Hi Andy.

Hi David.
I'm looking at Ain't No Such Thing As Too Much Amy Wong.

Ah, you know who I am then!
Yeah. [laughs] You think I would get on the phone with someone without looking them up on the Internet?

I'm sure not all the journalists you've talked to have their own Futurama websites.
But I didn't know I was going to have to be prepared to speak to someone who actually knew something about Futurama here instead of just making stuff up on the spot.

I'll try not to expose your lack of Futurama knowledge too much.
[Laughs]

This is great, because as you obviously know I'm a huge fan of the show, so I'll crack on with the questions.
Okay.

How long was the initial development process of the show, between you and Matt first getting together and the pilot episode being completed?
It was very long [laughs]. It was way too long, that's the better way of summarising it. I was working on The Simpsons as a writer at the time, and for years there was this rumour that Matt Groening had this idea for a science fiction show, so this is the pre-David Cohen part of the development phase. I don't know what went on during that phase, I think it was mainly Matt selecting science fiction books and old science fiction magazines with funny covers on them to try to steal designs from. But after a couple of years of hearing that rumour, he actually sat down with me at lunch one day, and singled me out as one of the science fiction nerds on the Simpsons writing staff and brought me aboard, and then after that it was still at least a year, I'd say, before we went to Fox to show them what we had. So basically what happened was we were just talking about it all the time, getting together for dinners, weekends, and suddenly realising we had way too much material, so it became a paring-down process at that point. But I would say over a year of my involvement before we even went in and talked to Fox about it, so it was pretty overdone at that point.

On the first season DVD commentaries, either you or Matt mentioned that there were a lot of variations on what the show was going to be like before you came up with the final one. How many different version of the show were they before you went to Fox?
Of the pilot specifically, or the series?

The series in general.
I would say the basic characters were always pretty much hit on. Matt had already come up with Fry and Leela and the basic ideas behind them, that Fry was this guy from our time who got frozen, and Leela was this orphan cyclops alien, and then we kind of built up the rest while talking about them. There was not that much debate about the characters per se, but what exactly they were doing and what Fry's role was were constantly changing. For example, for a long time we didn't know they were going to be a delivery company. We actually thought for quite a while that all of them would work for Mom, the super billionaire tyrant of our universe, and they were going to be depressed employees of Mom. So for a long time that was going to be the setup of the show.

So Mom was in it right from the beginning?
Yes, she was. And she was going to have a much larger role -- that was why were had her three sons made up in the first season, because we envisioned -- actually, her youngest son Igner we thought was going to be a very frequently-seen character, and he was one of our favourites.
[David describes Igner as an evil Homer Simpson - see DVD Review]
As it turned out, we saw him for about five minutes of screentime in the entire history of the series! [Laughs] Originally, he was going to be their nemesis, and he would be like if Homer Simpson had decided he were evil and wanted to take over the world, that would be Igner. So that was quite a different thing. I think it started to feel like we just didn't have enough freedom with that setup, they would be facing the same villain week after week, and it didn't seem to take advantage of all the possibilities of the future to have this villain who was sat right in the building with them, basically. So that kind of went by the wayside.

Obviously the evil Homer Simpson role became Bender in the end.
Yeah, sort of. I guess we decided an evil character could be one of our heroes, and that kind of freed things up a bit.

I guess that's what great about having a robot as a character, because you can get away with pretty much anything.
Yeah, it's funny because just yesterday I was watching the DVD -- the first season of DVDs has just been released here in the United States and I don't have a Region 2 DVD player, so I myself have never watched the DVDs until the last week or so, even the first season. So I was just watching the 'robot hell' episode from season one and listening to myself talking, and at this point I didn't remember what I'd said about it, so everything was a surprise to me!
[Brief discussion of Bender's many vices that would be very hard to get past the censors if he were a human character - DVD Review]

He is such a great character, so the message there is obviously: to get around the censors, put robots in your show.
[Laughs]

As the executive producer and co-creator, how hands-on are you with the writing of each episode?
That's the main part of my job, I would say, as the head writer of the show. That's what I would easily consider the most important part of my job. It's very much a group process -- I think people see one person's name go by with the 'written by' credit, they tend to give that person all the credit or all the blame, depending what they thought of that episode. But in reality every episode is very much a group effort. The Simpsons is the same way; having worked on The Simpsons, I modelled our system, our work environment after theirs. And the way it works is that a couple of us, me and one or two of the other writers, go off on a weekend maybe, or have a long, extended lunch, and try to come up with the basic theme or setting for an episode, and over several days flesh it out with more people. And then one person would go out and write the script, but after the script is done we'd go over it in excruciating detail with the whole room, and usually I would be the person in charge of that rewriting process. So really, the job of all the writers on staff is primarily of rewriters -- ninety per cent of the writers' time is spent rewriting other people's scripts.

