The Simpsons (Seasons Six To Ten)

Since my last post on The Simpsons, in which I covered my stupid opinions on the first five series, as well as how the show came into my life in the first place, my loyal readers have been crying out for me to continue my ramblings and share opinions on subsequent instalments of the yellow family’s adventures.  So here we are, doing The Simpsons again, but make it seasons six to ten.  You might be asking yourself how I got through five sequences of around 25 episodes in under four weeks, but that’s one of the good things about lockdown.  There’s nothing else to do.  I let an episode roll while I lounge on the sofa with a morning coffee before I log on to the laptop for a bit of working from home.  A couple more play over lunchtime when I briefly step away from the laptop to eat some food that I have to make at home in my own kitchen, and then tidy up afterwards as well.  And finally, once I am finished with the laptop for the day, I step away to eat dinner, in the same room I have been in the whole time, only this time I play some more Simpsons episodes, eyes on the animation while I shovel in another home-prepped meal.  Don’t worry, my actual evenings, spent watching more telly (in the same room, guys), are filled with more adult and aspirational boxsets, like Fargo or Lupin.  I’m not a savage that simply canes hundreds of instalments of the same thing.

Airing between 1994 and 1999, this is what I shall deem The Simpsons’ sophomore years.  Let’s be honest, I only watched these many years later, although I do recall we did actually as a family finally get Sky at one point and for a few expensive years we did watch premier episodes in real time.  I remember the Mayored To The Mob episode being trailed so endlessly that watching it live became an involuntary inevitability.  Worldwide, The Simpsons’ incomparable cultural influence was well established and undeniable.  They had the near perfect storytelling of the vintage seasons to build upon, heritage with the perfect balance of humour and heart and, goodwill surrounding their beloved characters.  Everyone wanted to know what was happening in Springfield.  Indeed, these are some of the absolute classic episodes, but their density among lesser instalments decreases with each progression from one series to the next.  From Lemon Of Troy and Homer The Great’s terrific heights, we slide down a slippery slope of relying on tropes that extinguish the original charm with repetition and unsatisfactory plotting.

Let’s just remind ourselves that I have no legitimate position from which to criticise any of this.  These series are still some of the best TV committed to my eyeballs.  Some sequences I have seen countless times yet they still bring irresistible amusement (such as all of Das Bus).  It’s only as a fan and through this slightly academic process of re-watching that I have been able to pinpoint where things began to lose their shine for me.  We shall go through each one in turn, exceeding only Comic Book Guy for geeky irrelevance.

Firstly, Homer has now become nothing but stupid.  Not just a bit silly, but utterly and unforgivably reckless.  When he is slightly childlike, yet ultimately sacrifices to put his family first, as in You Only Move Twice, he is at his best.  Or in The Joy Of Sect, where his impenetrability offsets cultish earnestness, playing him for laughs is an utter joy.  But when he’s repeatedly ruining Bart and Lisa’s lives, it starts to grate.  Often, he’s a foil to both sides of an argument, as in The Cartridge Family, but his actions veer into unpardonable territory.  He was always preferable as an everyman family man that at least had some, if only modest, aspirations.  This is why he’s always my least favourite character.

Compounding this is an increase in far-fetchedness.  The Simpsons are at their best dealing with the banal – literally managing the household budget or coping with the education system.  But to eke out plot, they have to go to new places or become new things.  Marge and Homer embark on CV-busting dalliances with any and every career:  Homer becomes a carny, Marge becomes a policewoman, Homer becomes a bodyguard, Marge becomes an estate agent, repeat to fade.  Even Bart and Lisa dabble in broadcasting, military academies and ice hockey.  As a cartoon, we have to return everything to how it was at the start, but, as we move on from season six, our routes to getting there become increasingly extreme.  By series seven, we’re having to take an epic approach, and this just isn’t the Evergreen Terrace I want to hang out on.

What makes this more curious is that The Simpsons have always had an outlet to exercise and exorcise nonsense: the Treehouse Of Horrors specials.  In fact, my favourite ever Simpsons story is The Genesis Tub, found in series eight’s anthology (actually instalment number VII), where Lisa accidentally creates life for a science fair.  The very meaning of our existence is lampooned, all while taking aim at Lutherans and teacher assessment.  With the rules out the window for these seasonal specials, couldn’t the standard episodes have retained more realism?  My preference for nuclear family humdrum is probably just a personal matter, but the more celeb cameos (playing themselves), the more destination episodes (New York, Australia, Japan) and the more Homer embraces and then abandons a different lifestyle, the less original charm remains, even though each episode still offers many moments of brilliance.

