by John Ortved
Perhaps animation’s greatest asset was that it allowed the characters to remain physically identical from show to show, year to year. If Bart were a real ten-year-old at the beginning of the show, it is hard to believe that his antics could interest us past age twelve. A pubescent Bart is scary, a teenage Bart is depressing, and anything past that is really too terrible to contemplate. Imagine an audience’s response to one of Kramer’s silly entrances after Michael Richards’s racist rant of 2008. How about sweet little Stephanie Tanner’s morphing into a methhead in front of our eyes? Real people get old. And unappealing. And crazy. Animated people stay exactly the same, and in so doing solidify their identities within an audience, which parlays into ongoing resonance.
Animation also provided a cover; you could talk about subjects and show content that you couldn’t with live-action shows. There were elements of satire on The Simpsons that, if they weren’t too risqué for other shows—not to mention completely incongruous coming out of the mouth of Urkel, Kimmy Gibbler, or Tim Taylor—were too nuanced. In the episode “Radio Bart,” from Season 3, Bart plays a trick on the town, convincing everyone that a boy named Timmy O’Toole is trapped down a well. While Marge is saying grace before the family’s TV dinner, she asks God to watch over little Timmy, and Bart bursts out laughing.
MARGE: Bart! What’s wrong with you?
HOMER: Yeah! That Timmy is a real hero.
LISA: How do you mean, Dad?
HOMER: Well, he fell down a well … and can’t get out.
LISA: How does that make him a hero?
HOMER: Well, it’s more than you did!
Lisa and Homer’s exchange is interrupted by Kent Brockman’s news report, which includes a feature on Krusty the Clown’s gathering of celebrities, “who normally steer clear of fashionable causes,” to record a music video for little Timmy, “We’re Sending Our Love … Down the Well.” The exploitation of local tragedies by the media, celebrities, and citizens would have been difficult to lampoon on any other sitcom; it would be too dark, or too complex, for Family Matters or Home Improvement. Those shows were made for the people who called well victims “heroes,” not those of us who might laugh at that notion. News networks, and not just local ones, are famous for putting victims on display and treating them as people to be celebrated. Whether it’s young white women who go missing, trapped miners, or victims of shark attacks, the media relishes these events because they stir up a gut reaction that is quite profound: this could happen to us. The cultural catharsis that takes place isn’t so dissimilar to what happens when a joke is told: a deep-seated feeling of dread that we could be the victim, and relief that it is someone else.
There was also elasticity in terms of the show’s permissible content, far beyond the violent stranglings of Bart. Season 3’s episode “Bart the Lover” opens with Bart’s class watching a 1960s-era informational movie about zinc in which a teenager is so despondent about living in a world without zinc that he tries to shoot himself (the gun doesn’t go off—the firing pin is made of zinc). No live-action show, then or now, could show a character putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. It’s too horrific. But not only could The Simpsons show attempted suicide, it could get a laugh from it.
In a Season 1 episode, Homer, depressed by the loss of his job and not being able to support his family, tied a large stone to his body and walked toward a bridge, intending to end his life. At the last moment, he was saved by his family. Pretty dark stuff, and really not permissible in anything but a cartoon—Mr. Belvedere may have had his sad moments, but they would never have showed him sitting in front of a bag of sleeping pills and a bottle of Jack.
This sensibility was aided by the long lead time of production, which forced the writers away from topical humor and was conducive to timeless, more intelligent jokes. They stayed far away from the snappy, snarky humor that had become the norm in family sitcoms. A typical scene from Home Improvement in 1993 had the father figure, Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, coming home to find out from his wife that his two eldest sons had played a trick on the youngest. Within five lines of dialogue, the father made fun of the mother’s cooking and revealed himself as bumbling and gullible, while the mother told her son, “Honey, you’re eight years old now, it’s time we had this talk: stop being such a sap!” Compare this with a run of jokes revolving around a domestic Simpsons scene from the same period. Homer is lying on the couch watching TV, when Marge enters, sorting mail.
MARGE: Bills, bills, bills. Oooh! Free sample of Lemon Time.
HOMER: Oooh! Give it here.
Homer begins to drink the sample.
MARGE: Homer! That’s dishwashing detergent.
HOMER: (pauses) What are you gonna do?
He continues drinking the detergent.
Silly? Yes. Absurd? Of course. But cheesy? Not at all. Nor was it predictable, safe, or snarky. The scene conveyed Marge and Homer’s marital roles: he the incorrigible with an insatiable appetite, unmatched sloth, and less than discerning taste; she the dependable, responsible housewife, both horrified at his disregard for himself and oddly accustomed and attracted to those unorthodox features that made Homer Homer. Simpsons episodes were replete with these clever, revealing, ridiculous moments, which were able to make you laugh without cracking jokes about Marge’s cooking (The wife is a bad cook! Hilarious! Boo urns).
