Poor Bart Simpson. The 10-year-old son of America’s most famous family has spent 31 years being throttled by his father in one of the TV shows longest-running gags. Most will recognise it: Homer Simpson screeches “why you little” as he strangles his child – tongue out, eyes bulging – in a rather outdated mode of parental discipline. For the most part of the past three decades no one thought to look twice. It’s a cartoon, after all. But these days are apparently behind us. Now, 35 seasons deep, Homer has abandoned the practice. “Times have changed,” he says, uncharacteristically.
We have long been treated to hand-wringing about the violence associated with cartoons. As early as 1968 – per one contemporaneous New York Times report – activist groups were lobbying the government to replace these TV shows with the more urbane, the more gentle. Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker and Roadrunner were all cited as problematic, thanks to their “stompings, bashings, pushings off-cliffs.” Any sense that this generation is uniquely sensitive should quickly be put to bed by the absurd anxieties of the 1970s. It simply took until 2023 for The Simpsons to succumb.
Nevertheless, when The Simpsons first aired in 1989 it was a sharp antidote to those raised on the boring, sanitised and oh-so-worthy sitcoms of the 80s and 90s: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This was the kind of programming that purported to be about family life but failed to reckon with any of the realities of middle-America. As the onscreen equivalents of cotton around barbed wire, these shows did not acknowledge that family could be cruel, that work was menial and poorly remunerated. Instead, they were an argument: the soul of America is uncomplicated and warm.
In season 18 Homer laments his precarious finances: “I have three kids and no money. Why can’t I have no kids and three money?”
But in comes The Simpsons with an alcoholic father in a low-skilled union job, a nagging matriarch, children in underfunded public school and a grandfather sequestered away in a soul-sucking old people’s home. At a time when the TV was full of moralising sitcoms, The Simpsons championed a misanthropic reverend, a slothful chief of police, a louche mayor. In season 18 Homer laments his precarious finances: “I have three kids and no money. Why can’t I have no kids and three money?” He hardly cuts the figure of the loving family man that typified the sitcom era. But perhaps this is not such an unusual sentiment, one that occasionally pinballs around the heads of beleaguered and unappreciated parents.
And so, with its yellow, four-fingered cartoon characters; trenchant stereotyping, frissons of nastiness; and implausibly avant-garde plot lines (Homer goes to space, Homer defeats prohibition), The Simpsons somehow still managed to be more real than any of its contemporary competition combined. It painted a dysfunctional domestic life and relied on caricature to depict something true about America. The Simpsons was ultimate proof that social realism can come from the most unlikely of places. Ordinary America was its subject and its audience and for all of the stereotypes and strangling it never held it in contempt.
So what have we lost as The Simpsons constantly adapts to suit ever-changing social mores? In 2020, Hank Azaria announced he would no longer voice the Indian character – convenience store owner Apu, famous for his catchphrase “Thank you! Come again!”. The charge was simple: Azaria as a white man should not be speaking in a South Asian accent to ventriloquize an egregious caricature. And so, The Simpsons changed. Slowly the jokes and characters central to the soul of the show were erased, as the writers attempted to morph the programme into a paragon of onscreen virtue.
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This, of course, is a story about how art adapts to suit the anxieties of its age. But it is also a story about something much simpler than that: everything runs its course eventually. No programme that has been going since 1989 could survive without constant re-invention. Many of its current writers were hardly born when it first aired. George Bush Snr was US president then. Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach when The Simpson’s feature-length movie hit cinemas. The Simpsons has tried to weather this vertiginous social change. Perhaps it is no longer working. Just like the legend of Theseus’ Ship, one adaptation at a time The Simpsons is unrecognisable from its original incarnation.
And so the task for long-running cultural touch-stones becomes abundantly clear: defend its essence against all the changing mores; or leave the product altogether and cancel the TV show. It is abundantly clear that the middle way – pretending The Simpsons is what it has always been while abandoning all commitments to its artistic principles – does not work. It has merely left us with a milky palimpsest of the real thing.
The Simpsons will remain one of the most influential cultural products of the past 50 years. To protect its legacy – Homer strangling Bart, egregious caricature and all – it should have been taken off air long ago.