I don’t think I’m even whingeing about inconsistency.  I’m just a viewer, setting up a mythology in my mind about what rules a show should play by, applying those rules to the world without telling anyone, and then expecting something else to what I’m being offered.  Let’s end on a moment I had clean forgotten but which surprised me with its poignancy and hope to such an extent that my spine tingled.  In ’Round Springfield, Lisa says goodbye to Bleeding Gums Murphy.  He was never a popular character, but he represents to her a certain metropolitan quality that’s lacking in Springfield.  The show deals with loneliness, being remembered, and family.  Lisa only comes across her hero because of her brother absorbing her parents’ attention.  Appearing to her after his death, Bleeding Gums reprises the song Jazzman with Lisa, and I’ll have to admit here that it brought a tear to my eye.  I don’t even know why.  So, despite some imperfections, The Simpsons can still touch me all these years later.

 

The Simpsons (Seasons One To Five)

For those that know me in real life, you’ll have noticed a significant and glaring omission from these posts over the last 188 entries.  There’s a certain animated sitcom that influences my speech every day, that I have spent whole ski trips reciting (“Stupid, sexy Flanders”), whose songs I have butchered to the irritation of other passengers on trains in Germany (“Oh please won’t you see my vest?”) and that probably represents to me the first time I saw the status of masterpiece achieved in TV: The Simpsons.  It’s now been running almost as long as I have, but we’re going to go back to the very start and giving its early years the respect they deserve.  Therefore, its voluminous canon will be split into chunks and we shall begin with the first five seasons.  The classics, if you will.  It’s a well-documented and popular opinion held these days that America’s favourite yellow family is far past its peak.  Now that I have plumped for access to Disney+ (see crucial explanatory post on my life admin decisions here: The Mandalorian), I’ve decided to go back and see for myself.  But let’s be generous – at no point will I be denying the ongoing cultural impact of one family from 742 Evergreen Terrace.  In fact, they may even be victims of their own success.

For a long time I had no real idea what this Simpsonite phenomenon was.  In the UK, the show originally only went out on Sky One (which my parents wouldn’t pay for), and, in the days before the internet, my single route to any further information was an on-pack promotion with Shreddies.  This cereal occasionally appeared in the line-up for breakfast in my early 90s childhood.  My dad, who worked nights, would be asleep upstairs while my mum would quietly prepare my sister and me for school.  A selection of cereal boxes would be laid out on the table in the breakfast room (yes, I know) the night before, so we could serve ourselves on waking up, munching along in time to Mr Motivator on GMTV.  These days, Shreddies would cause me severe digestive discomfort, but in my youth I seemed happy to risk a code brown in order to keep hunger locked up till lunch.  In place of toys, the promotional packs contained Simpsons trivia cards.  I devoured these, desperate to know more about this collection of people who were, to me, at the time, little more than a spiky haired boy, a bald man, a lady with a blue head bush, and an indeterminate number of star-headed woman, all with bulging eyes and yellow skin.  One question then posed still lives with me: who is Bart Simpson’s hero?  I remember you had to slide out a little piece of paper to confirm the multiple-choice answer: Krusty the Clown.  I was torn.  Thrilled to have learned something about these intriguing characters, Krusty sounded like a weird name for a clown.  I also hated, and still hate, clowns.  I was left broadly concerned and very much unsatiated when it came to the world of these yellow cartoon strangers.  What was all the fuss about?

In a rare use of the license fee not to promote Tory politics, the BBC finally acquired the license to broadcast old Simpsons series in the later nineties.  It was the dawning of a new age for my sister and me.  This was years before culture was simulcast on both sides of the Atlantic.  Primitive dwellers of Blighty had to wait months and sometimes years to access Hollywood films.  Thus, only seven years after its American debut, The Simpsons came to British terrestrial telly in 1996.  Life would never be the same again.  In an act of severe trolling, its initial slot was something like 5.25pm on a Saturday afternoon (though it may have been Sunday).  This was before catch-up services and during an epoch throughout which my dad didn’t know how to set the timer on the VCR (which actually extends into present day as he has never learned), so the appointment to view was without compromise.  The show was paired with the TV spin-off of Clueless, so, for the best part of an hour, we would bathe in the contrasting genres of glamorous, sunshine-drenched, high school-based light entertainment that we didn’t understand, and a riot of colourful animation that we simply had to have in our lives.

