THE SIMPSONS
On a network schedule littered with such quaint commodities as "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Friends," and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "The Simpsons" probably isn't the worst show on TV. It is the most heartbreaking, though. The people who sit down and watch your typical TV entertainment know what they are getting and frequently appreciate it. I get the impression that many of those who still tune in to "The Simpsons" are doing so out of a distant hope that they will catch a glimmer of something destroyed ages ago.
It's also an institution, and to begin with, there is simply nothing else like it. Today it is second nature among college students. Kids 14 and younger have lived with it their entire lives. Everyone knows about it. Everyone has seen it. Everyone has an opinion on it, even some people who, in contradiction to my last statement, have never seen it. A quietly astonishing pool of talent cooked up a piece of impeccable Americana with mammoth, ferocious mass appeal in the nick of time. Ten years earlier, it's a show that would have failed. Even just three years later, it would have been lucky to make it to air. "The Simpsons" arrived precisely when it was needed.
In a phenomenal 1976 essay about the Beatles, Greil Marcus, the best writer ever to work in rock criticism, addresses the theory of the pop explosion, an "irresistible cultural upheaval that cuts across lines of class and race (in terms of sources, if not allegiance), and, most crucially, divides society itself by age. The surface of daily life (walk, talk, dress, symbolism, heroes, family affairs) is affected with such force that deep and substantive changes in the way large numbers of people think and act talk place." The Beatles are cited as the second "and thus far the last" pop explosion. "The Simpsons," rock music or not, is the third. In some ways it's only now beginning to become clear.
In another sense, though, the explosion was at its height in one very chaotic 1990. Anyone conscious at the time will recall clearly the armies of people, mostly children, mostly boys, white and black and everything between, clad in Bart Simpson T-shirts. Incredibly, the shirts were themselves the source of an uproar, specifically the ones emblazoned with the slogan "Underachiever--and proud of it, man!"
All this remarkable for any number of reasons. To begin with, the show broke a cardinal rule of prime-time programming in place since the '60s: you don't put a cartoon on at night. You also don't swear in a cartoon. You don't put sex in a cartoon. You don't make a cartoon realistic. You don't show a family going to church. You don't show childhood as it is. You don't show marriage as it is. "The Simpsons" got under people's skin because it was a funhouse mirror and it divided America in half, at least the piece of America that received Fox at the time. You either hated what you saw or you celebrated it; either way you were hating or celebrating it because it was something you saw in yourself. The underachiever shirts would not have been controversial if they weren't a glimpse of the truth.
"The Simpsons" probably got on the air only because of the association with the new fourth network, Fox, a conglomerate for whom no gamble was as risky as it could have been for the Big Three. How on earth it managed to become the catalyst for pop-culture revolution on the last-rated network despite being animated is still an almost complete mystery. We can place part of it on James L. Brooks, a man who fights for his work and has been doing so for years.
He was a writer for "My Mother the Car" who, after working tirelessly on the labor of love that was "Room 222" for three years, ended up banding together with Allan Burns, from the "Rocky & Bullwinkle" team, to create what remains the most potent of all situation comedies, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." He followed this with another, far less successful but perhaps even more acclaimed series, "Taxi," then moved into a motion picture career that has left, if possible, an even larger mark on the industry than his television work.
After writing "Starting Over" for director Alan J. Pakula, he slipped into the auteur chair for the devastating "Terms of Endearment," which swept the Oscars in the year of Bergman's "Fanny & Alexander" and has grown infamous for it, but is nonetheless an astonishing piece of work, particularly in the context of his followup "Broadcast News," an undeniable masterpiece, and his most recent film as director, "As Good As It Gets." It is as a producer, however, that he had the most impact, believing in both Penny Marshall and Danny Devito as directors, essentially discovering the whizkid Wes Anderson in 1994, and giving Cameron Crowe the chance to direct his tiny script "Say Anything" five years prior to that. (Brooks also produced Crowe's "Jerry Maguire.")
Brooks' name lent "The Simpsons" prestige, and he chose the accompanying talent impeccably. Matt Groening, who created the family simply because he didn't want to give Fox the rights to the characters of his comic strip, was a beloved underground cartoonist who had been drawing the wicked "Life in Hell" for a decade. After a stint as short, clever animated segments on a bizarre early Fox sketch comedy starring Tracey Ullman, a pool of talent was assembled by Brooks' company Gracie Films to create an intelligent, incisive, artistic, character-driven prime time cartoon show. This was a monumental event in the '80s, when the animation industry had been all but eaten alive by Hanna-Barbera and their shameless league of half-hour toy commercials, not to mention Disney's pratfalls with bombs like "Oliver & Company" and "The Black Cauldron."
