Book: The Simpsons

Ortved, John. 2009. The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. New York: Faber and Faber.

I quite like the Simpsons, and this book is a pretty good introduction to various backstories about how the show got going, changes in the animation shop in the early years, the inevitable creative battles and so on. I particularly enjoyed the material about the mechanics of the process of how the show gets created each week.

The format consists of rearranged bits of interviews done by the author (or occasionally from published sources) interspersed with explanatory bits of authorial narrative. I suspect I would have preferred a book that was all narrative, but it is the author's book, not mine.

Recommended if you are into the Simpsons.