While the five core Simpsons remain the show’s most valuable characters, The Simpsons owes its longevity as much to the ever-expanding, ever-stranger population of Springfield (state unknown) as it does to the writers’ ability to keep cranking out variations on stories where Marge gets a job, Lisa makes a friend, or Homer offends a celebrity. In the ancient, malevolent, supremely self-centered Mr. Burns, the series was making fun of the one-percenters decades before it became de rigueur. Springfield’s Kennedyesque mayor “Diamond Joe” Quimby offered a window on corrupt, self-interested politics and the complacent electorate that does nothing to change it. The elementary school, the nuclear plant, Grandpa Simpson’s nursing home, Moe’s Tavern, Comic Book Guy’s shop, and many more Springfield locations gave the series an endless bounty of characters (incompetent police chief Clancy Wiggum, ambulance-chasing lawyer Lionel Hutz, slack-jawed yokel Cletus Spuckler) who could stumble in, get a laugh, then step aside to let the story continue on its merry way. You wouldn’t want to move most, maybe any, of the Springfieldians into their own series (an idea the show mocked in season 8’s “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase”). But their tonnage has given the series a richness that belies its animated format, as well as the one-note quality of local citizens like Disco Stu, mob boss Fat Tony, and Doris the Lunch Lady. After all this time, Springfield can feel disturbingly like a real city, complete with people you’d cross the street to avoid.
The Simpsons is similar in a way to a couple of other long-running TV series, 60 Minutes and Sesame Street, in that when a program remains a part of national life for more than two decades, it ceases to be a mere show and becomes something in between an institution and a utility: a thing that we have, use, and take for granted.
This is most apparent in the still-constant use of Simpsons quotes in daily life. The show has supplied a sentiment for every occasion, so many that it now gives the King James Bible a run for its money. Any stupid mistake can be acknowledged with a frustrated cry of “D’oh!” If you want to explain why you prefer a clearly inferior option, just say, “Barney’s movie had heart, but Football in the Groin had a football in the groin.” If you’ve just heard someone say something unrealistic or unhinged, you can dismiss them with “Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.” If you’re bracing yourself to deal with a new boss, a new presidential administration, or any other sort of dreaded leader, channel Kent Brockman and announce, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.” If you need a bald-faced lie to explain where you were last night, say, “It’s a pornography store! I was buying pornography!” If you’re struggling to get across a basic concept, as Homer’s brain once did when it tried to teach him why $20 can buy many peanuts, say, “Money can be exchanged for goods and services.” If you’re lost for words when making a toast, there is no better fallback option than “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
That The Simpsons has been on so long past its peak is really the only reason to suggest it shouldn’t be considered the best series of all time. But the narrative that the current show is a ghost of its former self doesn’t withstand scrutiny if you pay close attention to the second half of its run, which has had lackluster periods (over the course of almost three decades, what person, or nation, doesn’t?) but has continued to produce episodes so imaginative and funny that if The Simpsons had started its run in 2004 instead of 1989, it still might’ve cracked this book’s top 100. Whenever you’re about to count The Simpsons out, it produces a magnificent segment like the 2008 “Treehouse of Horror” short “It’s the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse,” in which a giant humanoid pumpkin wreaks havoc on the town after discovering the ritual butchery of jack-o’-lanterns and the cooking of their seeds (“You roast the unborn?”). Or it stages a crossover episode that amounts to a withering referendum on its would-be competitors (see the Simpsons half of a 2014 crossover with Family Guy that rebuked the upstart not by slagging it but by being more inventive, visually striking, and humanistic). The shift to high-definition animation and a more rectangular 16×9 frame (versus the original 4×3 format) has made the series more visually daring; even when the writing failed to match the depth of the show’s first decade-plus, the compositions, editing, and production design equaled or bested them. Modern episodes like “Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind” (Homer tries to re-create the forgotten events of the night before), “Holidays of Future Passed” (a flash-forward where Bart and Lisa grapple with the disappointment of their middle-aged lives), and “Halloween of Horror” (the show’s first in-continuity Halloween episode, where Homer tries to protect a terrified Lisa from a trio of home invaders) demonstrate a level of formal and/or emotional complexity that make them worthy of consideration alongside the best made when Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels were on the writing staff.
“Treehouse of Horror” has been a consistent bright spot, mainly because of its freestanding nature. Its segments treat the Simpsons and their fellow Springfieldians as players in a repertory company and cast them according to their most metaphoric qualities, as a fairy tale or a Rod Serling screenplay might. The ability to derange, mutate, mutilate, kill, and resurrect the main characters for shock effect without regard for continuity (or perhaps we should say less regard) seemed to energize the writers even during weak seasons. The tonal and visual variety displayed in a quarter century’s worth of “Treehouse” shorts (seventy-three as of this writing) constitutes a triumphant achievement in itself. The show has attempted other anthology-styled episodes over the years—everything from the aforementioned “22 Short Films” to episodes based on Greek mythology and the Bible—and elsewhere you can find still more examples of shows-within-shows. These include the hyperviolent Itchy & Scratchy shorts played on Krusty’s kiddie program—Tom and Jerry by way of Ralph Bakshi, minus the sex, thank Jeebus—which could be The Simpsons’ way of critiquing audience bloodlust even as the goriest sight gags elsewhere on the show feed it (“I told that idiot to slice my sandwich!”). The fresh couch gag at the end of every opening credits sequence amounts to an anthology on the installment plan; the shift to HD has encouraged the show’s writers and animators to experiment more boldly within it, and even to allow outside animators to try their hand at it. The twenty-sixth season opened with a couch gag from aggressively outré animator Don Hertzfeldt, who imagined The Simpsons continuing through the year 10,535, and pictured the family as black-and-white octopuses with tentacles and eyestalks, screeching gibberish catchphrases at one another.