That's not to say "The Simpsons" saved animation -- "The Little Mermaid" saved more careers than it did -- but it was something new. Animation had rarely been conceived with adults primarily in mind, and when it was ("Rocky & Bullwinkle") it was well-written but drawn audaciously, usually with an appealing sense of style but little to no technical efficiency. "The Simpsons" was a big-budget, studio-produced series, with an orchestral score and elaborate storyboarding and an extremely gifted voice cast and a dozen or so brilliant writers and, hell, a theme by Danny Elfman, who'd recently become a beloved persona thanks to "Beetlejuice" and "Batman," to boot.
Steven Spielberg mentioned once that in the '60s he resisted the Beatles because they weren't something he discovered for himself. I had a similar attitude toward "The Simpsons." It was something Everyone Else knew that I had missed out on and therefore dismissed. It was a fad and I was allergic to hype even as a preteen. Plus, my parents were the sort of moderate conservatives that were not considered the ideal audience for the show, which early on in its run was considered another "Roseanne" or "Married... with Children." (My parents ended up being very fond of the show, but it took a while.) Eventually I was reeled in, just in time to catch up and, as the Supremes sang a long time ago, "keep falling in and out of love."
There were other people who were watching all this happen at the beginning and are far more passionate about the issues to be discussed than I am simply because they watched something with potential crumbling to dust. They watched talented people throw away a creation they'd spent years on. They watched a television show that seemed beyond criticism in the beginning betray itself. They're mostly gone now.
It is here that the timing of the show comes into play in another sense. On a large scale, "The Simpsons" was something that our country needed because we were in the middle of the first Bush administration (it still kills me to put "first" in there) and we needed something that was alive and energetic. It was the dawn of a decade that this single series would come to define. There would be shows that ultimately had more longevity, but none that duplicated the impact of "The Simpsons" or the stunning grace of its early seasons. However, what I tend to think of even more in regard to the timing of the show's premiere -- December 17, 1989, fifteen days before the decade of Rock the Vote, Monica Lewinsky, "Beavis and Butt-Head," the Oklahoma bombing, the .com boom, the end of the Cold War, Y2K hysteria, and "Titanic" -- is the dawn of a medium, the Internet, that has turned out to be the most durable, frightening, and liberating we've yet to come up with. It's not so much that access to unfiltered opinions and ideas has changed the landscape of our time -- it hasn't -- but it has informed these times, and it's difficult if not impossible to imagine "The Simpsons" without the interlocking world of modems and Usenet and websites.
They used to call television a house for ghosts. Try the Internet, where forgotten and neglected documents from years ago sit around undoctored (many of them at this website, har har). Search for things about "The Simpsons" and you discover two separate worlds. You see the world of 1990 and 1991, of people who were seduced by qualities of the show that it took far too little time to abandon. Then you have the world of today's "Simpsons" fans, quoting obscure episodes liberally, singing the praises of secondary characters that were once meaningless jokes (and arguably still are). The show has found its new audience, one that may as well be watching "Saturday Night Live" or any other given sketch comedy series. They've no interest in characterization or drama, and think of those who disagree as bellyachers. It's not their fault that this is how they look at it. The creators of the show have encouraged such a viewpoint for some time.
If we judge "The Simpsons" by what it once was, we hold in our hands the most arresting television series that I know of. It's funny in a real way, a way that shakes you to the core. (There's nothing wrong with being wacky, but why bother if you're capable of "Lisa's Substitute"?) Grab the plotlines one by one and the whole program seems stark and unforgiving. Two weeks into the show's run its main character contemplates suicide. Shortly after that his daughter seems close to doing the same.
If the first season of "The Simpsons" can now be seen as a triumph of craft, precision, and feeling (look at the episode in which Krusty is framed for robbery and tell me you've seen a better mystery on TV in the last twenty years), its world painted with an intimidating attention to detail, its characters sensitively protrayed because the people behind the scenes cared about them and their potential, the second season may well be the peak of everything serial television is capable of. In its entire 22-episode run, the second year of the show has not one false moment, and its stories have grown ever more compelling. Bart's quest to pass the fourth-grade becomes an Odyssean journey; you can't escape it without feeling nervous when he feels nervous, and likewise enjoying the triumph and the pain and disappointment. It's twenty-three minutes but it feels like you have gone through everything with this child.
Bart was what children latched on to in the early '90s, and it's a good thing because he is a brilliantly executed character, but any one member of the Simpson family is easy to identify with at any given moment during the first three seasons. Lisa exhibits many of Bart's traits -- both are bright and slightly rebellious, but they react to this in different ways -- but the writers have turned her into something enormously touching. It is as though everyone working on the show -- from artists and animators to actors and scriptwriters -- fell in love with this girl, with what she was but also what she may become (immortalized later in the overwhelming "Lisa's Wedding").
