Post by starman on Oct 16, 2007 23:19:06 GMT -5
(WARNING: People with short attention spans, this might not be for you.)
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We've known for a while, whether we admitted it to ourselves or chose to ignore it, hoping it would go away. The most recent episode of The Simpsons, now in its eleventh season, is perhaps the most clear sign yet that the problem isn't going anywhere.
The greatest show ever for my generation, and perhaps others, has become a pale, pathetic imitation of itself. The inevitable comedic decline that turned Seinfeld into a joke during its last season has afflicted The Simpsons, but perhaps what's most disheartening is that the show is only now enjoying an unprecedented popularity, the result of having become the longest running show in primetime.
I remember, some years ago - I think '92 or '93 - reading a quote from one of the show's producers, basically saying that they wanted to reduce The Simpsons to "cult status". It was a remark said half in jest, and at the time I didn't comprehend its true meaning. But that's exactly what happened. After its initial popularity, when the show was as much about selling T-shirts and other merchandise, the show evolved into one of the most genius half-hours of comedy in television history. And it became at once a popular television show and a cult phenomenon.
Then the show became unfunny. In the pursuit of the almighty laugh, the producers of The Simpsons sacrificed the consistency of the characters and the magical world they had created - the greatest violation that could have been committed against television's most unique show.
The aforementioned episode, "Alone Again, Natura-Diddly", continued a recent trend on the show of treating the deaths of characters as a twisted, heartless joke. It was vaguely funny but more disquieting when Homer's enemy, Frank Grimes, was electrocuted at the end of his sole episode, with Homer cracking jokes at his funeral. This was a show that had something intelligent and meaningful to say nearly every week, yet on that occasion, the message was either absent or sorely dismal. It paled next to the sentiment conveyed by the earlier death of Bleeding Gums Murphy. There was a death that was treated with the significance and respect it deserved.
No, the offing of Frank Grimes was the start of a different attitude towards the people of Springfield. It symbolized one important event: the producers had stopped loving their characters. What else could explain the haphazard way in which the characters were allowed to devolve into ludicrously schizophrenic versions of themselves, and what else to explain the manner in which Maude Flanders was sent to her death in this episode?
All the citizens of Springfield find themselves at a race track that has appeared out of nowhere. The Flanders family is in the last row at the top of the bleachers, the Simpsons seated in front of them. And Maude goes to get hot dogs, and a disgustingly fatter-than-usual Homer yells down to the cheerleaders to fire a T-shirt out of their shoulder cannons up to him. So, inexplicably, they fire half a dozen at him, and at the last moment, he sees a bobby-pin on the ground, says "Ooh, a bobby-pin," bends down to pick it up and thus clears the way for the shirts to hit Maude square in the chest, knocking her off the back of the bleachers and down several stories onto the macadam, DOA.
Now let's assume for a moment that this situation is plausible up to the firing of the T-shirts. No, strike that. The entire situation is ludicrous. That is to say, none of it makes sense. A half dozen T-shirts fly at Homer, traveling fast enough and with sufficient force to knock a grown woman off the back of bleaches whose back wall is not high enough to prevent the accident, all because Homer was distracted by a bobby-pin - a bobby-pin?! - even though he'd spent the entire scene to that point screaming like a two-year-old for one of those T-shirts. It is as if the writers intentionally thought of the weakest plot possible to dispose of a character that, like it or not, was a significant part of the Simpsons universe. It was silly! It was bad farce.
And then they had the funeral, which was an even bigger joke. The casket is covered in corporate logo stickers; Reverend Lovejoy delivers a eulogy that references Maude's status as a supporting player on the show in an uninspired way; the d**n cheerleaders fire off a twenty-one T-shirt salute. What the hell are we watching?
The show has bent reality, has skewed it slightly in the past to give us an intriguing perspective. But never during its glory days, (seasons 3-I'm talking the middle seasons, did it turn their reality into something so nonsensical and irreverent as to be insulting to the audience.
