I seldom pay attention to the credits at the beginning, but tonight I noticed the producers seemed to go on forever. How many does an average episode of this have?

All of the writers are credited as "producers."

Do they really need that many writers?

That's the way they've done it since the beginning...why mess with a working formula?

At a guess, I'd say The Simpsons has around 341 producers on any given season.

Wow. How come there are so many writers/producers?

Because if you are a writer for a series long enough you get producer credit. simple as that. Why do they need so many writers? Have you see the show lately?

The Simpsons has always had many writers. Considering the style of the show, throwing multiple layers of jokes at you, I imagine multiple writers are a good thing as long as some decent leadership reigns it in. Not to mention it's a tv show, they gotta share duties I imagine.

Actually they have that many because they have teams working on shows concurrently. Since it takes many months to complete and episode, they have to have many teams working on differrent episodes at once. There are also producers and writers at differrent levels. Some that work on the initial script and others that contribute later on in the process.

Most dramas have anywhere from 4 to 8 writers (depending on the number of episodes in a season ), while most sitcoms employ anywhere from 6 to 12.

The sitcom (and especially animated series) writing process is different than dramas in that the writers (of sitcoms) generally break the stories/episodes/jokes together.

They sit in a room day after day after day coming up with the episodes and the major jokes of the episodes, and then whatever writer happens to be in the rotation for that episode gets his/her name on it.

The name under "written by" on a sitcom episode is simply the writer that had the task of actually typing the script and sometimes coming up with the 'A' story of the episode. Then all the writers contribute jokes for the episode. It is a very communal process.

As for the producers on The Simpsons - all but a couple of those names are writers that, as jackskeleton said, have earned their title by being there over the course of many seasons. Or being somewhere else for many seasons and then coming to The Simpsons.

In television everything is defined by your title. Writers start out as "staff writers." You get no credit - except for a very few shows that list the staff writers at the end - and generally only write one episode a season.

Then you move up to "Story Editor." Then "Executive Story Editor" and so on and so on, getting into the producer credits:
Co-Producer
Producer
Supervising Producer
Co-Executive Producer
Executive Producer

If you see a "Produced by" credit that is generally the Unit Production Manager - the money guy - who actually oversees the physical production of the show.

people have asked about this a lot, maybe I oughta post a thread explaining it all???

PAUL!!!! How ya' doing?