Once upon a time, the notion of The Simpsons’ continuing forever—past the life spans of Groening, Brooks, Simon (who died in 2015), Jean, Castellaneta, and everyone else who’s contributed to its current incarnation—would have seemed horrifying. But the series has reinvented and rediscovered itself enough times over the decades that the idea of its pumping out new episodes in perpetuity can be oddly comforting. Arguably no show should last eight hundred seasons, but if any show can, it’s The Simpsons.
The playwright Anne Washburn seems to agree. Her 2012 off-Broadway production, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, pushes the idea of The Simpsons as pop culture’s lingua franca to science-fictional extremes. Act one, set immediately after an unspecified apocalypse, observes a group of terrified refugees wondering why humankind suddenly lost all electrical power and struggling to bond by trying to remember the plot of “Cape Feare.” Act two is set a few years after that, with surviving members of the group forming a theatrical troupe that performs stage versions of Simpsons episodes; their story lines are bizarrely and somewhat poignantly garbled by virtue of being handed down via the oral tradition—not unlike the epic poems of, ahem, Homer. Their production-in-progress is interrupted by the appearance of a murderous rival troupe that aims to steal the first group’s Simpsons-derived “plays” and add them to their own repertoire. Act three is set seventy-five years after that—a self-contained play within Mr. Burns. It takes place entirely on a storm-tossed boat, the same setti
ng as the climax of “Cape Feare,” which was inspired by the 1991 film Cape Fear, which was a remake of the 1962 film Cape Fear, which was adapted from the 1957 novel The Executioners. Here the Simpsons are tormented not by Sideshow Bob but by a demonic figure who seems to be a mix of Bob, Cape Fear’s maniacal redneck Max Cady, Mr. Burns, and Satan. The performers wear spiky masks that invoke the traditions of Greek tragedy and Noh. When blood is shed onstage, it’s hideous—a hellish spectacle befitting a society that has lost hope along with law, order, and electricity. The closing section is sung-through, in the minor key of a lament: a grim homage to the moment in “Cape Feare” where Bart distracts Bob by getting him to sing all of the songs from H.M.S. Pinafore. When good triumphs and order reasserts itself, the audience feels not the warm reassurance of low-stakes weekly ritual (the feeling we get from watching The Simpsons today) but cathartic relief at being alive at all, as well as giddy incredulity at the idea that bug-eyed banana-yellow cartoon characters would survive the end of civilization. Wolfcastle’s muttered aside in “Krusty Gets Kancelled” might have been the tagline for Washburn’s play: It’s not a comedy.
But then, neither is The Simpsons—not exclusively, anyway. It always had the culture and the species on its mind even when it was clowning around; in those infrequent moments when The Simpsons drops its grin and goes melancholy or lyrical, you can see it. Think of the lovely moment near the end of the season 6 episode “Bart’s Comet,” wherein the town of Springfield reacts to news that a comet (named after Bart, who discovered it) is fated to wipe them out. When panic spreads, Ned Flanders—as usual, the town’s only unselfish citizen—opens the doors of his bomb shelter and lets his neighbors pile in. The comet peters out after striking Principal Skinner’s weather balloon and all’s well that ends well, but the episode is best remembered for a moment of existential terror that gives way to graceful resignation: The camera tracks slowly across the faces of Springfieldians packed into Flanders’s bomb shelter as they sing “Que sera, sera / Whatever will be, will be / The future’s not ours to see…”
Indeed, it’s not. But if a modern-day Nostradamus predicted an apocalypse that would wipe out most of humanity but leave a resilient handful quoting The Simpsons, what TV fan would doubt him? We’ve come this far.
—MZS & AS
The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) Total score: 112
The last words heard on The Sopranos are delivered not by New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), not by wife Carmela (Edie Falco), daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), meathead son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler), nor by Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) or any of the other wiseguys who survived the HBO mob drama’s bloody final season.
No, the last words we hear come from Journey front man Steve Perry, who belts out, “Don’t stop…,” right before everything does.
The series’ place on TV’s Mount Rushmore was secured long before that divisive final moment, when Sopranos creator David Chase denied his audience closure on everything, from Tony’s fate to the last word of the Journey song’s title. The Sopranos was the Big Bang of the cable drama explosion that led to TV’s latest golden age. It was consistently excellent in every department: direction, performance, cinematography, editing, sound design, music, dialogue, and overall narrative architecture. At its peak, it produced moments so transcendently funny, sad, brutal, and mysterious that they make even the finest moments of other great series seem underachieving.
