James L. Brooks was the executive producer of The Tracey Ullman show and wanted to include animated shorts in the program. He had seen Groening’s Life in Hell strip and asked Groening to pitch some ideas.
Groening has later said that only when he got to Brooks’ office did he realize that doing Life in Hell on TV would mean surrendering his rights to them. So, on the fly, Groening came up with the now-iconic characters loosely modeled on his own family. Forty-eight one-minute Simpsons shorts aired on the program. Ultimately, Brooks noticed that they were getting a lot of attention. He also knew that Matt Groening dreamed of making a primetime animated series, even though there were none at the time. Brooks, with his background in sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi) and Groening, with his experience as a cartoonist and animator, were the perfect pair to create The Simpsons as we know it today—which looks and sounds notably different from its original iteration
Today, each half-hour episode takes approximately eight months to make, from when the story breaks in the writer's room, to having an episode animated by Film Roman, to when the cast records their lines.
