I’ve been watching the first two seasons of the Simpsons the last couple weeks. It’s been years since I’ve watched the show, but I still remember the first ten seasons or so as some of the best TV yet produced.
The first season came out in 1989-90, just 25 years ago, and I remember the show being controversial when it came out; I wasn’t allowed to watch it until some time in high school, about a decade after it first started showing. It was controversial enough that Bush actually used the Simpsons as a negative example of a family. Yet, re-watching now, it’s amazing how tame and traditional it is compared to media offerings today.
Obviously the ‘offensive’ humour in the Simpsons is nothing compared to stuff like Family Guy or South Park, but that’s not the whole of it or even the most important part. It’s not the stated messages, but the basic assumptions in the show.
The Simpsons family is intact and stable, if slightly dysfunctional, and hold to functional, almost traditional, family values. They all love each other, however much they might bicker. Homer is a flawed man, often selfish or stupid, but still loving and caring towards his family. Marge is shown to love and respect Homer, despite her occasional anger at his flaws. Bart disrespects Homer occasionally, but it is shown as a clear deviancy for laughs; it also clearly shown that he does look up to and admire Homer. The kids fight, but at heart care for each other.
Compare those family values that to the three highest-rated sitcoms of 2013: Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Modern Family. The first is about a bunch of (fornicating) nerds and their slut friend who spend the entire show snarking at each other. The second is about a cad, his divorced brother, and his nephew who regularly snark at each other; the cad is shown as cool, while the ‘family man’ is shown as a loser. According to Wiki, the third is about a blended family, a somewhat normal family, and a gay couple; the ‘modern family’ is so screwed up wiki needs a chart to keep family relations in order.
The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions. Other than Duck Dynasty, would any modern show simply assume the father’s position as head of the home?
The episode Homer’s Night Out, centres around a picture of Homer dancing with a belly dancer at a bachelor party. The (non-nude) picture creates a town-wide scandal, brands Homer as a ‘swinger’, and is seen as something fundamentally deviant and abnormal. In any modern show would bachelor party antics, especially such comparatively tame ones, be shown as being so shockingly deviant?
The show assumes that normal people go to church on Sundays and say grace at mealtime. Prayer is a casually accepted part of the show, as is religion. Does any major show today, other than Duck Dynasty, so casually accept religion as a normal, unremarkable, everyday part of life?
Other, less remarkable, moral lessons are also included. The pro-family/loyalty message of Life on the Fast Lane. How Marge’s sisters constant denigration of Homer is shown as negative, destructive behaviour. In one episode, Marge is casually referred to as Mrs. Homer Simpson.
All this is not to say the Simpsons is a font of traditional values, it is a liberal show, it does have some fem-centrism, and is rather subversive, but it is a good example of just how fast our culture is collapsing. Just a couple decades ago, the Simpsons was a controversial show that was held up by the president as an example of family dysfunction. Yet compared to today’s cultural wasteland, where broken families are common, disrespect and degeneracy are the norm, and the husband as the head of the family is, at best, a joke, it is very tame, almost traditional.
25 years is all it took. In 20 years, will Two and a Half Men and Modern Family be relatively tame and traditional?
Your last paragraph sends through me a shiver of dread…however, there’s the possibility that the pendulum might swing the other way. Perhaps these shows will be seen as proof of how awful the culture of 2014 was.
If we’re lucky.
Oddly enough (for previously stated reasons on my blog), I know enough to know you’re out of touch on these to the point you’re wrong on the descriptions. It shows how the shows have evolved.
Big Bang Theory actually was one of the more red pill shows, but the last few seasons they’ve went very blue pill. One of the “fornicating nerds” is now married, the other one proposed marriage (to the “slut friend” oddly enough), and the third has a steady girlfriend. To wit, your description was accurate in the early part of the show, but they’ve evolved it to be much more blue pill and “traditional” in a sense. Of course, you’d have to evaluate it yourself to determine what is better or worse.
The second actually has changed entirely from your description. It’s about a deep blue-pill soft mangina millionaire that pines after about every woman he comes across as “The One”, the before mentioned “divorced brother” who has always been about as hapless, and the lesbian love child of the before mentioned cad. If you want a solid example of cultural decline, all you really have to look at is how this show has changed since it started.