The rest of the episode was concerned with Ned's return to the dating scene - and we're talking eight minutes after Maude, a character we've watched for ten years - and some vague business about him questioning God. Normally, this would make zero sense, Ned dating in the same episode in which his wife is killed in a freak accident. But then, when you think about it, Ned, like many of the other characters, lost his soul long ago. There was an episode recently wherein, amazingly, it turned out that Ned was a senior citizen. Had been all along. And because we've watched the show, invested our interest for nearly a decade, we're betrayed. It was an insult to our common sense, which told us that Ned could not, with everything that had been established before, be sixty-some-odd years old.
The Simpsons found a delicate balance between reality and fantasy, consistency and inconsistency, during its early years that continued until its recent decline. The show played with these fine lines: the family doesn't age, yet time clearly passes - seasons change, holidays and birthdays come and go, events from early in the show are referenced later as though they had really happened in a time past - and we were able to accept it, because those were the laws of the show's special reality.
Flash forward to early in the current season. Homer becomes a food critic, having Lisa ghost-write his reviews. She eventually backs out of the arrangement, leaving Homer to his own grammatical devices. He starts writing about the bread at a particular restaurant, and turns to the dog for help. "Rough," says Santa's Little Helper. Okay, that's barely acceptable, since it's a pun: 'rough', 'ruff'. Homer says no. "Chewy?" the dog asks. No, no, you can't do that. It's lame, it's cheap, and it ruins the show. It's a dumb, pandering mentality, and it reigns currently on The Simpsons. In the Maude's death episode, a bear in the woods walks over to a garbage can and disposes of a bag of its excrement, moments after Homer complains about having to do the same thing, despite the fact that bears don't have to. We've seen animals do funny things before. The writers have used animal incongruity with finesse in the past. But not anymore.
Once, popular culture was slipped into the show in the most wonderfully subtle and rewarding ways. In recent years, the stories have fallen back on it. During the recent episode where Homer joins the Naval Reserves, which started out promising but grew increasingly insipid, we were beaten over the head with references to the 1995 film Crimson Tide, in such an obvious way it disgraced the early shows, where a car driving past a building could have been an image lifted out of a film, and it took a literate, watchful eye to spot it. That subtlety vanished long ago.
Gone too is the wit that came up with the little nuggets of dialogue that you permanently inscribed into the lexicon that you and your friends share. You know the lines - the ones you can say to your friends without having to explain where they came from, during which episode they were spoken, or even what character said them. And there's a line for virtually every situation of everyday life. A friend of mine once remarked that, in terms of post-modernism, "it begins and ends with The Simpsons." You can reference virtually everything by evoking a line or a scene from the show - that is, the show as it used to be. What we've gotten lately is a wasteland, devoid of wit, of intelligence, of panache - even of the exuberance and self-confidence the earlier show exuded.
Watching the new episodes, it's clear that the creative team behind the show has lost faith not only in their creation but in their ability to connect us with it on a weekly basis. "This isn't the best we can do, but it's The Simpsons and that's what matters" oozes off the screen nowadays more than anything else. The writers has resigned themselves to imitating their own show. It would seem there aren't enough people asking where the hell that mountain came from in the episode where a Power Bar-like company sponsors Homer to climb it - we've never seen that before, even though if it was there, we would have seen it dozens of times. Or asking about any of the other numerous examples of the show side-stepping its own creative integrity for the sake of telling us another story.
Maybe The Simpsons should have taken a bow two seasons ago, when it was still watchable. Or maybe, if the show goes on long enough, its creativity will become cyclic, and we'll get a resurgence in the quality of the show. Or, perhaps, the show will go on as long as there are ratings, but will continue to lose sight of its own charm, putting Homer and company into increasingly bizarre situations, tailoring the characters to that week's episode, regardless of the impact on the show in the larger context. People may still watch. But the people who cared most for the show, who recognized its genius and who feel betrayed because they know that it can be so much more than it is, because it was, will have long since left. The couch will be empty, but the glow from the television will flicker on into the night, serving no purpose except to reassure The Simpsons that it still exists.
For all that the show did for me when it was as great as used to be, I find it hard to resign myself to that possibility. Stubbornly, I cling to the hope that the show will recover before it rides off forever into television history. But I can't ignore the fact that it may be too late, and, as the T-shirts fired off at Maude's funeral suggest, it may be time we admit it to ourselves and, once and for all, accept the sad truth we've suspected for a long while, and "Let her R.I.P."