How many people are on the writing staff?
We had about twelve or thirteen at any one time. That may sound like a lot, but actually it's about half the size of the Simpsons writing staff! They have an unlimited budget at this point, and we were always more under the watchful eye of Fox. We didn't have the blank chequebook. That was about the minimum number of people, because often to meet our schedule we would have to have two groups at one time, and I would be in charge of one group while Ken Keeler, another of the senior writers, would be in charge of the other group. So just to make our deadlines, we usually had to be doing the rewriting process with two scripts at one time. Everybody really has contributed a lot to every episode.

Which episode are you personally most proud of?
Hmm. Well, from season three... This is probably our strongest season on the whole I'd say, the one coming up. I'm going to name one which may be a little less flashy to write about, but if I'm going to be honest the one I'm most proud of is probably the episode called 'The Luck Of The Fryrish'.

That's one of my favourites.
Okay, good! I'm tempted to just name one where Bender goes crazy and yells a lot! You'd have an easier time writing about it, but that particular episode, 'Luck Of The Fryrish', accomplishes a lot of the things we wanted to do from the beginning of the series. It ties in Fry's past to the present, you learn a lot more about him and I think it's a very funny episode, but also is one of the most emotional ones as well. Even having seen it 50 times myself, I still get a little teary at the end. That's probably the one I'm most proud of, I'd say.

It's rare that any TV show affects me emotionally, to be honest, but for a cartoon to do it, it has to have done a pretty damn good job.
I appreciate that. I felt really proud when I checked the responses on the Internet after that aired, and there was a long list of people contending that they had cried at the end of it! As long as people had laughed and enjoyed the rest of the show, then that was really the desired response. There is a very high degree of difficulty, because as you say it is a cartoon, and people don't come into it expecting to have an experience like that. I was pretty happy that we did that.

Another show that had an emotional ending was the one with Fry's fossilised dog, 'Jurassic Bark'. I think the ending of that took a lot of people by surprise, because it was really quite harsh.
That's the season after this, I wasn't sure if you'd seen that one yet.

It just aired a few weeks ago on satellite.
That one, some people felt we had gone too far, and you may have your own opinion about that! My assistant Michelle, she was literally mad at me for about a month that we chose that ending! People are all over the map on their responses to that episode. It seemed like once we actually started writing that one, it turned more and more into an episode about Fry and Bender and Fry's past, but not really about the dog -- the dog is the McGuffin, the object that everything else was rotating around, and at some point we realised that we should not bring the dog back to life, because the episode is not really about that at all. That's why we decided to go the way we did. But I certainly sympathise with the people who think we went too far on that one! Personally I really liked it. I think we're going to submit that one to the Emmy awards, in fact, really go out on a limb and put out on that people either love or hate!

Right from the start, on the DVD of the pilot, you said there were hints being dropped for later storylines that were going to be picked up, like Nibbler's shadow -- were there any storylines that you never got the chance to follow up because of the cancellation?
Yeah, there were a few -- if I go back to Igner, for example, part of the reason we didn't follow this one was because we didn't end up making him such a big character. But one thing we were going to reveal down the line was that Igner was the Professor's illegitimate son, because he and Mom had had a fling years ago. That was one we were going to follow a bit more, the past history of Mom and the Professor.

That's popped up every now and again...
Yeah, we never got to the offspring, but we got about 80 percent of the way there [laughs]. There were no doubt many others, but that's what comes to the mind at the moment. Others will pop up probably as we go on.

You're in the bizarre situation of you only made four seasons, but it's now on the fifth and the way things are going it might even get stretched out into a sixth, as far as airing them goes. Did Fox changing the order of the shows around so much affect or force you to rewrite any of the ongoing plotlines?
Not really, because we worked so far in advance preparing the series -- the minimum possible delay time was about nine months, but with Fox delaying them so much it was usually more like a year -- at this point it's about two years, probably, from when we started thinking about the episodes to when they're getting on the air in the US. So there's no way we could adjust our thinking to compensate for the future air schedule, so anything that Fox screwed up, they did in a way that was irreparable! Fortunately, usually I would say they usually ran by us the order of the shows that they were planning, so once or twice we caught things that were going to run out of line, like show a character before they had ever been introduced, for example, and they usually were amenable to correcting the order that it went in.