And to place this into a bit of historical perspective, Bush compared it to the Walton’s (there’s a lot of extra material on one of the Simpsons DVD sets, season 3 I believe?), which says something in itself. TV depictions of families were up to the time of the Simpsons were perfect pictures. In other words, it depicted family life as problem-less and perfect. The perfect husband who never made a mistake, the perfect wife that never failed in keeping house and never questioned the husband or feared following him, the perfectly behaved kids. Sure, they had little superficial problems that drove the plots of the shows but they were always wrapped up into a neat little bow. (most of this was driven by FCC related standards and practices, you know the same ones that made it so people never had to “relieve themselves” on tv shows)
What the Simpsons, Married With Children, and Roseanne (the major popular family depictions of that time) changed the most in terms of television was that they showed families as filled with flawed people. To wit, most of my generation (dating myself, I grew up watching the Simpsons) saw the other shows such as the Cosby’s, the Waltons, Leave It To Beaver, and others as absolute jokes simply because they didn’t have any reality to them. Most of my generation could easily see that it was all nonsense.
If anything, elder Bush and people of his generation saw this shift to reality as a threat to “traditional family values” more than anything else. If you want more of a harbinger of cultural decline from the era, looking at Murphy Brown and her choice to be the “strong independent woman” with child would probably be more constructive.
Free, your post reminds me of the rock band KISS. When I was a kid, KISS was the “debil”. Their lyrics are absolutely tame compared music targeted at 12 year old girl of the here and now.
To be fair, it does have Satanic overtones.
KISS = Knights In Satan’s Service
If it took 25 years, it could be reversed in 25 years.
These things go in 40 year cycles. We’re on the way back.
Or keep it simple stupid….
Interestingly, the creator of the Simpsons is Matt Groenig, an open homosexual man. He drew several syndicated cartoons, I believe, before creating the Simpsons; I remember reading one back in the late 80s called Akbar and Jeff, a gay male pair. In later seasons, homosexuality is promoted on the Simpsons, for example in the one in which John Waters makes an appearance and Homer goes to a gay steel mill. I remember thinking that episode was funny at the time.
Ballista74 – l haven’t watched the Waltons in years, but I don’t remember that show as promoting an unrealistic family model for the era is was supposed to be set in (the 1930s). I seem to remember there were a lot of problems that were addressed in the show, though I don’t remember the details.
@Ballista- of the shows you mentioned, the one most illustrative of my childhood is Leave it to Beaver. Why have people in the intervening decades tried so hard to tag that show as unrealistic? To me it was very realistic. I understand that some people had dysfunctional families back then, but they were not the norm.
Funny, I was just thinking the other day that The Simpsons and Married With Children were the only remotely defensible shows on television.
I grew up loving the former, and despising the latter, but in retrospect – as vulgar as they both are – they expose harsh truths about unsuccessful marriages. Homer might be an idiot, but so is Marge – she only has the surface appearance of being more competent. With Al and Peg, you see the dynamic of a man who won’t romance his wife, a wife who’s obsessed with status, and parents who are stuck living in the past, rather than living with themselves.
In reference to standards and practices as I mentioned it, it mentions a prohibition of “the negative portrayal of family life” on TV shows between 1952 and 1983. This basically meant that family life literally had to be portrayed as absolutely perfect. So you got the writer’s conception of the perfect family…instead of a real truthful depiction of family. In other words, these portrayals of families in shows before 1983 were all complete fictions, never mind the fact that it actually was fiction anyway- they only depicted positives and not the true negatives of family life.
@sunshinemary
I hold that show up as a good example of what proper Biblical marriage should be on television, but it’s still unrealistic to what people are and what marriages really are. People just aren’t that perfect. Kids go against their parents. Spouses fight. It still had the same characteristics I described. Kids don’t misbehave, wives don’t rebel against their husbands, husbands never screw up. Basically it’s just a bunch of almost infallible people depicted on these shows. Unrealistic.
@aurini Exactly.
Your observations are correct, but the Simpsons has continually drifted left of center throughout its run, and is a much less pleasant show to watch these days. Indeed, even though I religiously watched it since its inception, I stopped about two years ago, because I had gotten so fed up with the implicitly insulting tone: constant references to global warming (and the idiocy of “climate deniers”), the assumed normality of “gay marriage”, the assumed racism of opponents to unrestricted immigration, the inclusion of Republican stereotypes that are invariably insulting, and so on (for the same reason I stopped watching Futurama). I don’t know if that is because the stable of writers has changed over the years, or because the people running the show put stuff in that they knew they couldn’t get away with 20 years ago (like in the 90’s, when Democrats wouldn’t dare endorse gay marriage, but said constitutional amendments prohibiting it were pointless because all gays really wanted were recognized domestic partnerships and the benefits they conferred…a lot of people fell for that one).