Viewed in the present day, the episodes of that first season are charmingly rough around the edges.  The drawings threaten to melt at any moment.  Characters take on almost liquid form, and there is a very loose approach to ethnicity, with some racial identities taking a while to settle (and even adjusting in the same episode).  But this is part of the fun, and, either way, the tight tight storytelling distracts from any sketchy sketching to a significant degree.  Each instalment is a masterclass in screenwriting, combining biting satire with comforting heart, acidic wit with sweetness, genuine emotion with slapstick silliness.  The balance of contrasts is remarkable and something that, as modern detractors would argue, hasn’t stayed with the show through subsequent series.  At one point, Homer attempts suicide.  Lisa has depression.  But these aren’t played for laughs – they are taken on to reflect modern life.  Homer, in particular, is a different man.  Sure, he likes is food and is often outsmarted, but he is much more short-tempered, snapping often at Bart, and even at one point the driving force for his family to improve.

As I re-watched, I became fixated on the evolution of our paterfamilias.  Season one Homer has depth, but by season three he is almost fully dumb, and as season five settles in he is stupid beyond all reason.  Reflecting now, this strikes me as the main feature whose loss affects the quality of The Simpsons.  We go from masterpiece to (only!) still better than most things.  A tough judgment for something so lasting and popular but it’s my blog and there’s nobody to stop me venting my bugbears.  Homer shouldn’t matter so much as I’ve always preferred the rest of the family.  Storylines focusing on the children hold more fascination, with Bart channelling my impulse to do anything for the laughs, and Lisa a kindred spirit to my intellectual snobbery.  Often, the best line is simply Maggie’s dummy-sucking.  Marge, in fact, feels more relevant than ever as a manifestation of the invisible mental burden carried by female members of most modern hetero households.  As we progress, a whole town population of Springfielders is generated around the family and a perk of sitting through some episodes for what must be the twentieth time is tracking their first appearances and subsequent developments.

By season two, The Simpsons has perfected (from a high base) the art of the 22-minute story, carrying this right through to most of season five, which is what made me separate this quintuplet off for its own post.  A blessing and a curse comes in the form of the fact that each episode must end with the world unchanged.  The characters don’t age (imagine being eight since 1989).  All plot must be wrapped up and resolved.  When played for laughs, such as with the ongoing joke that Mr Burns can never remember who Homer is (“one of the carbon blobs from Sector 7G”) despite significant intertwining of their lives, this feels appropriately self-conscious.  But as time goes on, the increasing extremity of what happens in each episode gradually chips away at the family’s everyman status.  By the time Homer has gone to space, I start to feel a certain amount of turning off.  While an incredibly witty episode that puts Lisa’s morals front and centre, Whacking Day’s plot hinges on snake activity that is so unrealistic that the suspension of disbelief barely clings on (even though everyone is yellow and only has three fingers).

But who am I to nit-pick?  The show remains enormously comforting.  Even after its UK repetition ad-nauseum in the 6pm weekday slot on BBC2 and then Channel 4, I somehow stumbled across real gems in season four that I had potentially only seen once.  Season five in places represents a pinnacle in perfect sitcomery.  From my more advanced years, I can appreciate the wealth of references, both high- and lowbrow, that pepper proceedings: Edgar Allan Poe, The Grinch, Hitchcock and more.  From season two, there exists a wildcard Treehouse Of Horrors episode that serves to let the writers really shake things out.  As a cartoon, ultraviolence has fewer repercussions, and I always laugh whenever there’s an unnecessary explosion.

The Simpsons’ first seasons set an impossibly high standard.  They spawned a whole new world of animation for adults, begetting an array of entertainment that could often go further with offensive humour and push the boundaries of taste (South Park, American Dad!).  As such, The Simpsons in later years began to look safe and pedestrian.  Like Facebook, it risked acquiring a role as something embarrassing only your parents go on.  But, going back to its classics has been the perfect background comfort while pottering around my flat in lockdown 523, gaining a new and meaningful appreciation of its importance.  To imagine a world where it never existed is to imagine a duller, sadder way of thinking and being.  The inequalities it parodies are still with us so we can conclude that vintage Simpsons is as evergreen as the terrace where the eponymous family still live, all these decades later.