The first season has each of the two children, in separate installments, sneaking out of the house to meet a destiny. Bart is defacing something, not out of rebellion but out of conformity, an irony that crushes him soon enough. In Lisa's episode, she is following the sound of a saxophone because it's something that makes sense to her. There is nothing haphazard or hamhanded about the execution. It is animation that feels more real than live action because it sees people as we see ourselves, and when Marge grabs Lisa and takes her away from her new friend, the jazz player, our sympathies are everywhere. We understand Marge, the doting mother who means well, but we also understand Lisa, consumed by depression that no trite platitudes or even her own explanations can obliterate. And in another scene, as Bart bitterly tries to cheer her up, we feel for him, lost in this crushing tide of a family. However, the family loves each other and we feel at home with them. We don't want to be them... but that's only because we are them, and then we look around and realize how much we've got.
The pattern is clear now: The first season established the characters and gave them a history and a dimension. The second season explored their emotional capacity. The almost equally superb third season took off from those layered characters to create comedy of ecstatic strength. For the next three years "The Simpsons" struggled with an identity crisis, producing some good comedy and some shows that ranked with the early efforts, at least in terms of the scripts and performances, but also liberal amounts of flat humor and shortcuts to emotion. We are expected to go along with every continuity gaffe presented to us as if the context of one episode was alien to another. We are expected to shift our symapathies violently between the four (or five) principals and even some of the minor characters, who are not necessary to begin with so there's really no excuse for how poorly they tend to be written.
If you have to search specifically for what has, in effect, wrecked the appeal of "The Simpsons," it is necessary to look at four elements. To begin with, compare the Klasky-Csupo animation house's work from 1989 to 1992 to Film Roman's contribution thereafter. I don't know if we can blame that or the directors or what for how the show looks, but the fact remains that the early shows are explosive and full and visually imaginative, and today it is unbelievably flat. The series looks professional, of course, but it is literally executed as if it was a live-action sitcom, destroying the much-admired angle that the cartoon allows us to view the lives of these people in ways otherwise impossible.
The second element of the show's downfall is the way its important characters are written. The key here is Homer and Lisa and their relationship. Homer is no longer the "lovable oaf"; he's an idiotic asshole. Lisa is no longer an intelligent 8 year-old; she's a miniature workaholic adult spouting off her ridiculous politically-correct regimes in Rod Serling-like monologues. The two characters' interactions are, for lack of a better term, cartoonish and laughably stupid. This goes for everyone in the family. In this sense for certain, "The Simpsons" has disgraced itself.
Third and on a related note is the reliance on background characters, who should rightfully be used the way the writers are now incorrectly using the family -- to complement or counterpoint the other action in an episode. Instead, they've either tried to give history and personality to people who didn't need it -- Ned Flanders comes to mind -- or they have relied too much on them as the "comic relief" -- Ralph Wiggum is the poster boy, and to paraphrase Matthew Kurth, it's harder to screw up toast than a Wiggum line.
But most importantly we have seen a lowbrow shift in the form and style of the scripts on the series. Early shows were often emotional rollercoasters. Homer discovers he has probably consumed poisonous blowfish and may have 24 hours to live. His reactions are not comical in the least, but they are immortal and unforgettable. In the finest episode of the series, Homer grows madly jealous when Lisa discovers her absent father figure in a substitute teacher played by an unbilled Dustin Hoffman. Plotlines now on the show run along the lines of "Apu's wife Manjula gives birth to octuplets. Everyone in Springfield soon pitches in to help, until a couple in Shelbyville gives birth to nine, causing everyone to forget about Apu and Manjula." Just who are these people, anyway? In any case, on a given show today, the plot is irrelevant because it will be derailed by an endless army of weak "satirical" jokes. This formula has, incomprehensibly, grown so popular that shows are now modeled solely on the idea, "South Park" marginally the best of the lot, the appalling "Family Guy" the worst example easily.
I am not complaining. There's no issue here. Whatever the fate of "The Simpsons" the fact remains that in its early stages it meant a good deal to me, and became an obsession for a time. Like all pop explosions, it has faded. The difference is that it's still there, or its skeleton is. The Beatles faded with their mythology, and they had a cloud of dust; it's only now becoming clear to me what a comparatively weak record ABBEY ROAD is, and the damn thing is over thirty years old. What makes this worse is that the people who work on the show are not willing to quit, which is fine, but they're also not willing to accept the notion of criticism and tackle these issues. They could easily do it. They did once try to return to their glory days and very nearly succeeded; the seventh season of "The Simpsons" saw the sophistication and deeply-rooted wit of the classic years making a modest return, but for seemingly no reason the producers gave up completely a year later and tossed fans a bone with the thinly disguised diatribe "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show," which included this disturbing speech from a mouthpiece resembling Bart: "They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them." A rather bizarre political statement from a network television series which is, truth told, designed to sell products and services. Fans have made "The Simpsons" an institution. It has been on the air longer than any other situation comedy in the history of primetime. We buy the merchandizing and we've turned the show into an industry. Oh, but we owe them.