One of the episodes on the third season set of discs is 'Route Of All Evil', which introduces Dwight, but that didn't get shown until the fifth season.
Actually that was a production difficulty which caused the delay of that, which was that the actor we had hired to play Dwight was a guy named Bumper Robinson. We recorded that episode, but as is standard practice we made various changes along the way while we were producing the episode, and we needed him back to record some new lines we'd written. Unfortunately he went to China for close to a year to film a miniseries, I don't even know what it was exactly, some kind of long movie -- I don't know what takes a year to film! -- but he was literally on the opposite side of the world, and basically because Fox had bumped us up so much, we didn't really have a need for every show to be ready on time. So rather than try to set up a very complicated recording session where he was in China and we were here and no-one spoke the same language, we decided to wait for him to come back a year later. So that was one which I can't blame on Fox. There was an oddity on that in that Dwight did appear in passing in a different episode before we had introduced him -- the exact problem I was just claiming we had avoided, we did have -- with Dwight, but it was such a minor appearance I don't think anyone quite knew or cared who he was. It was, ah... 'Anthology Of Interest' which Dwight actually appeared in briefly.

Yeah, in the Wizard Of Oz episode.
Exactly. You know that -- there's not much I'm going to tell you that might surprise you!

The odd thing about Futurama was that initially it was well-promoted and had a good timeslot -- was it Tuesdays?
The first two weeks it was on Sundays at eight right after The Simpsons, and that was always the timeslot that we felt was perfect for the show, because obviously we're trying to go for a similar sensibility to The Simpsons, so we always thought 'You're never going to get a better audience coming into the timeslot than if you run it right after The Simpsons'. But they quickly moved us to Tuesdays, where we were after King Of The Hill, and after that they bounced us around -- they put us back briefly after The Simpsons for another half of a season, and ultimately in our gravesite...

The 'death slot'...
Yeah, seven o'clock on Sundays, which as you may be able to surmise is considered a very bad timeslot here, especially if you have a younger audience like we do. It's still light outside, and it's kind of a strange practical consideration, but literally, if you're on at a time when it's light outside, kids will be outside -- even in this day and age a certain percentage of kids will be outside throwing a ball or something and not watching TV. So it's a very bad time.

What do you think Fox's problem was, suddenly dropping it in quite possibly the worst slot it could have?
It's a strange thing, because if you look at the performance the show had, the ratings in the slot after The Simpsons, it was about the same as all the other shows they've ever had there, including Malcolm In The Middle, King Of The Hill... It comes down to a couple of things; one is that it's a business decision -- for a long time, that was the only good timeslot that Fox had, so each time they had a new comedy out that they wanted to give a big promotion to, they had to put it in that slot and bump out whatever had been there before. So that I can sort of understand, that each thing just gets a limited run in that slot. But as far as ultimately moving us to the death slot... you have to suspect that there's a little more personal motivation for that. I think really what it means is that the powers that be just don't get the show. It's not their favourite show, they're not exactly our target audience. And there's always been a little bit of an antagonistic relationship with Matt Groening, because he likes to do things in a very independent fashion and not have a lot of interaction with executives as far as their opinions go or what changes should be made to the show. So we were never really on great terms with the executives, if you put it that way. I mean, they could have knocked us off the air three years earlier if they had been determined to, so it's kind of a strange middle ground where they didn't take it off, but forced it into a slow, agonising death.

[Was this because Fox didn't want to actively piss off Matt?
Possibly, but in the end they did anyway! David suggests that rewarding the man who made them billions of dollars might have been the logical approach, but there's very little logic in Hollywood - Hotdog]

What would be the best fate for Fox's executives, then? Would it be boneitis, swallowed by a gelatinous blob or sucked dry by brain slugs?
[laughs] I'm not quite that vindictive about the fate of Futurama, especially as I may yet be working with them again in the future! There's kind of limited choices here. But I guess ultimately for them I would like to see Futurama have a hugely successful run for decades in reruns and syndication and movies, and it ends up making zillions of dollars for somebody else! I guess that would be the ultimate payback.