The end of Bartmania also transferred the focus to Homer, a more wide-ranging, relatable character than Bart (whose proximity to a walking catchphrase was parodied in the “Bart gets famous” episode in Season 5). Homer incorporated many of the impetuous, id-driven behaviors of his errant son, but his age allowed for adult conflicts. Originally Homer was a character not unlike many sitcom dads, an underdog chasing the American dream. During The Simpsons’ golden age, Homer stayed somewhat anchored to this role but expanded his range of emotions, silliness, caprice, and appetites. It’s at this time that viewers began to appreciate in Homer what Newsweek called the “most potent ingredient of comedy: the shock of self-recognition.”
While it’s possible that the writers were simply running dry of Bart stories, Homer was becoming an embodiment of his time, a representation of our nineties selves, Homer became a symbol of our voracious appetites and cultural cravings; our deep dissatisfaction combined with our profound lethargy. More than anything, Homer was a pawn in the chess game of life—he was at the mercy of his job, his cravings, the media, and the pressures of cultural and institutional forces he could not, or chose not to, understand. Giant corporations, lobbyists, and media conglomerates didn’t suddenly appear between 1989 and 2000, but in the nineties there was an increasing sense that institutions were growing beyond our control. Bands like Nirvana, books like The Beach, and films like Office Space expressed a fundamental alienation and helplessness in the culture we’d created. It made a great deal of sense that, after Bart had been a focus of the culture wars during Bush’s last years in office, the show would turn to Homer while Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh galvanized the public against gays, immigrants, abortion, and the separation of church and state.
GERARD JONES: I think most Americans don’t want anything to do with these culture wars. It was just a couple of small groups battling it out, especially the baby boomers. Most Americans really just wanted to get by, to get along. They may have leaned more to the left or to the right, but really they had no interest in this stuff; in fact, they wanted a relief from it. And that’s why I think the show moves to the dopey, apathetic, hedonistic but pretty much nondestructive Homer. I think it’s a strong sense of identification. There’s all this wild stuff swirling around him, some of which is quite politically pointed, but he himself just kind of stays happily there with his job and his donuts, and his personal dramas.
Additionally, Homer’s daily life was so much more varied than Bart’s that it allowed greater access to the fantastically rich secondary and tertiary characters Homer interacted with, and story lines incorporating these characters: Moe, Mr. Burns,
Barney, Flanders, Waylon Smithers, Apu, Grandpa, and Chief Wiggum.
The expanded cast became institutionalized along with the show. One Simpsons writer explained to me on some level how all Simpsons characters are essentially stereotypes: the fat, ineffective cop, the crooked mayor, the heartless millionaire businessman, the foreign convenience store owner. But between the writers’ prowess and the actors’ range, these characters were not only believable; they became an indelible part of Springfield. They were reliably funny without becoming gimmicky or tired (as later additions like Disco Stu, Cletus, Lindsey Naegle, and Gil would become).
One of the richest of all these characters has to be Krusty the Clown, the unpleasant, outdated Jewish clown whose afternoon kids’ show is the touchstone of entertainment in Springfield. Krusty came to be Springfield’s greatest entertainment celebrity, and its most pathetic hack.
CHRIS TURNER, author, Planet Simpson: He plays the role of modern celebrity culture, but he’s also a throwback. Like any modern celebrity, his relationship with his audience is completely exploitive. He’ll sell anything for any amount of money, and all of his merchandise is shoddy; most of it is actually dangerous. But they managed to give him this backstory, this life offscreen—he’s this secular Jew who is estranged from his rabbi father, his show is often on the verge of failure—and you begin to care about him.
Another timeless character is Charles Montgomery Burns, Homer’s ancient boss and the greedy, malevolent owner of Springfield’s nuclear power plant, who becomes less of a businessman than a business monster, a stand-in for all capitalism. It’s hard to say what the inspiration actually was for Burns’s character: suggestions indicate an amalgam of Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, James L. Brooks, and Charles Foster Kane. Then there’s Apu, the owner-operator of the Kwik-E-Mart.
CHRIS TURNER: He is an awful stereotype. The interesting thing is the relationship South Asians have with him, particularly South Asians living in the West. On the one hand, yeah, he’s a cartoon. On the other, he’s the most prominent South Asian character on TV. He’s a great example of how the writing developed, because initially he’s a stock character. But as they realized they had this rich canvas to play on, they decided to get into this idea of being an immigrant, and it was actually really subtly handled.
Ned Flanders is an excellent example of a character who began as stock, was deepened during the golden years, and then became an extreme caricature later on.
CHRIS TURNER: If you watch the early seasons, he’s just the annoyingly perfect neighbor. The Christian thing is not up at the front. They revealed Ned’s Christianity slowly; Rod and Todd would be playing some weird Christian board game. Eventually, they got rid of everything else and just made him insanely Christian. You had this stand-in for all evangelism.
And then there is Homer’s friend and drinking buddy, Barney.
CHRIS TURNER: Barney is a good example of what happens when they tinker too much. Barney was great as just the town drunk. Making him sober falls into the trap of all the stuff The Simpsons satirizes, all those simple sitcom narratives where everything is wrapped up in half an hour and everyone learns a lesson in the end.
