Schultz who is behind The Simpsons, King of The Hill and Garfield is suing Roker and c-suite-level employees at Al Roker Entertainment, claiming he was wrongly fired from his position, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter. According to l Schultz, who worked on Roker’s animated series Weather Hunters, for nearly a decade, believes his time was cut short because he called out Roker’s team for not upholding the diversity initiative set up to create a more inclusive environment by bringing more minorities into the writer’s room.

In the lawsuit filed in New York’s federal court, Schultz accused the executives at Al Roker Entertainment of “callously” ignoring the DEI program regulations required by PBS. He included them in the case because they had full “authority” on how things were being run behind the scenes.

Although 70% of the money provided for the show’s budget came from the network for 40 30-minute episodes, Roker’s team allegedly hired Black writers to solely edit scripts written by their white counterparts, which seems counterintuitive since Black people were the targeted audience of Weather Hunters.

The complaint also states that others “treated the DEI Policy as discretionary and an obstacle to be circumvented,” which the plaintiff says Roker was aware of because he flagged it.

Following an internal meeting on August 2023, where Schultz told his colleagues that he “could not meet the production schedule if BIPOC writers were used to write the stories” and that “he would need to hire experienced non-BIPOC writers.” He was then notified by the Emmy winner’s company that he was “in breach of his contract for failures related to staffing,” along with some other alleged discrepancies, per The Hollywood Reporter.

“Instead of giving the chances to BIPOC writers as had been the plan, the story editor, repeating a strategy previously advocated and backed by Al Roker Entertainment management in writing, wanted to have ‘non-BIPOC’ writers write the stories, and then bring on a ‘BIPOC’ writer and after the stories/episodes [were] shaped, they could be ‘hand[ed] off to BIPOC writers,'” the lawsuit reads in part.

Schultz, who had been with the company since 2014 and was paid half a million dollars for the original 40-episode order, was suspended before he was terminated from Al Roker Entertainment.

Part of the filing states that the enterprise violated New York State’s human rights law, which aims to ensure employers treat workers fairly regardless of “race, creed, color, and national origin,” per New York’s Division of Human Rights’ website.

“I put nine years of my career into Weather Hunters, a project I strongly believe in, with the goal of making a wonderfully crafted show for children to enjoy and learn from,” Schultz said in a statement released by his attorneys, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I also believed, and still believe, that the project benefited by creating opportunities for the ‘new voices’ crucial in storytelling and that the Weather Hunters production needed to live up to the ideals it was supposed to represent.”

Neither Roker nor a spokesperson for Al Roker Entertainment has publicly commented on the lawsuit at the time of reporting.