Who is Carolyn Premish?

[on:]

This is the ultimate question raised by the new episodes: who is John Galt Carolyn Premish? Is she real? If so, where'd she come from? If she's not real, who is she? Why did they use a pseudonym? Is it only one person?

I've searched online and can't find anything on her. In my opinion, she doesn't exist, and we need to find out, as the nerds we are, who "she" is.

[Reply #1 on:]

what are you talking about?

[Reply #2 on:]

She's probably Mike Kazaleh's writing wife.

Imagine if they made a comic together, It'd be like puking on a pile of shit.

[Reply #3 on:]

This is from DXC's interview with the A. V. Club:

AVC: The four movies were done with a much smaller writing and production staff. Is that also the case for the revived series?

DC: We’re up to kind of a medium-sized staff now. Still several writers smaller than we had when we were on Fox, but several writers more than we had for the DVDs. And that made me pretty nervous when we started this process, but it was necessary, just because we’re on cable TV now, and we had to trim the budget a little bit. So I was hoping, and it turned out that it worked, to farm out a few of the scripts to some of the other Futurama writers who are not on our full-time staff, but were available now and then to do scripts [including Lou Morton, Aaron Ehasz, and Stuart Burns]. So they have basically picked up the slack where we couldn’t handle it with our smaller staff here. So actually, several more very experienced Futurama writers were involved who just aren’t on our staff on a day-to-day basis. So overall, we got pretty lucky with that. In fact, the entire writing staff, in terms of our day-to-day who are here, is composed of people who have really worked on the show a long time, and were involved as far back as the Fox run of the show.

Emphasis was mine. Carolyn Premish is either somebody who's been there since the Fox days and we don't know about yet (unlikely), or a pseudonym.

[Reply #4 on:]

No, the interview says that the day-to-day writers have been involved since the Fox days.

Carolyn Premish is most likely a freelancer. Cohen says that he was able to farm out the scripts to some veteran Futurama writers who are no longer on the day-to-day staff, but presumably not all freelancers are veterans.

[Reply #5 on:]

Considering that "Carolyn Premish" doesn't have any other writing credits on websites such as IMDB or TV.com, I think we're correct in our suspicion that "her" name is a pseudonym invented for this episode. You can look up the names of virtually every other writer who has ever written on Futurama, and find their credits.

There have been relatively few freelancers who've written episodes for Futurama:
Brian Kelly - "Love's Labours Lost in Space"
Heather Lombard & Evan Gore = "Fear of a Bot Planet"
Aaron Ehasz = "Crimes of the Hot"

Kristin Gore only wrote one episode, but she was a staff writer for several seasons, so she shouldn't be considered a Futurama freelancer.

If that quote i_c_weiner referenced is true, then even the "freelancers" wrote for Futurama before, so it's unlikely this "Carolyn Premish" person came out of nowhere and wrote a script for Futurama. It's more probable that the real writer of this episode realized it was far from their best work, and didn't want their name on it, so a pseudonym was invented for this episode. Although, I find it surprising that Matt Groening would keep his name for the "Story by" credit if the real writer didn't want the writing credit.

[Reply #6 on:]

It's Matt Groening, he wrote the episode under a pseudonym.

[Reply #7 on:]

He double wrote the episode?

[Reply #8 on:]

It's entirely possible that MG is the sole writer and threw in the extra name as a prank.  If so, well played.

[Reply #9 on:]

Having thought about it, I'm of the opinion that Carolyn Premish doesn't exist, and that Groening is fucking with us all. He wrote the episode alone, masturbating over the piles of money that he has made from The Simpsons, and smoking strange herbs from faraway lands.

Then he cackled maniacally, and credited a fake person with part of the writing just to screw with folks.

It could've happened this way.

[Reply #10 on:]

It's entirely possible that MG is the sole writer and threw in the extra name as a prank.  If so, well played.

I kind of like that theory, but like i_c mentions, it would result in a double-credit for the story, right? The teleplay is only credited to this Carolyn Premish character, though, which seems odd. Why not credit Matt with the story and Premish with the teleplay, if they are both the same person?

Oh well. I'm sure we'll hear all about it, hoax or not, when the DVDs come out. We waited a thousand seven years for new episodes of Futurama; we can wait a little longer for the commentaries.

[Reply #11 on:]

I'm Carolyn Premish

[Reply #12 on:]

And I'm your friend, Jesus!

[Reply #13 on:]

I know some of the internet nerds here didn't like the episode, and yes the episode had its flaws, but honestly--it wasn't such an awful script that the writer would go all Alan Smithee on us. I seriously doubt the writer freaked out because they were ashamed of such a bad script. There have been plenty of worse episodes before and nobody ever used a pseudonym.

If it IS a pseudonym, my guess is that this is kind of like the ol' John Swartzwelder theory from long ago. The episode was written entirely by committee, and they couldn't decide who should get the teleplay credit. So bam, they make up a name and split WGA minimum payment evenly between themselves.

[Reply #14 on:]

She's probably Mike Kazaleh's writing wife.

Imagine if they made a comic together, It'd be like puking on a pile of shit.

I've got some bad news about issue #52...

It really only is the last few lines, and actions, that are horrible. Resulting in the episode leaving a bad impression.

[Reply #15 on:]

It's entirely possible that MG is the sole writer and threw in the extra name as a prank.  If so, well played.

I kind of like that theory, but like i_c mentions, it would result in a double-credit for the story, right? The teleplay is only credited to this Carolyn Premish character, though, which seems odd. Why not credit Matt with the story and Premish with the teleplay, if they are both the same person?

Actually, I retract what I said earlier. For example, Charlie Kaufman wrote Adaptation and credited it as "by Charlie and Donald Kaufman", his fictional brother. They won the Oscar, so two Oscars were given: one to each, despite Donald being fictional.


And I wasn't bringing this up as an Alan Smithee moment. If the episode were so bad, they would've done something to it to make it better. But it wasn't as horrible as some are marking it out to be. I have the feeling like this might be a John Swartzwelder moment though.

[Reply #16 on:]

This is the ultimate question raised by the new episodes: who is John Galt Carolyn Premish?

This made me laugh out loud. This is unrelated with the topic... but I remember seeing a bumper sticker reading "You're not John Galt." Left me confused. Looked up "Who is John Galt?" on Wikipedia. Now I know. And knowing is half the battle.

Anyway, I just figured she was a one-time writer on Futurama... to be as worthless as Jaws 3-D.
EDIT: Just searched Google. Found nothing proof-wise, so I checked the images looking for an image of her and this is what I got:



That explains a LOT.