In 1988, Sam Simon, a reader of "Army Man", recruited Swartzwelder and Meyer to write for a new Fox animated sitcom he was producing: "The Simpsons". By 1994, with the show's sixth season, Swartzwelder was granted a special dispensation and allowed not to attend rewrite sessions with the rest of the staff, instead being allowed to send drafts of his scripts in from home so other writers could revise them as they saw fit. This was a direct result of Swartzwelder's heavy smoking coming into conflict with a newly implemented policy banning smoking in the writers' room. Swartzwelder's scripts typically needed minimal rewriting compared to those of other writers, with about 50% being used.