“The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions.”
This was a decision that was merely pragmatic, not based on principle. Of course the rest of the family follows Homer – giving him free rein is what enables the entertaining lunacy in the episode that the success of the show depends on. The point is that Homer is almost always in the wrong and has to either “come to his senses” or grovel and beg for forgiveness by the conclusion of the episode. If anything, the show seems to be saying: “see how ridiculous the concept of patriarchy is?”.
In truth, the show’s greatest achievement is how endearing the character of Homer is, despite his glaring inadequacies. He has almost no redeeming qualities: he is ignorant, profoundly stupid, lazy, envious, spiteful, short-tempered, greedy, gullible yet oddly suspicious at times, often cowardly, supremely selfish and generally neglectful of his children’s needs (on one episode he tries to make amends, but his children finally revolt against his ineffectual hovering, complaining that they preferred him as an absent parent, rather than a “half-assed one”. Homer’s whining rebuttal, “Aw, I thought I was using my whole ass!”.) It is troubling that he is often shown as representative of the typical white American male.
I think the most realistic show at depicting family life might have been Roseanne. They were flawed but certainly not dysfunctional. (Im not counting the last couple of seasons where they really went off the rails.) Yes, the parents sometimes fought and the kids often didnt mind, but they still loved each other.
While Roseanne did put Dan down somewhat, you could tell that she did really love and respect him underneath it all. He was clearly the patriarch of the show until it went insane at the end.
Ironically, speaking of the standards against “negative portrayal of family life”, The Brady Bunch is probably one of the cultural factors that brought acceptance of divorce and remarriage into acceptance. Especially since they couldn’t depict any negatives in that family either…
Then in general, I forget the regular problems of daily life never showed up on most of these shows either. Ward never got laid off from his job with June fearing what will happen, something never broke in the house with the fear that the check might not pay the mortgage that month. Ward never feared getting fired for the car being broke so he couldn’t get to work…really, real life never happened for the Cleaver family.
Good post.
Anonymous:
Yeah, all you need for that to happen is a complete reversal of the cultural gradient. That will happen any day now.
The Simpsons was one of the few shows on television that I remember watching together with my family, such as it was. Besides being brilliantly funny, I agree that the early seasons of the show reflected mores and attitudes that were already on their way out. Certainly not a “parody” of the traditional family by any means, but even as a progressively brainwashed young kid I could sense that there was something in the Simpsons’ family that was absent in mine, and in those of my friends.I could never put my finger on it, of course. They seemed so…happy. And this despite their constant bickering. They seemed to know their place in the world and be comfortable with it. Meanwhile, my house was tyrannized by my shrew of a mother, who jokingly compared my poor stepfather to Homer Simpson. How wrong she was. My stepfather could never make a decision that she could accept without argument. Never gave him any children, either. But why should she have? She managed to get him to move to an expensive suburb with “good schools” for us, her precious offspring, and she was already too old and on the onset of a crippling illness to risk becoming pregnant.
I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had my real father been a better Catholic – not to mention a better man – and tamed my mother instead of divorcing her. Like Homer, he wasn’t a smart or ambitious man, but perhaps we would have had something approaching a normal life had he decided to stick around. I have no bad memories of him, though he left when I was very young. I like to think that he would have been a decent father and husband.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but it makes me furious to think that even a humble background is too much to ask of modern society. Instead, I and my generation mostly come from broken homes of one sort or another that would move the Simpsons to pity.
Your observations are correct, but the Simpsons has continually drifted left of center throughout its run, and is a much less pleasant show to watch these days. Indeed, even though I religiously watched it since its inception, I stopped about two years ago, because I had gotten so fed up with the implicitly insulting tone: constant references to global warming (and the idiocy of “climate deniers”), the assumed normality of “gay marriage”, the assumed racism of opponents to unrestricted immigration, the inclusion of Republican stereotypes that are invariably insulting, and so on (for the same reason I stopped watching Futurama). I don’t know if that is because the stable of writers has changed over the years, or because the people running the show put stuff in that they knew they couldn’t get away with 20 years ago (like in the 90’s, when Democrats wouldn’t dare endorse gay marriage, but said constitutional amendments prohibiting it were pointless because all gays really wanted were recognized domestic partnerships and the benefits they conferred…a lot of people fell for that one).