Disenchantment

It’s happened again: I’ve succumbed to a cartoon on Netflix.  Though this wasn’t that recent.  A few months back, I found myself clicking play on episode after episode of Disenchantment.  But I can hear my dear reader(s) asking: why am I talking about it now?  Well, it’s vaguely linked to fantasy-based medieval kingdoms with dragons and that.  For a blog about TV shows, the fact that I’ve not really mentioned the highlight of our televisual lives so far can’t have gone unnoticed (unless you’re just dipping in for the shows you actually watch and not indulging my ramblings about things you haven’t seen – the requirement is that you read everything).  I had mighty plans for Game Of Thrones, let me tell you.  Breaking with precedent (93 posts and counting) I was going to cover each series individually, giving me the perfect excuse to re-watch all seven existing seasons (which would be my third time doing this – cool).  Alas, I am no longer in a Sky household however, so each Monday while series eight premiers is characterised by me rushing around London trying to get invited round to friends’ houses to avail myself of their Now TV or (ideally HD) Sky packages.  Today I took four different buses to Fulham and back.

I was supposed to be in my own flat by this point.  I had dreams of returning to Westeros on a massive sofa in front of a 55” telly, but I’ve not moved into My First Newbuild yet, as lawyers are not only doing nothing, they are doing it at their contractually glacial pace.  So, while I’m still in my final rental, with nothing but somebody else’s Netflix account for company while I save my final pennies for furniture, cutlery and a washing machine, I might as well cash in on Thrones fever by talking this week about something that is a bit to do with it.

Disenchantment is to fantasy what The Simpsons were to real life and what Futurama was to science fiction: animated irreverence.  Uniting all three is my hero and the owner of a surname I’m still not really sure how to pronounce: Matt Groening.  Whether he’d have wanted to or not, this man had a hand in my upbringing, such was the influence of his humour on me at an impressionable age (0 to 34).  Luckily, he didn’t have an effect on my appearance, as so many of his characters have horrendous overbites.  That said, I did require orthodontics to fix my own overbite, but this was never horrendous.  It was initially grotesque and now it is nearly moderate.

Instead of Westeros, then, we have Dreamland, a ye olde fantastical kingdom, ruled by a king in a castle.  Through the eyes of our heroine, we join a complex network of political structures.  But while treaties with neighbouring kingdoms or giants might be inconsistent and rocky at best, Princess Bean’s sure-fire ability to make a hash of most things is a very reliable way to create the perfect plot device, ensuring hilarity ensues in each episode.  Voiced by my beloved Abbi Jacobson of Broad City, Bean prefers drinking to all other princess-ly duties.  Goading her in this misdemeanour is a black cat-like demon whose possession of her spirit signifies a sort of adolescent willingness to do the wrong thing.  Funnier than him, though, is Elfo, a little green elf who is picked up into the trinity of pals along the way, and voiced by Nat Faxon of Friends From College.  As the elfin punching bag for all punchlines and physical comedy alike, Elfo’s interminable cheeriness proves a worthy foil to the constant fantasy peril in which our three leads find themselves.

Each instalment is a standalone adventure, though there does seem to be progression towards various landmarks in Bean’s life and Dreamland’s existence.  The realisation of a fantasy world varies, seeming at points incredibly rich such as when they voyage to the damp realms of Dankmire, and at other junctures shallow and only serving a purpose of pay-off for some joke or other.  Similarly, there are moments of animation touched by true artfulness, such as every establishing shot of King Zøg’s castle, and others which look like the creative direction was running out of time.

The misadventure, however, plods along from mildly amusing to oh-so-clever.  Untapped reserves for future mining spring up everywhere, from the various elves of Elfo’s home village, such as Kissy (who kisses), and the fact that Bonnie Prince Derek, Bean’s half-brother, is completely emo.  This is because the territory is fecund and therefore ripe for parody, mostly through shooting fish in a barrel rather than needing to do anything truly original.  Either way, it adds up to a pretty smart watch, leading me to the conclusion that you probably can’t go wrong with a cartoon on Netflix.  There are so many more stages in animation when compared to filming live action; I imagine that this means there are more opportunities for someone to decide the whole thing is bollocks and stop or improve the production.  A second, longer series is greenlit and the security of that acceptance should provoke bolder humour and bring the seminal achievements of Groening’s other canon within closer grasp.  It won’t fill any Game Of Thrones holes in your life, but you may well enjoy a couple of funnies while your beloved characters are brutally killed off.