival this year, with most showrunners backing out. Those that did attend were very careful not to do anything that could be misconstrued as promotion for a show with staff on strike. Such was the case with Matt Selman, showrunner of The Simpsons (one of the few animated series covered by the WGA). Matt participated in a panel called “Showrunner POV” (click here for a recap) that focused on the job of showrunning, but nothing future-focused. And alongside his wife, actor, writer, and breast cancer survivor Renee Ridgeley, the duo participated in a panel called “Beyond the Very Special Episode.” I had the honor of sharing an orange couch with both of them (okay, it was actually blue), where we talked about their collaboration on the Season 33 episode “Lisa’s Belly,” which introduced Dr. Wendy Sage, a one-breasted cancer survivor.
(FOX)
Alex: It’s an honor to meet you both. Matt, in the Showrunner POV panel, you mentioned that you began with The Simpsons in 1997. Does that predate you two becoming a couple?
Renee Ridgley: No. When I met Matt, he was writing on a different show…
Matt Selman: A forgettable show.
Renee Ridgley: Then we broke up, and then he started writing on The Simpsons. And then we met again.
Matt Selman: But we didn't get back together because I was on The Simpsons. She’d never even seen it.
Renee Ridgley: I had never seen it, and I said, "That's a cartoon. Right?" And then…
Matt Selman: I don't believe this ever happened.
Renee Ridgley: He said, “It's not a cartoon, it's an animated show.”
Matt Selman: Remember the tone of voice when you said, "Is it a cartoon?"
Renee Ridgley: Well, you were like this, “It’s not a cartoon.”
Matt Selman: Trust that when we started dating, she didn't know. I would say something about Springfield, and she'd be like, "What's Springfield?" She'd never seen the show.
Renee Ridgley: Never. I had heard of it. I knew who Bart Simpson was, I saw the shirts.
Alex: Hitting the fast-forward button to today, you’re both married with kids, and Renee is a breast cancer survivor and advocate. The Simpsons has a long history of touching sensitive topics in a way that few other shows can. When did you two first discuss featuring a character with one breast?
Renee Ridgley: I said, "I think it would be really cool if you put a one-breasted cancer survivor on The Simpsons." And he's like, "Oh, what? We don't talk about cancer." I'm like, "No, you don't talk. No talking about it. Just the visual." Women with a single mastectomy that don't replace it with a breast form in their bra are the most visual evidence of breast cancer treatment. More than people who go flat. Because people can just think I'm a marathon runner or something. And we talked about it. We had many walks and there were a lot of conversations about how it could work. Finding the right episode. The character wasn't written in, she dropped into an episode, that could have been anybody. And when Matt, after years of having this index card on its cork board at work that said “uniboob,” which is what women, we have all kinds of terms of endearments for our bodies into survivorship. He said, “I think there's a script.” And I read it, and it was written by Juliet Kaufman. It was a beautiful story.
Matt Selman: I had a much darker way to represent cancer survivorship in another episode that I was tossing around in my brain that I think would've been maybe too disturbing for people. And then Juliet had this idea for this episode about how the things your parents say can get lodged in your brain as these giant words that never go away. And it seemed like there was this character that just seemed like a perfect fit. It was thematically linked, but it wasn't explicitly linked. It was just like part of Marge and Lisa's journey to try to deal with this mother-daughter conflict. The kind of somewhat goofy and perhaps fraudulent, but actually excellent hypnotherapist they go to. She just happens to be a breast cancer survivor, and the show doesn't talk about it. It's The Simpsons, and she's a little bit of a silly, goofy, new-agey character. Not every person that's been through something terrible is a perfect human, except for this one, of course [gesturing to Renee]. And so that felt Simpsonsy to me, but also thematically strong and with a little bit of extra emotional oomph. For a show that already had a lot of emotional oomph.