[Has a film been discussed?
David and Matt have quite a lot, but because Fox is a partner in the show, and they're not enthusiastic, there are problems. David says that Matt is looking for ways to get finance on board for a movie, and that it's currently his (David's) top dream for the show - Hotdog]

Cartoon Network's picked it up in syndication, and it seems to be doing very well by their standards...
It's a very strange experience for me, to turn on TV and see a promo for Futurama, which you almost can't avoid because they've been running them very heavily -- not just on Cartoon Network, but on CNN, they've had a lot of billboards here, buses, taxis... It's such a novel experience for me to walk outside and see an ad for Futurama. The most surprising thing of all is that that's a relatively small cable operation -- think of what Fox could have done with their vastly larger resources. It makes it all the more depressing when you realise what a great job a small channel can do. We got nothing, and I mean nothing -- two or three years went by without Fox running a single promotion for Futurama on the air, other than lumping it in with The Simpsons. They would almost say 'The Simpsons this week has 15 rock 'n' roll stars... afteranallnewFuturama!' If you don't count that, we literally went years without a single promotion from Fox, which is just astounding, really. I don't know of any other show that's got that treatment and not been cancelled! So it does kind of hurt to see all the Cartoon Network promotion.

You've done a commentary for every episode on the DVD so far; have you done the commentaries for the 4ACV production block yet?
We just finished about two weeks ago. We just finished all of them, so we've done 72 shows now -- in fact, we've done 74 commentaries because each of season three and season four comes with an extra bonus commentary. We have one in season three on the 'Roswell That Ends Well' episode, which we won the Emmy award for by the way, quick plug there, so in honour of that we did a second commentary where we focused solely on the animation process. In our discussions the animators are usually the quieter types, and the writers -- and the actors especially! -- tend to shout them down when they're about to say something interesting. So on that one we did an entire second commentary just about the animation process. And in season four, similarly on 'Jurassic Bark', the dog episode, we did one entirely about the writing process. And when I say the writing process, it's actually more the eating process, since the writers talk a lot about how much junk food we eat and close to the kitchen the writing room is situated, that kind of thing. But it's more about the life of being a writer on the show. So that's 74 commentaries for 72 episodes.

Presumably the commentaries for the last season, that was done after you knew about the cancellation, so did that change the tone of the commentaries at all? More nostalgic, more bitter, anything?
Ah... yeah, I think I would say 'nostalgic' was the better word, because everything has been softened a bit by time at this point. Even though the episodes have not aired yet, we've been out of production for maybe about nine months at this point, or even more, and even then we could see the writing on the wall. So none of this news was very shocking at this point! So our bitterness tends to be tempered by the fact that it's like a little reunion each time we get together to do these commentaries, and everybody is pretty happy to be there. Everybody tends to sit around afterwards for an extra hour and continue commenting for nobody's benefit. So I would say more bitter, but pretty much tempered by our greater ??????ity. [inaudible]

How many episodes do you do in one session?
I would say three is the most typical number. If you had asked me before what the process would be like, I would have thought it would be a lot more organised! [laughs] In reality, we just kind of go in and watch the episode, and I think you can sense that from the tone of the commentaries. They're pretty loose, there's very little preparation made. Luckily, it wasn't that long ago that we worked on them, so we tend to remember the key elements. But pretty much, it's a bunch of people who worked on the show sitting around watching the episodes and asking each other what they think they were thinking at the time. So it's pretty loose. That was at Matt Groening's request, actually, because he was a huge DVD buff, he watched a lot of DVDs, and he tends to find that the very written ones get boring right away, and tend to describe what you're already seeing on the screen, and I think his experience was that the ones where you're more part a conversation are more fun to watch. Just from listening to the first few commentaries, I would tend to agree -- they're the ones which are the most disorganised, and start talking about things which have nothing to do with the episode! We don't even have a regulation that you talk about anything related to the show on the DVD, especially in the later seasons, so people'll talk about their dog and their house in the course of the episode.

I'll wrap up with a last question which seeing as you know what my website is, it's going to be the obvious one: Amy or Leela?
Amy or Leela? Oh, Leela! The reason is, I'll give you my reason. Because there's a quote, unfortunately I don't remember who the quote is by, but I've always really loved, that the gist of is 'there is no greater beauty than a face of imperfection'. I always find the face to be more interesting if it's not completely symmetrical or not completely perfect. I would say Leela fits that description.

A good answer, though I don't agree with it...
Well, you wouldn't if you run an Amy website! [laughs] It's a tough decision, put it that way. I'll say that for the Amy fans out there!

Many thanks to Paula at DSA for organising the interview, and of course David X Cohen for doing it!