Harry Shearer says he has never seen The Simpsons, so he does not know whether the show’s 90s peak has aged well. The veteran voice actor still plays Mr Burns, Waylon Smithers, Ned Flanders and Principal Skinner, which makes the admission more striking than a routine nostalgia comment.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it,” he said when asked about the show’s longevity. He added that the series was “up and down” over the last 20 years, but he still enjoys “playing all these characters.”
Mr Burns stays his favorite
Shearer singled out Mr Burns as his favourite Simpsons character and said, “Pure evil is always best. When you play it, it’s a gift.” That kind of split-screen loyalty matters on a long-running series: he is still inside one of TV’s most durable voice-acting jobs while speaking about the show as someone who has deliberately kept his distance from watching it.
He also said the early days were more fun because the voice actors recorded together in the same room. “It was the reason I did this instead of some other television show where you’re pretty much limited to one character,” he said, adding, “I liked the idea of the variety of characters, and I still like that.”
Here Comes J Edgar! in 1994
Here Comes J Edgar! opens on 10 July at the King’s Head Theatre in north London, turning a one-off radio play from 1994 into a stage musical comedy. Shearer co-wrote it with Tom Leopold, and Bryan Batt stars as J Edgar Hoover, with original music by Peter Maltz.
The timeline is the point: a project that first appeared as a 1994 radio play is now moving to the stage after a long gap, with Shearer still working both sides of the same equation — voicing a landmark TV series while helping revive a separate character-driven piece for live performance.
Harry Shearer and TV work
Shearer has been publicly critical of The Simpsons over the last 20 years, but he did not frame that as a reason to quit. He said, “No, I still enjoy playing all these characters,” and the line explains why the job keeps going: the appeal is the range, not the viewing habit.
The practical takeaway is simple. He remains attached to the characters, but not to the audience’s rewatch culture, and that distance now sits beside a new stage run for Here Comes J Edgar! For viewers, the sharper question is not whether he keeps doing the voices; it is why he has chosen to avoid the show that made those voices familiar in the first place.
