Entertainment Weekly is reporting—in a piece that doesn’t offer much in the way of further detail—that Harry Shearer will return to The Simpsons for the next two seasons, nearly two months after very publicly exiting the show. The dispute was supposedly never about money, of which there is a massive amount for the voice cast, but about some nebulous definition of Shearer’s freedom to do other projects. (Showrunner Al Jean countered that Shearer actually records his parts—including Mr. Burns, Flanders, and too many more to count—on the phone, so he ought to have plenty of free time.) Well, for the next two seasons at least, we don’t have to worry about suffering the indignity of replacing his essentially irreplaceable voice, or suffer through a thousand before-and-after-Shearer analyses.
UPDATE: The show confirmed Shearer’s return on Twitter: