TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  Unless, that is, you decide to tear out the wires and reject the conditioning and look at what The Simpsons can give you that no other show ever has, like the constant, consistent formal experimentation—modeling episodes on Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and Pulp Fiction at the same friggin’ time, and the “Treehouse of Horror” anthologies, to name just two examples. And the mix of different intellectual levels of humor—very low, medium low, middlebrow, highbrow—and also the mix of visual and verbal, and the Easter eggs hidden in scenes that are mainly about something else. All that is amazing.

  I think I’m coming around to this idea, Alan, and a big part of the reason why is my belief that “greatest” and “best” are judged by different yardsticks. If you ask me what is the best series, I would probably go for something that demonstrated exquisite judgment throughout and that almost never did anything out of character or beyond the parameters it seemingly had set for itself—something like Cheers or The Larry Sanders Show or, to go way back in time, I Love Lucy, which was a brilliant example of a protean kind of entertainment.

  But “greatest,” to me, implies something else. It signifies a restlessness, an inability to be happy with wringing variations from a particular set of themes, or within a certain framework. The word “great” is associated with scale. Big. Grand. Immense. Epic.

  Most of the shows we’ve put in our top 100 could plausibly be argued to be the best in a certain category, and they all had moments when they were the finest examples of whatever they incarnated or revamped.

  But “great,” as subjective and slippery as it is, implies something else. It’s a comet passing through the solar system. Like the one the Springfield citizenry is terrified of when they all show up outside of Ned Flanders’s fallout shelter. And then they crowd in and the camera tracks past them as they sing “Que Sera, Sera,” and oh, dammit, yeah, The Simpsons is the greatest.

  Alan Sepinwall: Yes, you could be affected more profoundly by something like Melfi’s rape or what happens to Randy Wagstaff. But I think the effect comedy has on us is equally profound. In fact, let me quote an exchange from one of the best Simpsons episodes of them all, “Bart Sells His Soul,” where a worried Lisa reminds Bart that “Pablo Neruda said laughter is the language of the soul.” (To which Bart replies, “I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.”)

  I don’t know that I see as clear a best/greatest distinction as you do (to me, it’s more like my saying that Midnight Run is my favorite movie, even though I know it’s far from the best and/or greatest movie ever made), but I see where you’re coming from in terms of consistency versus ambition and the ability to achieve that ambition.

  As we discussed earlier, Cheers or Breaking Bad—or, even if we have some issues with season 5, The Wire—all have fewer flaws than The Simpsons or The Sopranos does. And if it was a Sopranos-versus-Wire debate (which we may have to have next to sort out the order of the top 5), I’m not sure which way I’d lean at this moment.

  But in my mind, the fact that The Simpsons was able to do so many things, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes oddly, but to keep striving and trying, even now at an absurdly advanced age for any TV show, is an argument for putting it on top. I like the later seasons more than you do, and I would put some of those episodes (like “Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” or “Holidays of Future Passed”) in among the best of that first decade, but even if you want to call the show today a thin shadow of its former self, think about how mind-bogglingly great its former self had to be for so diminished a version to be watchable at all.

  Matt Zoller Seitz: So I think we can agree that The Simpsons is number one, which leaves the question of where The Sopranos and The Wire rank.

  Alan Sepinwall: Victory!

  Okay, so do you have a strong feeling about The Sopranos vs. The Wire for the second-greatest show of all time?

  Matt Zoller Seitz: It’s tough, because they’re not trying to do the same things, and are equally good at what they are respectively doing.

  That said, if we consider them, for purposes of argument, as being equal in the first five categories—and I think they are very close—then we’re left with “peak.” And I think that on peak points, The Sopranos wins. In my world, it wins for the audacity of its ending alone. But even if it didn’t have that audacious, divisive, totally unexpected finale, I’d still give it to The Sopranos on peak points, because it has so many peaks, so many moments when you could not believe what you were seeing and yet it ultimately always felt justified. “College,” “University,” “Pine Barrens,” “Funhouse,” “Employee of the Month,” “Whoever Did This,” “The Test Dream,” “Soprano Home Movies”—I could go on.

