Ian Maxtone-Graham

Ian Maxtone-Graham is a television writer and producer. He was born in New York City on July 3, 1959.

Maxtone-Graham has written for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, and has also served as a co-executive producer and consulting producer for The Simpsons. He joined the Simpsons crew in the eighth season and has since written some important episodes, like "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily," in which Maude Flanders dies. In 2005, he won a Writers Guild of America award. However, Maxtone-Graham has also become wildly unpopular among Simpsons fans on the Internet. The animosity kicked off in 1998, when he stated that he had never watched the show prior to working on it. In the same interview, he contrasted the Simpsons writers' somewhat lackadaisical approach (saying, for example, that they sometimes confused Rod and Todd) with the Internet fans' apparent obsession with continuity, and remarked, "That's why they're on the Internet and we're writing the show." The interviewer Charlotte O'Sullivan expressed discomfort with his assertion that female writers were not often part of the writing staff, as the "guy humour" of Bart and Homer dominated the show's plotlines over the characters of Marge and Lisa.

Maxtone-Graham attended Brown University, in contrast to much of the other Simpsons crew, who went to Harvard.

Eric Idle's character in the sitcom Suddenly Susan was named after him.

Simpsons episodes

Among the episodes he has written are:

• "Burns, Baby Burns"
• "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson"
• "The Trouble with Trillions"
• "Trash of the Titans"
• "Lisa Gets an "A""
• "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)"
• "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily"
• "Tennis the Menace"
• "The Blunder Years"
• "Large Marge"
• "Dude, Where's My Ranch?"
• "Catch 'em If You Can"
• "The Heartbroke Kid"

External Links

• Maxtone-Graham's page on the Internet Movie Database.
• The Simpsons Archive explains Maxtone-Graham's unpopularity.
• Maxtone-Graham's infamous interview.