The Waning of the Golden Age: Memories of The Simpsons

Enjoying The Simpsons in its golden age, and just how much hilarity its writers were able to pack into a single episode on so many occasions, it seems that the show had the advantage of comparative freshness in being the first animated sitcom in American prime time in decades, and its establishing a free-wheeling spirit early on (in contrast with, for example, a more grounded show like its contemporary King of the Hill). The result was that it had a relative freedom from not just budgetary constraints (if they could draw it, they could do it), but the expectations of plausibility, consistency, continuity. Thus did we constantly get what would in a live-action version have required "set pieces" unrealizable even in a big-budget movie, never mind a half-hour show (like Homer's attempt to jump across a canyon on a skateboard, and its results), elaborate musical numbers, complete freedom with regard to locations as the Simpsons and other characters adventured all over the country and the world, and of course, a vast cast of recurring characters beyond the ability of any live-action show's budget to procure. Thus was it also the case that, at least up to a point, particular characters could become more rather than less entertaining even as they became caricatures of their earlier selves (Homer Simpson's getting "dumber every season" part of what made the golden age what it was), and the show in turn make a joke of its own excesses (as when Moe Syzslak reflected on how his brief moment as a handsome soap opera star came to an end). Frankly it also enabled the show's makers to get away with a great many artistic sins. (Consider such a matter as the characterization of Montgomery Burns. Ordinarily written as plain Evil, when John Swartzwelder was writing, the show treated Burns much more favorably. The result of these contrasting efforts was not to make Burns a more realistic, complex, interesting figure, but plain and simple inconsistency that few seemed even to notice, let alone think about, because the show so plainly disregards consistency, all as these were years in which everyone was encouraged to take everything "ironically.")

Yet even with all this freedom, which could seem to make the show jump-the-sharkproof, the endeavor had its limits. The writers, perhaps unavoidably, repeated themselves in ways that left the audience thinking to itself "Been there, done that"--as with the telling of the story of Homer and Marge's early days. Many a character became increasingly one-note--as did a Lisa Simpson or Ned Flanders (today a byword for this development). Others changed for the worse, as did a Homer who could not really get any dumber and instead just got increasingly nihilistic, such that already in just the tenth season, after Homer accidentally wrecked Reverend Lovejoy's church with a model rocket a horrified Marge told him "This is the worst thing you've ever done!" and Homer answered that "You've said that so many times it's lost all meaning." The line got laughs--but all the same, when you get to that point, where is there left to go with Homer's antics? (Especially when one remembers that even if many of us came to the show for laughs rather than sentimentality--and were just fine with no hugging, no learning, as the folks at Seinfeld had it--the laughs Homer got at his funniest did commonly derive from a profoundly stupid and irresponsible man also being a loving father who was within his very limited capacity trying to do right by his family, which was of course what got him on the aforementioned skateboard in the first place.) Meanwhile the new additions to the cast just didn't have the zip of the old, even the supporting ones, certainly not to the point of compensating for what was no longer working. (Pathetic "Old Gil" seems symbolic of the eagerness, and failure, to actually win people over.) Just about everything in the show bespoke exhaustion as what was new at the start of the 1990s--prime-time animated comedy, which had been the more striking for an American audience that never got over the idea that animated fare is for children and so amused or scandalized when such material is not for children--became commonplace, and the competition the product of an EXTREME! era in which there was a widespread sense of a culture watching itself have a nervous breakdown. Thus along with the danger of staleness there was the danger of being left behind by fashion, as where the show once started a moral panic by having a cartoon fourth-grader swear mildly in prime time now it was the cartoon fourth-graders of South Park who were pushing the envelope with far, far worse. As is so often the case with once ground-breaking series' that go on too long, stopped leading as it increasingly followed the trends others set. Thus the comedy got "edgier," and meaner--but not better. Quite the contrary the show looked increasingly desperate going this route (as, indeed, the more edginess-reliant South Park did even earlier in its run). Meanwhile it didn't help that the show wasn't even trying anymore to do some of those things the audience loved most about it (the day of its musical numbers ended, a casualty we were told of how the network's unhinged cramming of more and more commercials into each half hour were depriving the episodes' scripts of the "room to breathe" that allowed them to include such things as long song-and-dance sequences).

From the standpoint of both art and dignity it would have been better for those in charge to realize that they had given their best, and given what could only follow--not their best--go out on top (as the folks at Seinfeld did, in the very period when The Simpsons was looking less golden). Instead the show lumbered on from season to season as the audience withered away, to such a point that today the network may be cranking out new episodes solely for the sake of that "back catalog value" that, like so much else in a financialized economy gone brain-dead (as seen in the insane valuation of Tesla and so many other artificial intelligence firms), amounts to building a skyscraper of cards atop a foundation of nonexistent values and either being so deluded as to believe the evil day when it catches up with them will never come, or at least that they will have sold out before then and made the collapse someone else's problem.