Butters: They did that on The Simpsons! Ha! “Treehouse of Horror!” Episode 4F02! The Genesis tub. Lisa loses a tooth, and the bacteria on it start to grow, and makes a little society, and they build a statue of her thinking she’s God! Ha! Hahaha!
[Long pause.]
Cartman: …So?
Kyle: …Yeah. So?
Cartman: Dude, the Simpsons have done everything already. Who cares?
–from South Park, “The Simpsons Already Did It”
The very timelessness nature of the The Simpsons makes it difficult for me to find a way in to start analyzing why the show has proved so timeless. So much of my brain is made up of The Simpsons that it’s almost like trying to make the show evaluate itself. How do I pick a place to begin? Which episode or character? Where do I start?
After all, I waited for The Simpsons. I’d been reading the books of the Life in Hell comics that my parents bought for years, watched some of The Tracey Ullman Show mainly to see the shorts. When I heard they were getting their own show, I was ready.
I wasn’t disappointed.
I watched regularly for years. When my junior high school prohibited repetitive clothing in an attempt to discourage gang indicators, I wore a Bart Simpson t-shirt every day of my freshman year to show how stupid I thought the rule was. I don’t watch as regularly now, but I still tune in now and again, often binging much of a season at a time to catch up. I reference it regularly, and have enough chunks permanently embedded in my consciousness that I can do so in most social situations…as can much of America.
Why wouldn’t it have this kind of impact? It’s been on the air for almost 30 years now. A friend with a pirated satellite dish system once told me that prior to 9/11, you could always find The Simpsons on somewhere—just not necessarily in English. It may not have the same power in the entertainment world that it once did, but the world has showed no signs of beginning to let go.
Example: I was recently on the Las Vegas strip, and my wife and I were getting ready to take the Las Vegas Monorail to wander over to Caesar’s Palace. Remembering the fourth-season episode “Marge vs. the Monorail,” I had to check in on Facebook. Within moments, people chimed in with quotes from the episode. The author Jon Konrath quipped: “I call the big one ‘Bitey.’” One person’s “But Main Street’s still all cracked and broken!” was immediately answered with a “Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken.” Of course, I added in my own: “Monorail. Monorail! MONORAIL!”
Conveniently enough, “Marge vs. the Monorail” is actually a great way into analyzing the timelessness of The Simpsons. All that interaction above surrounded a piece of television history that is now more than twenty-four years old. Perhaps one of the most remembered episodes, it demonstrates the way The Simpsons interacted with the pop-culture consciousness. Part of the magic of that interaction is in how it took in the culture around it and built on it, like how the introduction of the monorail conman is a tip of the hat to The Music Man.
Another part of the show’s perennial appeal comes from the way its showrunners understand how limitless variation is possible within the framework of a universal form—i.e., the struggles of a family whose members never manage to be who they would like to be, but are good at heart nonetheless. Just consider how the characters attempt to alter their town forever (e.g., building an extensive monorail system, shifting to have the monorail be a central economic focus of the town, change Homer’s job from the nuclear plant to the monorail, and so on), fail (e.g., the monorail doesn’t work beyond potentially crashing and killing tons of people), and manage to learn lessons (e.g., quickly-conceived, flashy things like a monorail aren’t the answers to their problems) at the same time so that whatever lasting effects of the endeavors aren’t relevant are wiped completely away from the show’s running narrative (e.g., the money wasted on the monorail is forgotten, the monorail itself disappears, Homer gets his old job back with no problems, and so on). “Marge vs. the Monorail” even points this out, ending with nods to Springfield’s fifty-foot magnifying glass, the popsicle stick skyscraper, and the escalator to nowhere.
None of those are ever really part of the town in the main show again.
That’s what makes The Simpsons tick at its best: it picks a theme like a civic improvement effort, drags in aspects of the mass pop culture, riffs a bit on it all, and brings it home with some light humor. The portions of the show that are fixed allow the writers to do the above in any manner they can think up—and there have been some amazing writers over the years—and we incorporate the results into our lives. We can drop out for years, and still be familiar enough to pick it right back up any time we return, at any point. It’s a conversation…one that doesn’t need to end.
Homer: “But Marge! My lifelong dream is to be a monorail conductor!”
Marge: “Your lifelong dream was to run out onto the field during a baseball game and you did it last year, remember?”
And why would it? Definitive boundaries don’t really exist in Springfield from episode to episode. We have certain reference points, like Moe’s and the power plant, but the landscape in between is in constant flux. Should we set metes and bounds? Those are for places like Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook. Springfield, like The Simpsons itself, has no need of them.
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