  And then within episodes there were just so many mysterious and somehow wonderfully right moments, moments of poetry and sadness and black humor. It always came at things from a surprising angle. You know that as a formalist that’s always going to appeal to me, over and above a demonstration of classical mastery, which The Wire had, its layer-cake structure notwithstanding.

  That’s not to say I have less than total respect for The Wire—of course I do, look at how highly it ranked—it’s just that my value system gives The Sopranos a slight edge overall.

  Alan Sepinwall: I’m going to concede.

  Matt Zoller Seitz: You are? I’m stunned. Why?

  Alan Sepinwall: Because I love those two shows for very different reasons, and they’re ultimately a coin-flip, and I feel like I already won by talking you into The Simpsons as my top. So if you feel strongly for The Sopranos, then by all means, buddy.

  Matt Zoller Seitz: So you’re benevolently reaching down from the mountaintop and handing me The Sopranos?

  Alan Sepinwall: Sure.

  Matt Zoller Seitz: Motherfucker!

  1–10

  The Inner Circle

  The Simpsons (Fox, 1989–present) Total score: 112

  If, by some chance, you stumbled across a person who had never seen a frame of The Simpsons, and they wanted to know why it was so popular, so respected, so beloved, how would you explain it?

  You could start by showing them Sideshow Bob stepping on eight rakes in a row in under thirty seconds. The scene, from the classic season 5 episode “Cape Feare,” represents the whole spectrum of humor folded and refolded into a single gag. Layer one is the lowest form of humor, violent slapstick. The sight of Bob stepping on rake after rake after rake is a monument to comic excess, pushing one joke past all reasonable limits—a gag on the same wavelength of Jonathan Winters in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World systematically destroying an entire gas station with his bare hands, or Laurel and Hardy in Big Business repeatedly trying and failing to get a piano up a flight of stairs. At the same time, though, it is also conceptual humor, because it is also about the idea of excess. As David Letterman demonstrated on his late-night shows when he repeated the same knowingly lame catchphrase for weeks on end, sometimes a gag is funny the first time, less funny the second, still less funny the third, then ceases to be funny at all, until the audacity of continuing to repeat it wears down your resistance and makes you laugh again. Finally, the rake gag is a bit of character-based humor with actual philosophical overtones: Sideshow Bob, who keeps trying and failing to murder his young nemesis, Bart Simpson, throughout the show’s run, fears that the universe is indifferent to his desires, and may even derive joy from watching him suffer. What simpler way to confirm Bob’s fears than by topping the lead-up to the gag—Bob being mangled and torn while hanging beneath the Simpsons’ station wagon en route to witness protection at Cape Feare Lake—with a series of rakes to the face? That the onslaught of the rakes is so tedious, so basic, so not personal, only makes it worse. Everywhere Bob steps, a rake, a rake, another rake. The rakes stand in for every twist of fate that sabotages Bob’s plan, every indignity heaped upon him, every eventuality his supposed genius could not foresee, every moment of potential glory snatched from his grasp. And of course the rake is also Bart Simpson: the Road Runner
to Bob’s Wile E. Coyote, Droopy Dog to Bob’s Wolf. Bob’s guttural shudders (a brilliant verbal flourish by guest star Kelsey Grammer) are not merely expressions of physical agony but marrow-deep self-disgust. Each time a rake hits Bob in the face, it confirms his secret fear that beneath his educated facade and delusions of omnipotence, he’s still an unemployable TV clown, a second banana in his own life, a living embodiment of unmerited hubris and well-deserved failure—all of which, point of fact, he is. This lone gag crystallizes every facet of Bob in relation to the world of The Simpsons.

  And he’s not even a regular character!

  That one could write a similarly expansive lead paragraph drawing on any one of dozens of other Simpsons gags—maybe hundreds; at the time of this book’s publication, Matt Groening’s animated sitcom was nearing the end of its third decade—gives some hint of the show’s richness.

