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.

 

Final Space

While nobody will really recall 2020 as being a golden age for anything (unless this really does turn out to be the year everyone stops being racist), I would like to suggest that TV is, overall, doing a very good job at the minute.  We are spoiled for choice.  Luckily, this big old pandemic has come along and given us more time at home to keep up with boxsets.  If anything, let’s spread the rumour that telly started the corona-thon.  Thanks to my evenings in, I’ve torn through (and loved) Normal People and I May Destroy You from the BBC (great to see the institution taking time out from delivering news coverage biased to chinless Tories), I’ve been making the most of my Sky subscription for once (look out for upcoming posts), but I seem to have totally bricked it with my Netflix decisions.  There’s a third series of Dark and a fifth of Last Chance U, both absolute gems, that I am yet to start.  Instead, I’ve been trying to follow up on my impressive achievement of devouring the fourth series of Rick & Morty.  Suddenly, I’ve craved cartoons about space.

Enter Final Space, a Netflix animated series that my tired mind hoped might just be in a similar vein.  There’d be laughs, clever humour, but also philosophical provocation and richly imagined worlds.  I really do love a richly imagined world.  But let me get this out of the way upfront: the world in Final Space is so richly imagined that I couldn’t keep up and, before long, I had no idea what was going on.

This is totally my fault.  And, in my defence, it only happened in the second series.  Season one of Final Space introduces us to our hero, Gary Goodspeed.  An astronomical everyman, Gary is nearing the end of a space prison sentence, living in isolation in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired ship with an Alexa-esque companion called HUE.  His concerns are obtaining cookies and staving off boredom.  Enter Mooncake, a squishy green floating being who makes Pokémon sounds and turns out to be a hugely significant, er, thing.  This is where my understanding runs out.  He’s a creature, but also, I think, an energy source, or a key, or you know, whatever you like really.  Either way, I was pretty gripped by the first series, slowly realising that each episode, rather than being a self-contained animated sitcom, is a sequential instalment in a hugely ambitious story about the very nature of space and time.  Throughout, irreverent humour is peppered.  We come across a lot of silly characters and ludicrous situations proliferate.

It’s well-crafted storytelling, but somehow, something didn’t connect with me.  That is my loss.  By the second series, as the universe, literally, of characters and backstories and mysteries expanded, my tiny mind lost its footing and Final Space, in all of its potential to entertain, ended up being a background show I had on while inexplicably baking gluten-free sponge cakes simply because it’s something to do in lockdown.  Ultimately, the show’s humour seems to detract from its serious storylines, while its serious storylines undo its humour.  Maybe it’s basic of me not to care about the end of the world when someone is whingeing about a cookie.

But there is a lot to love, and the animation is breath-taking.  If you like action happening in space, then feast your eyes on these cosmic bodies.  Futuristic vessels slip past, all slinky, while battles and asteroid clusters come to life in three dimensions.  It reminds me of a book I had as a child: some sort of graphic novel from the Ulysses 31 series.  I don’t know where it came from and I never actually read the words, just looking at the pictures in the early nineties and thinking: yeah, this is space and that.  If that specific reference doesn’t work for you, and why would it, then think anime.  And if you don’t know what that is, you’re probably better off watching Love Island Australia.

While I typically advocate for almost all Netflix animations (Bojack Horseman, F Is For Family, Big Mouth, Disenchantment) I will swerve any subsequent series of this.  If I have failed to do it justice, then so be it.  Let the talented voice cast, the incredible animators and imaginative writers all come after me.  Justice is already served in that I am persisting with a poorly read blog while their creative output is getting greenlit by the planet’s biggest streaming giant.  At least there can be no spoilers in this post, as I couldn’t even tell you what Final Space really is.  But yes, give it a go if your sci fi skills are better than mine, but otherwise there’s a host of animation out there that’s easier to connect with.

Bob's Burgers

While some TV show episodes drag into eternity, others are over all too quickly.  From Bob’s Burgers’ jaunty opening sequence to its production company’s endframe, every moment of viewing is just right.  I find myself sitting there expecting more quality entertainment, when all that follows are adverts or an awkward silence.

