him "Jerkass Homer". Some of Scully's work on the show also received critical praise. Scully won five Primetime Emmy Awards for his work on The Simpsons, while Entertainment Weekly cited "How I Spent My Strummer Vacation" as the show's 22nd best episode. Robert Canning of IGN also gave the episode a positive review, something he also did for "Behind the Laughter" and "Trilogy of Error", which aired during season 12. He called the latter "one extremely enjoyable misadventure. The Simpsons may have peaked in the '90s, but that doesn't mean the eight years since haven't delivered their share of quality episodes. This was one of them." Tom Martin said that he does not understand the criticism against Scully, and that he thinks the criticism "bothered [him], and still bothers him, but he managed to not get worked up over it." Ortved noted in his book that blaming a single show runner for what some perceive as the lowering quality of the show "is unfair." When asked in 2007 how the series' longevity is sustained, Scully joked, "Lower your quality standards. Once you've done that you can go on forever." Further career Scully was a writer and co-executive producer on Everybody Loves Raymond for part of season seven and all of season eight, winning an Emmy for his work. Scully co-created (with wife Julie Thacker) The Pitts for Fox and Complete Savages for ABC, which was produced by Mel Gibson. The Pitts was a sitcom about a family suffering from bad luck. Thacker stated the show was designed "as a companion piece for The Simpsons. It had a very cartoony feel to it. We always knew the initial audience for the show would be 12-year-olds to start, and then when families saw that the writing was very Simpsons - like, because many of the writers were from The Simpsons, [we thought] families would start to watch it together." It was canceled after six episodes; Scully and Thacker laid the blame for this on the show's timeslot, 9:30 P.M., which was too late for the target audience. Complete Savages, which Thacker and Scully wrote with the "Simpsons sensibility" of layered jokes, was canceled in January 2005 due to low ratings and network anger at Scully and Thacker's decision to write to TV critics in what the Hartford Courant labelled "unsanctioned promoting". A fan of NRBQ, Scully produced, with Thacker, a documentary about