But even if The Sopranos’ impact on the medium had been far milder, even if the rest of the series didn’t so often scale such amazing heights and give us riveting scenes like Tony wailing in frustration at being denied the ability to murder his joyless sociopath of a mother, it might still have wound up in this Pantheon just because of the last four minutes of its finale, which in the past decade have come to be regarded as the Zapruder film of scripted TV. No ending in television history, and few in cinema, inspired as much debate about what happened, what it meant, and what an insistence on a particular interpretation revealed about the viewer. It’s so famous, or infamous, that even those who’ve never seen a frame of the series know the gist: Tony, Carmela, A.J., and the late-arriving Meadow meet at a diner and share a communion-like meal of onion rings; Tony glances around the place with what could be anxiety or bored complacency, depending on how you read the moment, until the front door rings, the Journey song hits another chorus, and Tony looks up and…
The ellipse implied by the abrupt cut to black is everything here. Despite the way it seems to echo the deaths of so many Sopranos characters, from Big Pussy (Vincent Pastore) and Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) to Bobby Bacala (Steve Schirripa) through poor Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), it remains resolutely unresolved; Chase even insisted on a long moment of silence after the cut, which convinced many viewers that their cable signal had gone out. Given the density of the “clues” (multiple possible assailants, none of whom actually move against Tony) and the vague but palpable aura of tension, the only definitive thing one can say about it is that it’s ambiguous.
But that did not stop legions of viewers from insisting that they could “prove,” like mathematicians solving for X, that Tony got murdered at the diner, perhaps by that sneaky-looking guy in the Members Only jacket, and that no other interpretation was possible—as if The Sopranos had ever been a “puzzle box” show like The Prisoner or Lost, rather than a half-satirical meditation on family, psychology, consumerism, suburban life, and the twilight of the American Empire, dolled up in the wide-lapelled sharkskin jackets and pinky rings of the Mafia potboiler.
Chase has repeatedly insisted over the years, in a series of increasingly forlorn-sounding public explanations, that it doesn’t matter what happened next, much less whether Tony lived or died; that the point of the ending was never what came next but that life was fragile and could be ripped from us (though not necessarily Tony’s life, and not necessarily at that moment) without warning. Admittedly, that is surely not all there was to the ending, or nonending; Chase, like most real artists, works close to his subconscious, so explanations of what the art means can often feel like oversimplications after the fact, intended to appease viewers who cannot just absorb a story but need to feel they’ve mastered it. There have been notes of sheepish apology in some of Chase’s statements, as if he were gently reprimanding himself for failing to make things crystal clear. But it also seems possible that, intentionally or no, Chase devised a clever means of giving both gangster-movie traditionalists and art-film-minded contrarians the endings they craved: You could see Tony as being punished for his crimes (proving that there is justice in the universe, and absolving viewers of having spent six seasons watching vicious people do vicious things) or not punished (there is no God, there is no justice, morality is a social construct, etc.). And then you could argue about what that meant or didn’t mean, even though The Sopranos never revealed what happened after that cut to black.
Years after the finale, and with more awareness of the kind of show that everyone had actually been watching for six seasons, the ending seems not merely in character but the apotheosis of everything The Sopranos is about. Characters are constantly drifting toward epiphanies but failing to seize them, and some of them regurgitate the language of therapy and self-help—including Tony’s mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), his grasping and manipulative sister Janice (Aida Turturro), mob captain Paulie Walnuts, and foot soldier and on-again, off-again drug addict Christopher; but very few of them actually cross over and make permanent, substantive changes for the better. One of the eeriest and most heartbreaking moments in the show comes in season 6’s “Kennedy and Heidi,” when Tony, who recently survived a shooting at the hands of his uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) but soon reentered mob life with a vengeance, then murdered his own nephew and slept with his girlfriend in Las Vegas, takes peyote in the desert and stands on the top of a mesa screaming, “I get it!”
Like so many proclamations on this show, that turns out to be wishful thinking. It’s
questionable whether anyone on The Sopranos ever truly gets anything, and for those who plausibly do (such as mob soldiers Eugene Pontecorvo and Vito Spatafore, who realize how morally and emotionally suffocating their lives are, and violently fail to escape them), the knowledge can be more tragic than liberating. The problem, for the most part, isn’t that the characters aren’t capable of self-knowledge or criticism but that they’re simply too lazy or easily distracted to implement the realizations they have. The prognosis for human change is so bleak here that the only things preventing The Sopranos from seeming oppressively nihilistic, even glibly cynical, are the continual reminders of the mysterious beauty that exists beyond the bounds of most people’s awareness, as indicated in the repeated shots of wind rustling through trees, and the references to history and theology, art and architecture, and the show’s literally elemental sense of what it means to be alive. The show’s North Jersey is at once prosaic and poetic, full of chain stores, tacky strip clubs, and tackier hairstyles, but also a place where nature is presented at its extremes, whether the crippling snow that strands Paulie and Christopher in the Pine Barrens or the oppressive sunlight that always seems to be shining down on the pork store whenever Tony has to make a big decision.
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