  As conceived by Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon, and continued by an endlessly repopulated writers’ room, with a brilliant voice cast (headed by Dan Castellaneta as Homer, Julie Kavner as Marge, Nancy Cartwright as Bart, Yeardley Smith as Lisa, plus Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer, and other utility infielders, including Pamela Hayden, Tress MacNeille, and the late Phil Hartman), The Simpsons is so ambitious, intimate, classical, experimental, hip, corny, and altogether free in its conviction that the imagination should go where it wants, that to even begin to explain all the things The Simpsons is, and all the things it does, you would need an immense Venn diagram drawn on a football field, each circle representing different modes of comedy. And even then, summing up The Simpsons would be impossible, because the best gags, the best scenes, the best episodes, the best seasons, contain multitudes within multitudes within multitudes, like that rake gag. Trying to identify any one aspect as the key to the show’s genius would be a folly as unwise as building the monorails that destroyed Ogdenville, Brockway, and North Haverbrook, and nearly ruined Springfield. The show has been on for far too long (so long that it now predates the existence of many of its viewers), done too many amazing things, and been through too many evolutions.

  The Simpsons is the greatest show in TV history for all the reasons listed previously, plus so many more, that contemplating them all feels a bit like Homer’s daydream about a trip to the Land of Chocolate. It went to more places—tonally and topically as well as geographically—tackled more issues, and told more jokes about more subjects than any comedy has before or since, and at its peak (roughly seasons 3–12) did it better than anyone else. But it also found a deep reservoir of emotion in its depiction of the Simpson family itself, as well as the complicated dynamics between husband and wife, brother and sister, father and daughter, student and teacher, spike-haired brat and gunboat-footed, Gilbert and Sullivan–loving maniac.

  Even the question “What kind of show is The Simpsons?” is hard to answer without sounding reductive, because it has kept morphing throughout its run. It began as a laugh track–free sitcom in the schlubby dad–harried mom–bratty son–precocious daughter vein, but one that happened to be animated (a mode that Fox’s subsequent King of the Hill stayed in). But within a few seasons the slapstick had become more extreme, the structural flourishes more brazen (the peak was probably the anthology “22 Short Films About Springfield”), and the pop culture references had become multivalent.

  The season 4 finale, “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” for instance, contains a scene where the show’s resident action-film superstar, the Arnold Schwarzenegger manqué Rainier Wolfcastle, appears on Springfield Squares, hosted by newsman Kent Brockman. It is simultaneously a send-up of 1970s game shows (specifically The Hollywood Squares); the supposed “newsman” as celebrity (in the 1950s, longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace was a radio actor and cigarette pitchman at the same time that he gained fame as an interviewer); Schwarzenegger’s attempts to remake himself as a star of family comedies like Twins and Junior; the 1980s craze for comedies about “nerds” (Wolfcastle is on the game show to pitch his latest picture, Help, My Son Is a Nerd!, which has the same plot as Back to School and, according to him, is “not a comedy”); and the cliché of the resident who won’t leave his home during a disaster (when a tsunami approaches, the longtime occupant of a bottom square, Charlie, refuses to leave because he’s been there thirty years, and is instantly washed away). This same episode contains references to Judy Collins, Joey Bishop, Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special, Howdy Doody (via the ventriloquist’s dummy Gabbo, whose success shatters Krusty), Cold War–era Eastern European animation (Worker & Parasite, the cartoon video Krusty shows when Gabbo steals Itchy & Scratchy), and parodies of Johnny Carson’s farewell episode of The Tonight Show (via Krusty the Clown’s comeback special, where Bette Midler serenades Krusty the way she did Johnny as his final guest). Celebrity cameos include Midler, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who replay a moment when Ed Sullivan asked the Doors to neuter a line from “Light My Fire”), and Carson, who offers Krusty career advice and lifts a Buick over his head.

  And yet, despite its nonstop maelstrom of satire, parody, whimsy, and shtick, The Simpsons never forgot the family at its core. This is what raises it above so many imitators. Bart’s rebellious attitude and catchphrases (“Eat my shorts!”) made him the show’s initial breakout character, but in time, he and Lisa would both be more memorably deployed to explore the melancholia of childhood: Bart’s belief that he’s peaked at age ten or the despair he feels after facetiously selling his soul to best friend Milhouse; Lisa’s constant fear that she’ll never find a place or group where she feels like she belongs. (When jazzman Bleeding Gums Murphy invites Lisa to jam with him, she improvises a song with the lyric, “I’m the saddest kid in grade number two.”) Marge, with her frustration at always having to be the responsible parent, provided gravity that became more valuable as the show’s plots became more outlandish: Homer joins NASA and goes into space; Bart offends the population of Australia and is sentenced to being kicked by a giant boot; Mr. Burns tries to block the sun’s rays from reaching the town. And even though there was only so much that the writers could do with Maggie, who doesn’t age and never masters more than one word (“Daddy,” spoken by Elizabeth Taylor, of all people), they still managed to establish her as both the wisest and the toughest Simpson (she shoots Mr. Burns and stages a prison break from a totalitarian daycare center).

