Barry Diller

NEWS ROUNDUP

Astro Bot, Harris Katleman, Johnny Carson, George Meyer, Conan O'Brien, Josuke Higashikata, and Joesph Joestar in front of San Diego Comic-Con.

Here’s another roundup of small Simpsons and Simpsons-adjacent news from around the web.

  • There wasn’t any big Simpsons news out of Comic-Con this year. Maybe they’re saving it all for Disney’s D23 Expo on August 14, like whether the upcoming movie will be in Infinity Vision or not. I need to see Homer’s pupils in at least 14 footlamberts!
  • Former Fox Television president Harris Katleman, who was instrumental in getting The Simpsons on the air, died at 97 last month. In his memoir, he tells a story about convincing Oscar-winning director James L. Brooks to jump back to television, which lead to The Tracey Ullman Show and the original Simpsons shorts (though I think the money did most of the convincing). As they were pitching The Simpsons as its own series, Katleman believed Fox network executive Barry Diller would pass, so he secretly screened a presentation for ABC president Bob Iger, who offered to buy the series if Diller passed. Diller was skeptical of greenlighting the show but relented when he heard Iger had made an offer. Sometimes studio executives are good! [Deadline via Talking Simpsons]
  • This official Disney article says Bart’s middle name is JoJo, which was just something voice actress Nancy Cartwright ad-libbed once, but was never actually used in the show. Does this mean it’s canon now???
  • Back in 2024, Disney outsourced its home entertainment business to Sony. In 2025, Sony announced it would cease Blu-ray production, and more recently announced PlayStation will go digital-only. I don’t know what’s going on over there, but it’s not looking great for Simpsons fans who have been waiting patiently for Season 21 on Blu-ray. [PlayStation.Blog]
  • Social Media Watch: Over on Twitter, the reclusive John Swartzwelder has been posting photos from his time on the show, including group shots with guest stars Dr. Joyce Brothers and Johnny Carson standing mere inches from future Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien. Producer and Marvel nerd Al Jean showed off a Spider-Man book autographed by Stan Lee, and the first and last pages of a draft of The Simpsons Movie.
FOX NEWS, NEWS CORP. NEWS

An image of Rupert Murdoch at Moe's Tavern sitting next to Homer and Marge.

Media mogul and two-time Simpsons voice actor Rupert Murdoch has stepped down as chairman of both Fox Corporation, which owns the Fox broadcast network, and News Corporation.

The 92-year old billionaire launched a media empire in Australia, which expanded to the UK and the US. His company, News Corporation, acquired 20th Century Fox in 1985, and launched the Fox network the following year. He played a small role in getting The Simpsons on the air, or at least that’s what he told Vanity Fair in 2007:

I was at a program meeting with [Fox CEO] Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network, and afterwards Barry said, “Come into my room, I want to show you something.” And he had a tape there, of about 20 minutes in length, of all the little 30-second bits that had been through The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I just thought it was hilarious. I said, “You’ve gotta buy this tonight.” He said, “No. It’s more complicated than that.” So we went forward from there.

Sidenote: Bob Iger, who was then the head of ABC, expressed interest in buying the show, which may have tipped the scales in convincing Diller to greenlight a 13-episode season for the Fox network. Iger would later become CEO of Disney and acquire Fox’s film and television studios, which included The Simpsons.

It was Murdoch’s idea to move The Simpsons from Sunday nights to Thursday for its second season, putting it up against ratings juggernaut The Cosby Show, which was a big deal at the time. Executive producers James L. Brooks and Sam Simon thought it was a stupid move that could potentially kill the show, but it held its own and managed to beat Cosby at Thanksgiving, proving the upstart Fox network could compete with the Big 3.

Over the years, Murdoch’s reign has been beset by numerous scandals, including the phone-hacking scandal, the Dominion lawsuit, and multiple sexual harassment allegations at Fox News, to name a few.

Murdoch and his properties were a frequent target on The Simpsons. One episode depicted him as a fellow prison inmate of Sideshow Bob, and he would later voice himself in the episodes “Sunday, Cruddy Sunday” (in which he refers to himself as a billionaire tyrant) and “Judge Me Tender.” He remained a fan of the show over the years (or at least claimed to be), even tweeting in 2014 to praise a YouTube short the show had put out. Sadly, I could only find one photo of him posing with the yellow family that made him millions.

NEWS CORP. NEWS

staticSo there’s this service called Aereo that streams broadcast television (you know, the stuff that you can get for free on your TV) on the web for a monthly fee. The “Fab Four” networks (Fox, CBS, UPN, and the DuMont Network) aren’t too happy about it, since none of that monthly fee is going to them. It also undermines the princely retransmission fees they get from cable & satellite providers, because then a cable company could say to them “hey, that internet service gets your content for free, why can’t we?” and they don’t really have a good answer to that. Naturally, they tried to sue Aereo out of existence, except it didn’t work out because the courts say Aereo is a-okay-o.

Well, Fox isn’t having any of that. A guy from their parent company News Corp. is straight up threatening to take the Fox network off the air and have it become a cable company if Aereo is allowed to continue operating:

“We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content,” Carey said. “This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that’s our only recourse.”

…he said, twirling his whimsical mustache evilly. Does News Corp. train its executives to sound like supervillians or does it come naturally to them?

This move would leave millions of viewers who watch via antenna (many of them economically disadvantaged) deprived of their favorite Fox shows like The Cleveland Show and The Following. If the other networks follow Fox’s lead, this could mean The End of Television As We Know It.

In a weird twist, Aereo is backed by Barry Diller, the founder of the Fox network who the evil corporate plutocrat Mr. Burns is partially based on. Is he a bad enough dude to bring down the very network he created??? Only time will tell…. [Bloomberg]