Renee Ridgley: For me, I got to help consult on the design. So I really looked at a lot of images of women with one breast. And how can this be translated to animation. I knew she kind of had to be in three-quarters on both sides, or you just lose the distinction of having only one breast. That she should have a port scar that was visible. So her shirt needs to be tight so you can see the silhouette differently on both sides. I thought it'd be interesting for her to have chemo curls, kind of short, curly hair. And that her flat side, women don't always get flat, they're often a little concave. No one loves it, but that's the truth of it. And so, in animation, it kept popping out a little bit convex. So I was like, "No, no, it goes the other way after a mastectomy." So I felt that The Simpsons was really wonderful that they collaborated with me in terms of the design to get it right because once it's out there, once it aired, the breast cancer community really responded to this. And they noticed things like that. "Oh my gosh, she has a port scar. Do you see she's slightly concave, just like me?" And those were really, really important things to the community to be seen, to be represented.
Matt Selman: But that's also part of the DNA of The Simpsons. From the beginning of the show as someone who was a fan of it before I was a writer on it, the degree of specificity in the world wasn't just like, oh, let's do the most bland, generic version of everything. Let's put in those visual details of everything in the world so that even if only a tiny audience member gets it, they'll get it super hard and feel super connected to the show. And I wish I could think of a great example from the early days. I just did an interview with LA with Austin Eater, the foodie website. And it was like The Simpsons got Indian food in Season 3, and it was so specific about the names of the foods, and they looked like the foods. And TV just didn't have that. It was all very generic and bland and pizza and everything. Everyone had to know what everything was. And The Simpsons were so groundbreaking in that it was a super detailed representative of every part of our culture. And this is a continuation of that. It's not some weird new thing we're doing.
Renee Ridgley: And that episode, right after it aired, Matt and I both got messages on social media from people we didn't know. And someone DM'd him on Twitter and said, “I'm sitting in my hospital room, I just had a mastectomy. I'm watching The Simpsons, and I see myself on TV. I'm crying, I know I can do this, thank you.” That stuff is unexpected, and it's so powerful to know that you've impacted people that way. So authenticity really matters.
Matt Selman: And it's fun to just have the character join the giant swath of Simpson's regulars.
Alex: I was going to bring that up. I had a poster in high school that had every character from The Simpsons up to that point, and they were all very tiny so they could all fit.
Matt Selman: In the opening credits of our 750th episode, we jammed 750 characters into that couch gag, including Dr. Sage. And I'm trying to figure out how to make that into a poster, but apparently, if the poster were one foot high, it would have to be 40 feet long.
Alex: Dr. Wendy Sage has been on the show 6 times so far, according to WikiSimpsons. When you have a cast of supporting characters as large as The Simpsons, how do you balance serving those that become fan-favorites? I remember loving Comic Book Guy and seeing him grow into a character that eventually received his own plot-driving episodes.
Matt Selman: Most episodes should be centered around at least one of The Simpsons. But maybe the best episodes are the ones that have a story that involves all four of them. But we also know that we've been around so long, and our world is so flexible that you can do a show that's just a road trip with Skinner and Chalmers. Or you could do an episode that acts like the show is called Moe's. What would that be like? And you could do a show that gets deeper, and you have a sense of which characters can sustain that and which ones can't. Comic Book Guy definitely can. We're always looking to poke around at ones to see if there's maybe a depth there that we didn't see. Which is one with Carl Carlson that was really good. And we're always looking for those side characters that we can go more into. We've done a lot of Cletus episodes. Cletus is, maybe he can sustain it, maybe he can't, but-
Alex: He's got so many kids.
Matt Selman: It's like, do they have that Simpsonsy pathos inner life? That's the question. I'm not sure every character in Springfield has an inner life, but we can always jam one in. Or we just do a little tiny story. We did something I love with the Sea Captain. How the Sea Captain spent 30 years looking for treasure and when he finally found it, he had ruined his marriage, and then he lost the treasure. It was a very sad story. That was funny. I'm glad that wasn't a full episode.
Alex: That’s great. Thank you both so much for your time. I hope you enjoy the rest of ATX TV Fest.
The first 33 seasons of The Simpsons are streaming on Disney+, including “Lisa’s Belly,” which was featured in the ATX TV Fest panel “Beyond the Very Special Episode.” New episodes of The Simpsons air Sundays on FOX.