The Simpsons first aired 35 years ago, on 17 December 1989, with a Christmas special originally scheduled to run eighth in the series – but brought forward because the ugly animation on the planned debut episode was so disliked, it was shuffled to last place. With a scheduled autumn start already delayed, the creators had to begin by airing their festive episode, Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, in mid-March. Despite this fumbling start, however, the series was an instant hit.
“After the Christmas show aired, I had a Simpsons jacket; I was at Disney World and people were approaching me asking me if they could buy it,” says Al Jean, who co-wrote the first series and is the show’s executive producer today. “They’d all seen the special. It was this phenomenon.”
Everybody now knows the story of The Simpsons – and we don’t mean the internal structure of a typical (if bright yellow) American nuclear family interacting with a vast cast of characters in mysteriously located Springfield. Rather, the external narrative: era-defining 1990s cartoon sitcom marries critical and popular acclaim. Then, after a decade, the quality wobbles. Then it falls off a cliff, not so much jumping the shark as jetskiing over a school of them. Take your pick from Homer being sexually molested by a panda, jockeys as bloodthirsty elves, Marge getting breast implants; the list goes on.
The fact that it is still in production today (the 36th season is airing in the US with a 37th already commissioned) is a source of wonder and despair for golden-era curmudgeons. Yet there is an audience for modern Simpsons, people who love it – some who even prefer it to the early seasons. Other aficionados argue that the series is undergoing a modern renaissance, a second golden age after the struggles of the middle seasons.
‘We’re going to get fired’
“Having been there during the ‘golden era’, I’ll just say it didn’t feel like that at the time,” says Jean, the only first-season staffer still in the writing room today. “There’s a show from season three that I think of all the time: Homer at the Bat. We had two script reads; that was the second, and it was dead silent. It was the worst read ever. Mike Reiss [Jean’s co-showrunner] and I looked at each other like: we’re going to get fired.”
Instead, the guest-star-loaded episode was inducted into the baseball hall of fame in 2017 and remains an all-time fan favourite. September’s season 36 premiere, billed tongue-in-cheek as The Simpsons’ finale – featuring the eternally 10-year-old Bart finally turning 11 – poked fun at the supposed decline. Conan O’Brien, himself a former Simpsons writer, joked: “When the very first episode aired in 1989, viewers agreed on one thing: it wasn’t as funny as it used to be.”
“Early on, we’re already making fun of ourselves for being a hit,” says Jean. “We had a joke about Simpsons T-shirts in season two. Some people talk about how ‘Lisa got too wordy and brainy’ – that happens in the Christmas show [when she eloquently rebuffs her aunt’s insults of Homer]. So I guess we jumped the shark in act three of the very first episode!”
Jon Vitti – one of the key early Simpsons writers, who worked on classics such as Mr Plow, Cape Feare and Lisa’s Substitute – has sympathy for the creative teams that followed. “One of the really early marching orders Simpsons writers got was: every episode should be different from any episode that’s been done before. And of course, when you get to episode 300, that’s not a realistic goal … So many good people have done the show now, it’s unlikely you’ll have a great idea nobody has done before. So you’re going to wind up writing the third time Lisa gets a pony.”
Vitti has not been involved in the show since returning to co-write The Simpsons Movie in 2007, but he defends the current product. “When people say the show’s not as good now as it used to be – we were hearing that from the second season. And I think it’s pretty provable that seasons two, three, four are better than season one.” Nonetheless, Vitti does touch on his concern about how characters’ traits become simplified and exaggerated, a process known as “Flanderisation”.
“Over the years, Christian people have turned on Ned Flanders, where they feel like he’s a parody. It is true that he got to be more of a Christian – but that wasn’t the intent. The original intent is well expressed in the [1989] Christmas episode – that he’s a nice guy. He thinks he’s Homer’s pal. He’s very happy with his own life … And it’s good that Flanders never knows he drives Homer crazy or enjoys it, because that’s an easy thing for a comedy writer to do. [But] with the quest for harder laughs, there’s too much of The Simpsons for that never to have happened.
“And it was actually a revelation, but when Homer started to get meaner, our fans – including some of the internet guys, who you might not associate with being incredibly character-driven – those viewers don’t hate Homer, they hate you. It’s an important lesson to remember as a writer.”