They're not biting the hand that feeds them, they're knawing it off. The fact is, the Internet has provided the most perceptive and valuable criticisms of the show from the beginning. The fact that writers such as Ian Maxtone-Graham resent this betrays the ignorance of the people who control what we see on the air now. The heartfelt writings of supposed nerds Matthew Kurth, Ondre Lombard, Raymond Chen, and innumerable others possessed more passion and integrity than all of the "Simpsons" episodes of the last seven years put together.
And where is James L. Brooks, a master of entertainment that you feel as much as you see and hear it? Why have Matt Groening, Sam Simon (who jumped ship fairly early in the run), Al Jean, Mike Reiss, John Swartzwelder, and on and on and on allowed this to happen? We can't blame them because it is a living and we probably would allow it too if we felt it would keep the money train rolling, but why wouldn't the show in its original form have done just that? (The first season is still the highest-rated of them all as far as I know.)
I started watching "The Simpsons" in syndication in early 1995. I was consumed by it two years later, and two years after that I had all but forgotten it. The eighth season was a disappointment that had its moments, the ninth a disaster with some precious seconds of competence, the tenth a train wreck, the eleventh unwatchable from start to finish, and not long after that one started I gave up. For me, aside from a few worthwhile outings, the show ends with the seventh season (and one of its masterstrokes, "Summer of 4 Ft. 2"), meaning that less than half of the show -- now in year fifteen -- actually has any considerable amount of value to me. Of course, I wouldn't be writing this if that wasn't a lot. It is plenty, but I can't help feeling excluded by what this thing's become. Even if I am too young to have been there from the beginning, I still get upset when I see the thing rolling along like the Energizer bunny even though it's really, really no good. In interviews Mike Reiss has said it could go on like "Bonanza" or "Gunsmoke," and we all know how much those alive-n-kicking shows will mean to future generations.
For most people, "The Simpsons" doesn't signify what it does for me. I think of something that stirred some very elusive emotions in me even as I laughed my head off. I don't see even a trace of that in whatever that thing is that comes on Fox Sundays at 8 now. There are quite a few people who feel the same way who gave up long before I did, who never will take the trouble to write anything like this. The damage has been done and in the end, this is a show that's existed and gone on in spite of rather than because of its fan base. The pop explosion became a glimmer or a torch then faded to smoke, and "The Simpsons" can be looked upon now only as a confused entity... it's become a strange beast indeed.
I am interested in doing reviews of this show's episodes before I do it for any others because I know these very well and I have a lot I'd like to say about them. I strongly prefer doing analyses of things I own on DVD, since it makes browsing and referencing a million times easier with no risk of wear on hardware or software. As such, you'll now find my thoughts on the first season of "The Simpsons" with more to come.
SEASON ONE
SEASON TWO
Top 25 Episodes
THE SIMPSONS ON DVD
Season One DVD review (at bottom of page)
Season Six DVD review
Season Seven DVD review
SIMPSONS LJ ARCHIVE
Shrek review
gag comedy
need for shorts on DVD
Paul McCartney: Memory Almost Full
not planning to see movie
The Police: Ghost in the Machine
400th episode rant pt. 2
400th episode rant pt. 1
X-Files: Season One DVD
Idiocracy review
7-11 redesign for movie
shows jumping the shark
1000th post
Frank Darabont
top ten of the week (Lisa's Substitute)
trying to finish S2 reviews
downfall
forbidden animation
top ten of the week (I&S&M)
Looney Tunes
Little Miss Sunshine review
A Streetcar Named Desire review
Arsenic and Old Lace DVD
Futurama S4 DVD
Chicken Run review
Cars reaction
animation laziness
A Boy Named Charlie Brown + Wallace & Gromit DVDs
Mickey Rooney
renewed again
Twilight Zone CG
DVD reviews
Futurama S3
mountain dew or crab juice?
Count Duckula
best DVDs of year
King Kong review
Elephant review
relationships with teachers
Larry King Bible
killing Beck
Don Adams obit
Russi Taylor
9-17-95
the gospel according to + Shadow of a Doubt remarks
South Park movie review
Barry Lyndon review
uncut
the day I found my best friend
the deficit rag
Antoine Doinel
Used Cars
Modern Romance review
fans
kiddie antics
animation rant
pop explosion
Great Expectations review
Nietsztchean subtext of Incredibles
Halloween
season two is the best
red
huh?
scholarly PHP
Harry Shearer complaining
DVDs
site commentary
The Ring review
The Critic on DVD
Simpsons pseudo-intellectualism
Simpsons nonsense