When you think of the writer's room of any popular show, most people see tons of shared, shot down and re-worked ideas along with long hours spent on a single storyline, especially iconic ones. For The Simpsons, the moment the world found out Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns (and if you didn't know this yes, come on!) took only 20 minutes to come together.
Show writer Josh Weinstein shared the writer's room pitch document on Twitter, before giving a bit more context to how the story came together after the season six cliffhanger of the classic cartoon.
"In a Simpsons story conference, you only have about 20 minutes to talk about each story," Weinstein said in a tweet with a close up of the document attached. "Impressively, in that short time, people came up with nearly all the Maggie beats."
Naturally, users started to wonder why all of this had to be done in such a short stretch of time. "When we were there, you only had two work days to: listen to each writer's ideas, decide which ones were worth pursuing," he went on the explain, "then do a very basic pitch-out/discussion to the point you thought a story was viable."
Of course, the details or "beats" of the storyline would be fleshed out further over the course of a few days, moving into the outline and draft and re-writing stages for months before making its way on-screen.
"After the story conference, you'd take all episode ideas you like to the room and pitch them out further for a few days," he said, "then the writers would go off to do a thorough outline."
After a user quipped it took "20 minutes to make history," Weinstein replied it took an additional "10 months to perfect it."
This apparently wasn't the only ending on the table for the episode, as just a few days ago Weinstein shared another page of pitch document and hinted that early suggestions including Barney, Patty and Selma, and even Smithers.
Of course, the ending they went with turned out to be the iconic solved mystery we all remember.
