There are more jokes on the page, but there are no laugh tracks. Matt will wander in and out of the writing room when he has the time. He basically has his foot in every bucket. With Futurama , it's more a matter of desperation than anything else, because we're always so short of time. On the rare occasion that we finish early we will talk about future shows and ideas, but usually it's a race just to meet the current deadline.
Work begins with assignments to staff writers.
We try not to have writers do too much work early, because like The Simpsons , it's very much a collaberative process, and we're still shaping it. Within the industry there's no intent to look specifically for animation writers. I know that, with some series, like King of the Hill , they specifically avoid that, because they want their show to have as much a feel of live action as anything. Legal and creative considerations also discourage producers of most shows from accepting specs based on their own series. Groening, while acknowleding the many faux Simpsons specs that float regularly on the Internet, also acknowledges that he's legally unable to look at any of them.