  But it was Homer who would become the show’s most important character, and its comic engine. He was the American male—and the American psyche—taken to a logical, hilarious, unnerving extreme: sweet and well-intentioned but also selfish, gluttonous, impulsive, and proud of his ignorance (“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent—fourteen percent of people know that”). As revolting as Homer can be, he’s also a wish-fulfillment object, albeit one who could not be further away from the likes of James Bond or Batman. What man hasn’t daydreamed of indulging like Homer and failing upward? What man wouldn’t want to foment unrest against spoiled movie stars (“And when it’s time to do the dishes, where’s Ray Bolger? I’ll tell you where! Ray Bolger is looking out for Ray Bolger!”), become the voice of a focus-grouped addition to your kids’ favorite cartoon show (“The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”), or (in 2007’s The Simpsons Movie) adopt a pet pig and teach it to walk the ceiling like Spider-Man? Okay, maybe those aren’t common fantasies, but Homer’s imagination was the only dazzlingly uncommon thing about him. An early running gag saw Homer peevishly telling Marge that his latest scheme—such as managing a country-western singer in season 3’s “Colonel Homer”—was his lifelong dream, only to be reminded that his lifelong dream was something far less grandiose, like eating the world’s biggest hoagie. The character’s idiocy, so perfectly captured by Castellaneta, could be heroically perverse—and never more so than in “King-Size Homer,” where he gains more than a hundred pounds so that he can get on disability and work from home. (Lisa: “Ew! Mom, this whole thing is really creepy. Are you sure you won’t talk to Dad?” Marge: “I’d like to, hon
ey, but I’m not sure how. Your father can be surprisingly sensitive. Remember when I giggled at his Sherlock Holmes hat? He sulked for a week and then closed his detective agency.”)

  Homer himself has gone through as many changes as the show, from week to week as well as season to season; if you look at his actions in terms of a rap sheet, he’s more monstrous than any of the characters on Seinfeld. Only his genuine (though often submerged) love for his wife and kids and town keeps him redeemable. His oafishness, selfishness, drunkenness, belligerence, and other unpalatable qualities were there from the start, but in the early seasons (the first two especially) he was a melancholy figure, for the most part more a danger to himself than others. Castellaneta’s voice even sounded gentler, verging on a Walter Matthau sad sack. Until longtime writer-producer Al Jean began his current marathon stint as showrunner in season 13, the series went through many bosses, each with their own sense of where to draw the line on Homer’s behavior.

  The character’s moral and emotional mood-ring quality creates yet another obstacle to defining what, at its best, The Simpsons is. Some writers (and fans) believe that the jerkier Homer is, the more memorable he is. Others prefer that kindness and/or self-awareness—or at the very least haplessness—dominate. The Rorschach test episode for this question tends to be “Homer’s Enemy” from season 8, where new plant employee Frank Grimes is driven mad by the realization that Homer is an incompetent drowning in unearned privilege while Frank, a smarter, more hardworking, more ethical person, struggles and suffers. When Homer is too intentionally cruel, it can give the show a more tragic feeling and make it seem sadder when Marge or Lisa forgives him his latest sin; but when he stumbles into his worst behavior, the family feels more in balance. The impact of moral choice was never far from the show’s mind. The Sopranos, Seinfeld, and Mad Men built a good part of their reputations on showing the dynamics of such decisions: how people can have the correct or right decision presented to them and still ignore it and do whatever gives them pleasure. But The Simpsons was more economical, often distilling the process down to a muttered aside by Homer about food. When the chronically unhealthy Simpsons patriarch suffers a heart attack from nervousness while asking Mr. Burns, his boss at the nuclear plant, for a raise, he falls dead on the floor, and Burns tells his assistant to send a ham to the widow; Homer’s spirit murmurs, “Mmm… ham…,” and climbs back into his body in hopes of eating some.