Peter Gaffney

Freelancer Peter Gaffney is the credited writer on Treehouse of Horror XVII (first aired November 5, 2006). His career in television has spanned over a decade, with writing credits ranging from The MTV Video Music Awards to Married... with Children to Beavis & Butthead. He was senior story editor during the first five seasons of Nickelodeon's Rugrats, for which he won both an Emmy and the coveted Jewish Telev-Image Award, and he co-created (with Gabor Csupo) Aaahh!! Real Monsters, also for Nick. Gaffney was also head writer on MTV's groundbreaking animated sci-fi series Aeon Flux, story editor on the Starship Troopers series and producer of Sony's animated version of Jumanji. Additionly he's written books, film scripts and games. He aspires to one day having his own blog.

The great-grandson of Irish immigrants, Gaffney was born and raised in the hardscrabble farm country of upstate New York near Binghamton, where his father, himself the grandson of Irish immigrants, eked out a living as an IBM engineer, dreaming of something better than an MIT degree for his only legitimate son. Gaffney attended a Northeastern liberal arts college, where he was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon and a roommate of Al Jean and Mike Reiss. [TEXT REDACTED] The trio, shaken to the core, vowed to take their gruesome secret with them to the grave.

Soon after graduation Peter Gaffney moved to Southern California, but he returned to New York after a year to work on National Lampoon Magazine. Following that job and a stint as a staff writer for MTV he came back out to L.A., where some say he remains to this day, doomed to haunt the bungalows and backlots of Hollywood forever in a vain search for his missing head.