Wednesday 16 October 2019


The secret of The Simpsons

It was back in a time of respect and wholesomeness, when, of an evening, freckle-faced children, consumed with the lust for self-improvement, gathered with their parents in front of the television, that the yellow peril arrived.

Some people quite liked the new show and some didn't, but everyone agreed that no goofball cartoon comedy from America was ever going to be the greatest television programme in history. Doh! A decade later The Simpsons was named by Time as the greatest television programme in history.

It wasn't so much that The Simpsons improved (in some ways it now lacks the edginess of its early days) as that the world refashioned its reality around the Simpsons. What else could it do? The more you got to know Homer and his brood of Springfield dingalings, the harder the truth hit you. These people weren't like us. They were better than us.

Let the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a long-time fan explain: "Goodness is taken very seriously in The Simpsons. Not in a solemn or moralising way, but the values of honesty and generosity and forgiveness are ones that, quite clearly, the programme endorses."

Hasten ye then to The Simpsons Movie, 18 years in the making, and a film in which no act of goodness of which the archbishop might conceivably approve goes unpunished. The complex plot revolves around Homer's unnatural affection for a pig called Harry Plopper, the toxic, er, waste of which eventually puts the whole of Springfield in jeopardy.

"We wanted something highbrow for cinema," says director David Silverman. "You've got to give it a certain amount of class and spectacle."

Yet, as always with The Simpsons, the silliness of the storyline serves to amplify the wit, intelligence and modest profundity that lie at the show's heart.

Subtly stirred into the mix are questions of power and accountability, and as the town descends into anarchy, its arch villain, nuclear plant supremo Montgomery Burns, is able to gloat: "So! For once the rich white man is in control."

Beyond humour, beyond pathos, The Simpsons possesses a kind of allegorical quality - always topical, always telling - that sets it apart from the tawdry cavalcade of reality shows and smut-laden chat'n'comedy that clog the rest of the schedules.

Even its rivals admit it has them beaten. "The Simpsons is the bane of our existence," complains South Park's co-creator Matt Stone.

Ricky Gervais, the star and writer of The Office says: "The longevity is astounding. I have to have a lie down after six episodes of The Office. People go: 'Would that pass in The Simpsons?' Because it's timeless and universal."

What, though, is it really about? When the show began in 1989, it was seen as part of the non-stop, pop-cultural carpet bombing of authority and deference.

Kids wore T-shirts emblazoned with Bart's core philosophy of "Underachiever and proud of it", and catchphrases such as "I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?", became part of the adolescent lingo.

Bart's überslob father, Homer, a beer-and-doughnut-addicted, bone idle, one-time uranium rod handler, appeared to be the epitome of the deadbeat dad. Homer is only truly happy in front of the television where his wife, Marge, is obliged to feed him crisps so that he can keep both hands on his video game console. "Come on," he tells her when she baulks at the task, "you're always telling me we should do things as a couple."

Poor Marge, with her Leaning Tower of Blutack hairdo, seemed, in a family rounded off by the precociously knowing Lisa, and Maggie, a one-year-old baby of remarkable weapons-handling abilities, to be the only Simpson with any redeeming qualities at all.

And even these raised the question of what she was doing in the dystopia of suburban Springfield.

Yet as the series took hold, we began to look more deeply into the Simpsons. Here, behind the craziness, we saw a family aware of its strengths. Betrayal and selfishness gnawed at the ground beneath their feet.

Cynicism pursued Homer everywhere, especially to the tavern, where Moe the barman would tell him: "Increased job satisfaction and family togetherness are poison for a purveyor of mind-numbing intoxicants like myself." The threat of financial ruin hangs permanently above the family's heads.

There's just one thing going for the Simpsons, and it is love. Love for each other, and love, in a sense, for the humble life they have built together.

From this stems the essential goodness identified by Rowan Williams; faced by a world where everyone and everything appears to be part of a permanent anti-little-guys-like-the-Simpsons conspiracy, the family's love holds it together.

It is easy to over-sociologise all this, and many academics, in hundreds of highbrow theses published over the years, have rushed to do so.

Some, particularly on the Left, have sought to argue that the show's social conservatism is the key to the satire, and that the Simpsons' patriotic, churchgoing, pro-family inclinations should be seen as an attack on the insularity, the emptiness and herd mentality of middle-American lives.

This seems unlikely. As Professor Paul Cantor of the University of Virginia, a prominent Simpsonologist says: "What The Simpsons seems to be telling us is that a dysfunctional family is better than no family at all."

Nor, although he defines himself as a political liberal, has the show's creator, Matt Groening, ever suggested that the bonds binding Homer, Marge and the children are less than sincere and admirable.

Groening (it rhymes with "raining"), based the characters loosely on his own family. Born in Portland, Oregon, he had moved to Los Angeles in the late Seventies, hoping to become a writer.

Instead, he dabbled unsuccessfully in the rock scene, and started drawing, largely for the amusement of his friends, a comic strip, Life in Hell, that played for its gags on the humiliations of those trying to make it in LA. The strip found its way into a local magazine where it was spotted by Jim Brooks, a writer-producer on the Tracey Ullman Show.

Brooks wanted someone to create a cartoon "bumper" that would fill the gaps between Ullman's sketches and the advertisement breaks. Groening, unwilling to part with Life in Hell, thought the situation over and came up with The Simpsons.

Today it is the longest-running animated show in television history, watched by more than 60 million people a week in 90 countries, and a huge generator of profits for the Fox network, whose boss, Rupert Murdoch, once appeared in it as himself saying: "I am Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media tyrant, and this is my Skybox."

How long can it run? The show started before the world was wired, and has continued long enough for Homer to ask: "The internet? Is that thing still around?" Many fans see the long-awaited movie as a crowning achievement and a sign that the end of the run is nigh.

Groening is coy on the subject, admitting that "after this long it's hard to keep surprising the audience," while adding: "There are always new audiences we can reach."

It is all, as the Simpsons would say, in God's hands. Yet why preach to the unconverted, when there's no room left in the church?

Follow The Telegraph on social media

Back to top

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2019

Terms and Conditions

Today's News


Style Book

Weather Forecast