Reuters reports that the cast of The Simpsons has finally negotiated with Fox for a record-breaking 20th season of the animated sitcom. Five of the six main actors will be making $400,000 per episode (more than Charlie Sheen, the highest-paid live-action sitcom star), and Homer himself, Dan Castelleneta, is being named a consulting producer. (Castelleneta has also written some episodes of the show in the past.) Harry Shearer, who has complained in the past about the diminishing roles for his characters, is still negotiating, but apparently showed up for the first official Season 20 table read (script go-through) on Monday. Although the deal is good for four years, The Simpsons has not yet been renewed past the 20th season- although if the quality of Season 20 is as good as Season 19 (one of the best in recent years) and the viewers keep watching, I wouldn’t be suprised if Homer and Co. will stay on our TVs for years to come. I retract a previous statement I made about putting the Springfieldianites to sleep- let The Simpsons go on until the show becomes unprofitable.
I’m Tory McClure and you might remember me from such television retrospectives as…
I wonder who gets the profits from merchandise. I read last year the Simpsons merchandise brought in about 2.5 billion dollars. I know that figure is probably more because of the movie, but if that money went into the pot of the people paying the salaries, you can see that is a small percentage of total income.
It’s stunning to me the Simpson’s are still popular enough to justify this level of expenditure.
Not nearly as objectionable as what the cast of Seinfeld or Friends made, IMO.
I’ve merged the two threads on this topic, just like that Halloween episode where robot Homer crushes Burns’ body and Burns has his head sown on to Homer’s body.
-Marley
who, if there was a language composed entirely of Simpsons analogies, would have majored in it in college
Oh, I hate having two threads!
Yeah, yeah, we know what you di-diddly-id.