“The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions.”
This was a decision that was merely pragmatic, not based on principle. Of course the rest of the family follows Homer – giving him free rein is what enables the entertaining lunacy in the episode that the success of the show depends on. The point is that Homer is almost always in the wrong and has to either “come to his senses” or grovel and beg for forgiveness by the conclusion of the episode. If anything, the show seems to be saying: “see how ridiculous the concept of patriarchy is?”.
In truth, the show’s greatest achievement is how endearing the character of Homer is, despite his glaring inadequacies. He has almost no redeeming qualities: he is ignorant, profoundly stupid, lazy, envious, spiteful, short-tempered, greedy, gullible yet oddly suspicious at times, often cowardly, supremely selfish and generally neglectful of his children’s needs (on one episode he tries to make amends, but his children finally revolt against his ineffectual hovering, complaining that they preferred him as an absent parent, rather than a “half-assed one”. Homer’s whining rebuttal, “Aw, I thought I was using my whole ass!”.) It is troubling that he is often shown as representative of the typical white American male.
Excellent article, but I don’t think TV was really all that whitewashed prior to the Simpsons. There are tapes of Nixon pointing out the subversiveness of All In The Family almost twenty years earlier. The real shock of the Simpsons was that this material was on an animated program, which up until that point had all exclusively been aimed at children.
That’s some insightful analysis of the early seasons of The Simpsons.
I think the reason the early seasons were that way is because the the original producers and writers of the series (Matt Groening) were baby boomers born before the 60s who were raised in a conservative and trusting America. In many ways those writers re-created their childhood towns and surroundings, and perhaps the homes they grew up in, in the show.
@SSM: According to Wikipedia, Groening has been married twice and has two sons. He does identify as a liberal agnostic.
Good post FN. When I was a boy, watching The Simpsons was something my father and I did every Sunday, then Thursday, then Sunday again. I used to never miss an episode, but I don’t think I’ve watched a complete episode in five or six years now. The show was always left leaning, but it was all in good fun
First – To the comment by sunshinemary about Matt Groening being openly gay: huh?? MG is currently married to his second wife and has kids. Even in rumor-bound Hollywood there have never been any rumors as to gay tendencies in MG. Where the heck did you even get the notion that he was?
With that out of the way… the are numerous examples of morality and decency in the Simpsons, and not just in the first few seasons. Such behavior is a basic assumption of the show for sure. Take Bart for example… lauded as a poor example by Bush senior, it is true that episodes are built around poor behavior by Bart. What is missed by critics though is how often Bart feels guilt and remorse for his behavior and redeems himself by the end of the episode.
The examples abound:
in a Christmas episode Bart attempts to shoplift a desired video game. The remainder of the show displays his guilt over this action and in the end redeems himself by spending own money to buy a Chirstmas gift for the person whom his actions hurt the most – his mother.
when the show’s bully encourages Bart to shoot a bird Bart’s guilt over this leads him to take the bird’s chick home and rise it himself;
when Bart “sells his soul” (a piece of paper with the words ‘Bart’s soul” written on it) to his friend he feels lost without it, realizes the error of his ways and spends the rest of the show trying to get it back. And as an example of the love shown in the show between the siblings of the show, when Bart does get his “soul” back it is sister who, despite knowing that it is only a piece of paper with no material value, makes the effort to get the soul back and hand it over to Bart, with nothing expected in return.
The main characters in The Simpsons are regularly and consistently shown as yes, flawed, but also as having very firm and intact values of basic decency.
You ought to pick up a copy of the magnificent Gilligan Unbound, by Paul Cantor. It contrasts Star Trek, Gilligan’s Island, the Simpsons, and The X Files. Much of what you have observed about the normalcy of the Simpson family is reflected in that book.
So I just stumbled here randomly side I wanted to find out who the guy next to Mr Burns was in the Simpsons modern family reference painting. After a brief glance I take it this is a site for unhappy men’s rights gamers to rant and complain. Just guessing from the woman bashing homophobia and the fact that you commented on modern family based on a Wikipedia page. Then I saw a link defending game gate and against cracked. So explain to me again how the show modern family caused all your problems and why relentlessly harassing a woman based on testimony of an angry ex until she had to flee her home is right please.
Slow Saturday afternoon so I’m reading through my Facebook page come to the post about a year ago where I linked to this blog post of. Agree with this post as much now as I did then. Thanks for taking the time to write it those many months ago.