Whenever I meet someone else who watches Bob’s Burgers, I immediately try and launch into a conversation with them where we can compare our favourite quotations from the show.  But then I always get stuck on the fact I can’t remember any of them.  Yet, every time I watch it, I think to myself how clever and funny each line is.  But this might just be the beauty of the show.  Unlike a lot of animated series, it hasn’t had to rely on stock expressions to engage its audience.  Instead, it has built up individual characters over time.

As a fan of the Simpsons and Family Guy, it makes sense I would enjoy Bob’s Burgers, but I can’t remember at all how I first came across it.  As ever, it took a couple of series of dodgier animation and rougher voice recordings for it to find its feet, but now each episode is a mini masterpiece.  Most recently, it seemed to appear in my Sky Plus on Saturday mornings (assuming it’s getting recording late on Friday evenings) and it makes the perfect viewing accompaniment for me when I am eating porridge and scrambling eggs and drinking a mug of coffee after training.

Family is at the heart of the show, so I have ranked the Belcher family below in order of funniness, and, consequently, their place in my estimations.

Linda

She’s the matriarch of the brood, but probably the least sensible.  More easily swayed by doing what seems fun than by doing what seems important, it’s often her whims that launch the family into its adventures.  That said, she loves her ‘babies’ and her ‘Bobby’ almost as much as she loves dancing in front of an audience and drinking wine.  Everything she says is funny.

Tina

One of the perviest characters ever to grace animation, Tina is what my mum would call ‘boy mad’.  Unfortunate for her, then, that she is stuck in the awkwardness of pubescence.  Her romantic dreams are almost always hopeless, but we root for her because we have all been that weirdo teen.  Her strong moral compass is often at odds with Linda’s shenanigans, but Tina has incredible throwaway lines that pepper the show with an undercurrent of darkness.

Louise

An amazing character if only for the amazing voice of Kristen Schaal.  Louise never takes off her bunny ears (perhaps her one weakness) and takes a small-time gangster approach to most things.  Her cynicism and relentless drive give way only very rarely to the more tender feelings we would expect from a small girl.  Adults beware.  In fact, everyone beware.

Bob

Long-suffering, yes, but innocent, no.  Bob indulges just as much of his own childishness as any of the other Belchers.  The difference is that he is the slightly downtrodden father figure with a flair for fine burgers.  Voiced by H. Jon Benjamin (which will make Archer sound like Bob and Bob sound like Archer, depending on which show you start with), his voice of reason is easily ignored, which is great, as it would only get in the way of the comedy.

Gene

Is it wrong that I like Gene the least?  His voice is wild, his roll malleable.  He is the disgusting boy, but both his sisters can be more extreme without even trying.  Again, he is a champion of throwaway comments and the driving force behind the show’s semi-musical nature.

There’s also Aunt Gayle.  If I could add her into the main nuclear family, she’d be in third place.  This is not only because she is literally me in ten years’ time (lonely old cat lady) but also because her selfishness is exceeded only by her delusion – a recurring theme in many of my favourite comic characters (see Nighty Night).  In addition to both of these points, she is also voiced by Megan Mullally.  This lady could read out anything and it would sound funny.

As the show has grown, however, so has the cast of characters.  Indeed, their unnamed Long Island town is populated with a host of outlandish, yet strangely realistic, individuals: Marshmallow, the transgender sex worker, Speedo Guy, who skates around in a pink pair of pants and nothing else, Mr Ambrose, the sour librarian (also me now – see The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) and Jocelyn, the high school girl whose pronunciation is the most fun you can have with your mouth, or ears, or both.  I have to admit that I cannot abide Teddy.  His whole schtick is that he is desperate to be part of the family, but my skin just crawls each time he speaks, even though he is really a sweetheart.

Threaded through each episode is a touch of musicality, often driven by Gene’s attachment to his fart noise-producing keyboard.  Our closing credits are always accompanied by a reprise of whichever original song has been brought to life in the episode and a skit in the restaurant’s grill kitchen.  I’m always sad the episode is over.  But then, I can just watch another one.