I apologize. Most people don’t.

So what didja’ do? Do tell! Do tell!

A show starts out, it’s got a cast, it’s got a crew, it’s got writers and producers. If the show survives to another season, the contract gives everyone a built-in pay raise for year two – cast, crew, writers, everyone. Of course some people will be fired, or quit, or whatever, so their replacements are brought in at the same level as people were paid back in year one. That’s fair, right? The people who’ve been there longer get paid more, right? Seniority. If the show comes back for a third year, of course there’s more built in pay raises for the long-timers and the new people who came in for year two. New people coming in for year three start at the bottom.

In some contracts, people also have a built-in promotions, sometimes in lieu of pay raises, or sometimes in conjunction with them. This isn’t considered a problem, since there’s always something for people to do – making a TV show is difficult – and most shows don’t run all that long, however if a show runs twenty or thirty years like the Simpsons, obviously you’re going to end up as top-heavy on the brass as the US Navy is. (The last I checked, four captains to every command slot)

The Simpsons are a massively labor-intensive production, however. I’ve got no idea how many people are on staff at any given time, but probably a couple hundred, and if you count the artists in Korea, probably several thousand. And it takes about 8 months to make an episode, as opposed to six-days-and-it’s-done, like Friends or Cheers or whatever. I’m sure everyone’s pretty darn busy.

However a similar situation where I think your observation is definitely right would be Saturday Night Live, with something like eleven hundred producers, many of who never even leave the bathroom, several of whom are too coked up to even properly make use of their wide assortment of Canadian hookers. Certainly NBC could get rid of a few hundred of them (The producers, not the hookers. Certainly not the hookers!), and use that extra money to maybe, I dunno, slip some jokes in to the show now and again. Or at least pay off the National Debt of Bolivia. You know, whatever…

Oh no, it’s those dirty artists fault.

Clearly, there was precious little promotion behind the show … but animation isn’t cheap so it’s unlikely someone will ride to the rescue.

That sad thing is the show is the perfect accessory for the Age of Obama – what the media used to call 2009 before before the president started stumbling, bumbling and lying about health care.