The Carolyn Premish mystery has been solved

[on:]

Animation director Corey Barnes reveals it's a pseudonym of Ken Keeler:

https://www.reddit.com/r/futurama/comments/17jb3gy/comment/k75jx4l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Ken Keeler, of course, is also using a pseudonym for his Hulurama episodes, namely "Nona di Spargement"

[Reply #1 on:]

After all this time the truth has been revealed!

[Reply #2 on:]

Corey just said he got his wires crossed and that “Carolyn” (he didn’t put it in quotes but I’m operating under the assumption it was indeed a pseudonym) saw the post and contacted him. Apparently it was a rumor that circulated in the animation circles that wasn’t true. I guess we may never know.

[Reply #3 on:]

And I may never care.

[Reply #4 on:]

Corey just said he got his wires crossed and that “Carolyn” (he didn’t put it in quotes but I’m operating under the assumption it was indeed a pseudonym) saw the post and contacted him. Apparently it was a rumor that circulated in the animation circles that wasn’t true. I guess we may never know.

Thanks for the update. Guess the mystery is back on. And I guess another animator got himself into trouble for posting information on the internet, a long standing tradition

[Reply #5 on:]

My opinion is that Corey told the truth and got punished for this. Ken = Carolyn. If you read this - your episode is utter shit anyway. If you feel ashamed of writing it - good riddance.

[Reply #6 on:]

The post has been deleted but I'm assuming it was Corey saying that Carolyn Premish is Ken Keeler.

[Reply #7 on:]

He did delete his entire account.

[Reply #8 on:]

Wow, who’d’ve thunk Ken Keeler was so powerful (or vengeful)?

[Reply #9 on:]

He made a second account just to say he'd gotten his info wrong, that he was contacted by Carolyn and that he was no longer going to post to that sub and would delete his prior account.

I should say, it was my assumption that it was still a pseudonym (just not Keeler) but the way he worded it suggests that may not be the case. Whoever Carolyn Premish is, they have some reason for not wanting to be more widely known, even if that is their real name.

[Reply #10 on:]

Yeah, I don’t actually think Keeler is Premish; he wrote plenty of episodes under his own name in the CC run, and IAGDL wasn’t so bad it should warrant him using a pseudonym.

My pet theory has always been that Matt Groening wrote it, but my other guess would be some original-run writer who didn’t rejoin the crew for the CC years and instead just freelanced a script. So someone like Ron Weiner, Jeff Westbrook, Bill Odenkirk, David A. Goodman, etc. Maybe someone who’d gone to write on The Simpsons after Futurama ended and for whatever reason wouldn’t want to/couldn’t be credited for their work.

The least likely option to me is that Premish is a real person, also a freelancer, and they just did such a poor job on the script that they promptly left Hollywood. Highly unlikely, but I suppose anything is possible.

[Reply #11 on:]

I can't imagine Groening is the writer because he's credited for the story. In fact, the story credit is given to Matt Groening AND Carolyn Premish. If it was his pseudonym, why would he still want story credit and why wouldn't they pick one or the other person to actually credit there?

I think Keeler is still a fairly likely option because we also have no idea what this Nona Di Sparagment stuff is about. The reason for that could very well also be the reason for Carolyn Premish if it is his work.

[Reply #12 on:]

Oh, shit, I’d forgotten Groening already had a story credit on the episode. Yeah, that makes him a far less likely candidate for the true Carolyn Premish.

The fact of the matter is we’ll probably never know for sure, but I’m still not convinced it’s Keeler because, again, he was a staff writer who wrote multiple other CC episodes under his own name. (He did mention in the farewell letter that was read off in the “Meanwhile” commentary that Zapp and Leela never should have slept together, though I assume he’s referring to “Love’s Labours Lost in Space” rather than “In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela.” But that would be my one conspiracy-minded bit of evidence in favor of Keeler being Premish—the man can’t help but critique his own work!)

Whoever the real writer is, I will say for the record (as I suggested above) that “In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela” is a completely OK episode. Like, it’s not so offensively bad that I think whoever wrote it chose to do so under a pseudonym as a form of disavowal. I’m sure it was a legal thing—which, again, makes me think it probably wasn’t Keeler—and no more interesting story than that.

[Reply #13 on:]

The least likely option to me is that Premish is a real person, also a freelancer, and they just did such a poor job on the script that they promptly left Hollywood. Highly unlikely, but I suppose anything is possible.

It wouldn’t necessarily have to be that. For instance, someone could have had an overall poor or troubling experience in Hollywood (unconnected to their own performance) and decided to leave. If, for instance, someone was sexually harassed or mistreated at their first job they might choose to leave the business behind. Ditto if they simply had some personal thing happen in their life that forced them to leave the industry.

However, I want to stress this is purely speculation on my part and should be taken as nothing more than that as applied here.

[Reply #14 on:]

At my current job I have access to a fairly powerful online research tool (more extensive than the white pages, I'd say) that allows one to look up specific street addresses and see records of people who are/have been associated with those addresses, or (more to the point here) to do the opposite--to search for names and see the known addresses of those with that name. The latter is usually less useful, since without further biographical information to narrow things down it would generate far too many results depending on the commonality of the name. However, at the risk of abusing my access to this already kind-of-overreaching database, I tried looking up the name Carolyn Premish. I was half-expecting there to be several results, maybe even with at least one of them having been in California at some point, but it found no records of anyone over the age of 18 in the United States with that name...nor even with just the last name of Premish, for that matter.

This still doesn't prove anything (and the database is certainly not omniscient or always accurate), but it does lend further support to the already widely-believed claim that it's a pseudonym.

[Reply #15 on:]

The reason it's almost certainly not a real person who landed their first gig on Futurama is just that like... writers don't appear out of nowhere. Futurama is a big gig for a writer and you'd typically have to build up some degree of a body of work to get a meeting with Cohen and Groening about landing the job.

Take the new writers from this past season for instance. Ariel Ladensohn, Cody Ziglar and Shirin Najafi all have numerous comedy skits online, credits as staff writers on various cartoons and sketch shows and a handful of writing credits on actual TV shows.

The only writer to pop out of nowhere is Ari Kaplan and that's pure nepotism because he's Eric Kaplan's son. And even then, he was only given a co-writing gig with his father -- presumably as a favour to Eric as a longtime member of the show's team.

[Reply #16 on:]

Just for funsies, I used an anagram generator to see if "Carolyn Premish", when rearranged, spells out anything that might be a clue as to the writer's identity. (Keeler's using a dopey pun as a penname for the Hulu episodes; someone using a dopey anagram for IAGDL doesn't seem so far off.) Nothing all that promising came up, but one of the anagrams was "Morphy Sinclare," which is a pseudonym that I will surely be keeping in my back-pocket for future use.

[Reply #17 on:]

Phonetically it's adjacent to 'caroling premise', not that that means anything to me.

I do like Morphy Sinclaire, though.

[Reply #18 on:]

Maybe “careless premise”?

DXC has some history of criticizing this episode and said again recently that it wasn’t something they should have done.

[Reply #19 on:]

I can end this mystery because I actually have a copy of this original script and can tell you for a fact who wrote it. Out of respect, I'm not sure I want to out them publicly but if anyone wants to DM me I'll tell you