If I had to pick a specialist subject, it would be The Simpsons. I reference it incessantly. I can recall episode names and showrunners by heart. I annoy my friends and loved ones by reciting lines as they play out on the TV. I love The Simpsons.
It’s also the worst thing on television.
Revealing yourself as a Simpsons fan comes with inevitable qualifiers: “Not the new episodes!” Most people want their favourite show to last as long as miserly TV executives will allow. Not me. I would gladly see The Simpsons sent to the knacker’s yard, rather than given a second movie, as was announced earlier this week.
Fans agree the show pales in comparison with the quality of its “golden era” – a period usually defined somewhere between seasons one through eight – where it had a mind-boggling roster of talent. With the likes of John Swartzwelder, George Meyer and Conan O’Brien, the show’s writers were masters of slice-of-life, absurdist, high- and low-brow comedy, often jumping between them in a single gag.
The Simpsons pushed what was acceptable on television, particularly with Bart’s smart-aleck underachieving and Homer’s penchant for beer, food and general laziness. President George HW Bush famously once said that his goal was to make American families “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons”. A few years later, The Simpsons retaliated by having Homer fist-fight Bush in a sewer.
Yet much of the beauty was the show’s wacky cynicism rubbing up against its sentimentality. Co-creator Sam Simon is often credited as helping to ground the characters in a reality unseen in cartoons up until that point. Nearly all the main cast were treated as multidimensional actors rather than drawings on a screen; in one episode Homer Simpson might go to space, in another he’d grieve the abandonment by his mother.
But The Simpsons hasn’t truly been good since 1997, meaning the show has been in decline for as long as I’ve been alive. Now we are beset with season after season of awful, awful episodes. Ironically, the show was already lampooning the growing difficulty in keeping itself fresh all the way back in 1995. As Troy McClure said in The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular: “Who knows what adventures they’ll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?”
It’s impossible to explain succinctly why modern Simpsons doesn’t work. It’s not funny, sure. But Springfieldians are now oversimplified caricatures of themselves – something so evident in Ned Flanders’ transition from a well-meaning and church-attending neighbour to a relentless Christian fundamentalist that it spawned the term “flanderisation”.
Perhaps more importantly, the show is less interested in shaping culture and more interested in chasing it. In its more mundane form this can be seen in the show’s cringeworthy couch-based take on the Harlem Shake. At its worst, you only need to look at the sycophantic Elon Musk episode, or the Marvel and Star Wars crossover slop made after Disney acquired 21st Century Fox.
Recently, the quality of The Simpsons has only suffered more by the loss of some of its iconic voice talent. Mainstay Marcia Wallace, the voice of Mrs Krabappel, died in 2013, followed by the death of Russi Taylor, voice of several side characters like the ever-bullied Martin Prince, in 2019. And of course, Pamela Hayden, who voiced fan favourite Milhouse since 1989, retired from the show late last year.
Viewings are a far cry from the 90s too, with season 36 often not cracking more than one million viewers per episode. Then there’s the declining voice quality of actor Julie Kavner, whose iconic gruff voice for Marge now sounds as pleasant as polyp surgery, and Harry Shearer: when he voices characters like Mr Burns and Ned Flanders, he comes off like he’s doing a bad impression. With recasts already a precedent, how long until artificial intelligence is used to skirt the limitations of actor mortality? Hank Azaria, the voice behind bartender Moe and the axed Apu, has already written an op-ed predicting that very outcome.
And yet, despite falling ratings and a struggle against existence itself, a sequel to 2007’s The Simpsons Movie is in the works. Not only that, but Fox has commissioned four more seasons, meaning when it hits season 40 in 2028, The Simpsons will be the same age as Homer is in the show.
Admittedly, The Simpsons Movie was a slight uptick in quality – no doubt thanks to the return of many of the sitcom’s best writers. But what can the Simpsons family do now that they haven’t already? What joke, what fresh take on Springfield can we really expect 36 years in? When The Simpsons started, it was a subversion of saccharine sitcom titans like The Cosby Show; today, it’s become just as hackneyed.
The Simpsons has given us so much: new ways to tell jokes and new ways to write television. Many of its best moments are still passed around in meme form. It has made us laugh. It has made us cry. It even embiggened our vocabulary with perfectly cromulent additions to the dictionary. But when the doughnuts start to go stale, you don’t keep them around for another 27 years – you chuck them out.