‘A new golden age’
At 29, Lydia Hicks is six years younger than the show she adores. Yet the creator of the hugely popular The Simpsons Theory YouTube channel will defend both the oldest and newest episodes. “I think the criticism is unfair when it comes from someone who hasn’t seen the show for a while,” she says in response to people who shake their heads at The Simpsons’ continued existence, yet haven’t sat down to watch a new episode in over a decade.
“I do believe that The Simpsons, especially since season 31, has entered a new golden age. I’m not saying every episode has been a winner, but there are far more home runs than misses … It was around this time that The Simpsons writers began taking creative risks again,” she says of episodes that include a Death Note-inspired segment in which South Korea’s DR Movie studio created a dazzling anime-style Springfield. Or a “bonkers but brilliant” episode that breaks the fourth wall by having hackers broadcast unreleased Simpsons storylines. “[They’re now] experimenting with formats and styles to produce some really great standout episodes.”
Watching modern Simpsons is nonetheless jarring for diehard 1990s puritans. The animation has never been slicker, and there is a reliance on pop culture parodies and meta-humour. In some ways it feels as if every episode is one of their Halloween specials: a non-canon series of sketches that resets at the end. Your mileage may vary on whether it’s actually funny, but the show has definitely moved forward rather than being the zanier version of itself it was during the initial post-90s drop-off.
It now spans so many generations that, in the same way we all think the children’s films from our youth are the best, perhaps we all believe that the Simpsons era we grew up with is the greatest. “My 13-year-old nephew loves the newer episodes because he finds the references more relatable,” says Hicks. “He also finds the animation more digital and modern – and I guess more attractive. I think he’s put off by the more clunky hand-drawn style, which is something I find nostalgic.”
While The Simpsons is clearly not the zeitgeist-capturing, gamechanging show it was during its initial decade, Jean defends it against accusations of a dwindling audience, pointing out people don’t watch TV in the same way they did in 1990, when the season two premiere, Bart Gets an F, drew 33.6 million viewers in the US. By comparison, season 35’s episodes averaged out at just under 2 million.
“People will often point to a ratings decline. Well, the ratings for all of television have declined,” he says. “Relative to that, we’ve done well – and we do extremely well on Disney+, which is where we live now with streaming. I’m a math major, so when people talk numbers to me, I say: you’ve got to qualify those numbers. Because the rating we had in 1997 would make us by far the world’s No 1 TV show. It’s not comparable.”
Jean also points to other barometers of success. “We’ve won 37 Emmys, and most of those are outside seasons one through eight. We had a very successful movie in 2007. We got nominated for an Oscar in 2012 for a short, which was theatrically released. So I can point to many reasons that I could say: it’s been good continuously. It’s just less of a surprise … The newness it had at the beginning could never be replicated. I’m not objective, but I think it’s still a really good show.”
The end?
Perhaps it is unfair to hold any show, including The Simpsons itself, to the standard of the its sky-high peak. It was the most influential TV phenomenon of its era – whose legacy can be seen in Family Guy, South Park, Rick and Morty and a host of others – which piled pressure on the creators even as they were making it. “It’s noticeably less fun for me to watch than any other TV show,” says Vitti, citing the associated stress of not wanting to let standards slip.
Yet even as the episode count ticks towards 800 – a two-part Christmas special, debuting in the US 35 years to the day since the first episode, marks Nos 778 and 779 – there are creaking signs of The Simpsons’ mortality. Pamela Hayden, voice of blue-haired dweeb Milhouse, school bully Jimbo and Rod and Todd Flanders, is hanging up her microphone. It’s a well-timed exit.
Season 36’s premiere, Bart’s Birthday, epitomises the best of the modern Simpsons (daring concept, golden-era nods, sharp meta-comedy) and some of the worst (all-consumingly self-referential and shoehorned celebrity cameos: hi John Cena, bye Tom Hanks). But it’s alarming how Milhouse, voiced superbly for so long, now sounds rather less like a 10-year-old boy and more like a seventysomething voice actor.
It’s a poignant reminder that even The Simpsons cannot last for ever. For some fans, an eventual ending is long overdue. But for others, the ultimate finale will still make for an emotional goodbye. If Hayden has picked an apt time to bow out, the hope is that The Simpsons, too, can eventually find a perfect note on which to say farewell.
