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.