“Those writers make a lot of money”: 12 works of unpublished or unproduced TV fiction

While many writerly efforts by Simpsons characters have real-world analogs (for instance, Marge’s seafaring bodice ripper, The Harpooned Heart), only Seymour Skinner’s brief foray into the realm of cautionary speculative fiction is such a blatant rip-off that it reduces a relatively reasonable fellow like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon to denounce it in no uncertain, extremely unkind terms. It’s not just because Skinner’s novel about “a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advance cloning techniques” so closely resembles a Michael Crichton bestseller and its Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation—it’s also because the title Billy And The Cloneasaurus carries none of the fleet, catchy mystique of Jurassic Park. The sequence of “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song” where an out-of-work Skinner pitches his novel in the Kwik-E-Mart is an expertly written bit of comedic bait-and-switch, but it also demonstrates how the hopelessly square, pop-culture-illiterate once-and-future administrator belongs in a principal’s chair. But what more can be expected from a man who stole another man’s identity out of pure spinelessness?