We all have our guilty pleasures in our media libraries, or TV shows that we fervently insist are "actually really good!" even when it makes our friends give us the eyebrow. In the new recurring feature Defend Your Show, we challenge the Wired staff to explain why the critical or conventional wisdom about the shows they love is wrong -- or why they can't stop watching even when it's right. Without further ado, defend your show: The Simpsons.
There's no getting around the fact that The Simpsons ain't what it used to be. With twenty-three and a half years under its belt, it's impossible to argue that things aren't at least in a slow decline for Springfield and its four-fingered citizens, and it's easy to point to episodes from 10 or 15 years ago as the peak, with everything that came after being a pale shade of Maggie shooting Mr. Burns (spoiler warning!) or monorail-based musicals.
But here's the thing: Even if The Simpsons isn't as good as it used to be, it's still worth watching, and there's a long way to go before it isn't.
More than anything else, The Simpsons is a victim of its own success, and not just because it's increasingly difficult to think of new things to do when your TV show is old enough to get a price break on car insurance. When it debuted in 1989, The Simpsons was counterculture, a weird little look at an animated world of sight gags and sitcom plots that were mixed up with cartoon zaniness. Before then, the only real attempt at doing an animated sitcom had been from The Flintstones and The Jetsons, which just recycled old Honeymooners plots and added wisecracking pterodactyls, a formula that sounds amazing but somehow ended up being mostly unwatchable.
The Simpsons, on the other hand, took all those sitcom possibilities and used the cartoon format to build them in a way that live-action actors couldn't, with wisecracking kids whose cracks actually were wise, big weird plots and set pieces, and a core cast of a frustrated family that was loving despite the fact that the father would occasionally straight up throttle his little brat of a son for popping up with a catchphrase, a fantasy almost every TV viewer has had at one point or another.
I don't want to sound too much like an old man yelling at a cloud or anything, but in case the people who weren't even alive when the show debuted don't realize, this was a pretty big deal. I have vivid memories of growing up in the South and hearing church sermons about how doing the Bartman was going to be 100 percent responsible for the downfall of humanity, and hearing mothers proudly announcing that they had forbidden their children from watching it lest they roam the land, sowing anarchy and challenging others to eat their shorts.
But because it was such a good show, with sharp comedy, engaging characters and a continuity that built on itself through the in-jokes and self-references that would come to define pop culture in the 21st century, it not only weathered that particular storm, it won. It became a dominant force, setting the standard and paving the way for that first wave of imitators (remember Family Dog? If so, you and I are the only two) that turned into a wave of great adult-oriented cartoons like King of the Hill, South Park, great new shows like Bob's Burgers, and, regrettably, the Seth MacFarlane canon. Nobody's perfect, I guess.
That's what I mean when I say that it's a victim of its success: It's a show that was defined in its early years by railing against the establishment that itself became the establishment. It became a fixture. It's one of those rare shows that outlived its struggle, and while that makes it easy to look back on those days and the feeling of edginess that they brought, it doesn't mean the stuff we have now is bad. I'll be the first to admit that the past few years of the show haven't produced anything as memorable as Hank Scorpio or the Planet of the Apes musical, but let's keep things in focus: There hasn't been anything as mind-blowingly wretched as that crossover with The Critic, either.
For all the talk of decline, the current season has been remarkably solid for a show that's on the far side of 500 episodes. "Gone Abie Gone," proved that there were still interesting twists and layers to the characters by introducing Homer's previously unknown stepmother, jazz singer and recovering heroin addict Rita LaFleur -- and it's a testament to the show that it was able to make the story of a jazz singer and recovering heroin addict something that was actually pretty funny. "Adventures In Baby-Getting" was a nice little piece of character work about Homer and Marge's relationship, and Homer's shocked response to Marge wanting "an on-purpose baby?!" is as great a catchphrase as Kent Brockman welcoming his insect overlords.
The weakest of the bunch so far was probably the episode that parodied Portlandia and actually featured that show's stars, and there were still great sight gags all over it. Marge's horrified reaction to breast-feeding alone was worth seeing, even if the rest of the show's "hipsters are weird!" premise was the clearest example of The Simpsons as the establishment that's ever been broadcast over the airwaves.
But there are still great ideas and sharp commentary in there, and premises that have an incredible potential for comedy because of how well-established the characters have become. Take yesterday's mid-season premiere: The show has definitely been guilty of relying too much on stunt-casting in the past, but a story about Homer falling in with a gang of survivalists preparing for the apocalypse that has Tom Waits a guest star? That's television I wanted to see.
And it lived up to the premise, too. It's the sort of thing we've seen before under a different coat of paint, but it's exactly the kind of premise that suits these characters and their quirks, in this case Homer's tendency to get wrapped up in and obsessed with new concepts. The writing was solid, the characters worked, and Bart's eager request for Homer to describe what he'd do if Homer was sent Bart's ear by kidnappers and Homer's shrugging "I don't know, feed it to the dog?" before their descent into bickering was as good an interaction as those two characters have ever had.
So yeah, The Simpsons used to be better. But to say that it's not still worth watching, and that it's not the kind of show that consistently rewards its viewers with the kind of plots and gags that no other show is willing and able to bring to the table is selling it way too short.