These are just a few of the steady supporting cast we came to recognize and rely upon (there are approximately two hundred recurring characters in all). There was also Groundskeeper Willie, Martin, the Squeaky Voiced Teen, Dr. Nick, and the list goes on. The supporting cast members not only provided fodder for more and more episodes, but they rounded out Springfield to the point where it was no longer just the town the show was set in. Like the Marvel Universe and Tolkien’s Middle Earth, it became a fully formed, imaginary place.
BRAD BIRD: The really fascinating thing about The Simpsons that I love is that within that universe of Springfield, there is a counterpart to any type of person you are going to run across in your life. You know a Groundskeeper Willie; you know a Principal Skinner; you know a Flanders. Those guys are all over the place. And I find it really interesting that as the show went on and on, they kept adding people to that universe, to where now it’s pretty complete. And it’s the kind of thing that only TV could really do, because of the volume of things you have to do.
The impressive thing about this period in the show’s history is that while the world around The Simpsons was being cultivated, the family became richer, too. As the Simspons became less concerned with the extent of their dysfunction, Bart’s behavior moved away from the colorful antics of a ten-year-old to edgier critiques of his parents, school, and lot in life. He came to express a child’s version of the greater nihilism that The Simpsons projected. In “Bart Gets an F,” where Bart’s poor academic standing forces him to face the prospect of repeating the fourth grade, you could really feel his struggling; Bart the thinking, feeling person really emerged. Lisa, for her part, became more stoic, less emotional and childish, and her critical voice was sharpened—and yet the vulnerability of the smart, different middle child was as strong as it ever would be. In “Lisa’s Pony,” when Homer failed his daughter, Lisa’s disappointment in her father was so palpable, and his efforts to regain her love were so sincere, it is hard to recall a father-daughter relationship as touchingly and honestly portrayed on television.
And yet there were moments of childish delight in every episode, like the laughter that followed Bart’s prank phone calls, which heightened the sense that these were actual kids (the contribution of the actors in making these characters believable cannot be overstated). Aiding this was that fact that, compared with the later episodes, the golden age featured longer, more involved scenes. There is a sense that the writers weren’t afraid of a little space between jokes, of letting the camera linger on the magic they and the animators had created.
The early episodes exploited classic movie clichés, not only for particular scenes and shots (The Godfather, Kubrick, and Hitchcock films were favorites) but also for entire plots, expanding on the show’s riff on the classic sitcom setup by further riffing on classic film and theater tropes. The writers were uninhibited in their more blatant references as well, pointing to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Andy Griffith Show, The Old Man and the Sea, the Algonquin Round Table, Citizen Kane, and hundreds of other cultural landmarks. One classic is Season 5’s “Secrets of a Successful Marriage,” in which Homer teaches a class on relationships. Smithers, the subject of a running joke that he’s a closeted homosexual, in love with Mr. Burns, admits to the class that “I was married once—I didn’t know how to keep it together.” The scene dissolves to a dream/memory sequence, reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (with some Streetcar Named Desire thrown in for good measure). Smithers, drinking heavily and supported by a crutch, is fighting with a Southern belle who is accusing him of being too devoted to Burns. Smithers smashes the place up, then runs to the window to Mr. Burns, who, in a ripped white T-shirt, is calling him Stanley Kowalski–style. Memory and dream sequences like these would later provide the major comic device for The Simpsons– inspired Family Guy.
This worked because the referential scripts incorporated many different styles—love story, mystery, horror, science fiction—while they simultaneously played with all of these genres. Until the ninth season, the writers managed not to get bogged down in a single trope or genre—they were much more elastic and nimble. “We can also bail on a story any time we want,” Matt Groening says with typical flippancy on the Season 5 DVD.
The show wasn’t just expanding its own horizons. By 1994, it was reaching whole new audiences through syndication, as kids coming home from school and adults arriving from work could enjoy a rerun from the first four seasons, five nights a week. In many markets, the show was played more than once a night, on more than one station. Fans seeing episodes for the second, third, and tenth time could catch jokes they’d missed in the initial flurry of comedy, or discover new meanings behind the humor and allusions as they became more educated and savvy.
When a show becomes an institution, it becomes somethi
ng we as viewers rely on, something we could expect every day, like the school bus or a lunch break. Watching The Simpsons for many of us became a welcome daily ritual, especially when you compare it to the other syndicated offerings of the period: Step by Step, M*A*S*H, Designing Women, Murphy Brown, and Married … with Children.
When television series reach a certain number of episodes (usually one hundred), a distributor negotiates a fee between the network and television stations to rerun past episodes in a local market, as well as any future episodes the show produces. This is the first round of syndication. Once the show is off the air, there is a second round of bidding, and those deals are renegotiated. With an estimated price of $1.5–$1.8 million per episode,1 deciding to carry The Simpsons was a major decision for any network affiliate (the show’s syndication actually marked a reversal in the downward trend in the price for sitcoms2).