The Not-So-Hidden Heart of the Simpsons
(or, a rebuttal to all those who wouldn't allow me to watch The Simpsons as a kid)
I can’t remember how I was first exposed to The Simpsons. The show debuted two years after I was born, so by the time I was old enough to actually be aware of the world around me (though some would say I’m still not) it had already rather firmly secured its place as a pop culture phenomenon. I probably first saw Bart Simpson in a Butterfinger commercial, or telling me not to have a cow on a classmate’s t-shirt. Or, more than likely, it was probably my mother telling me that it was a bad show I wasn’t allowed to watch when a commercial for it aired during a different, presumably more wholesome show.
The taboo of The Simpsons gave it an appeal even beyond its obvious quality, so I have rather vivid memories of the few times I was able to catch even glimpses of an episode growing up. There was the commercial for the episode where Homer makes a gay friend featuring the classic gag of Homer’s rapidly escalating ignorance to Marge trying to reveal his friend’s orientation to him (Marge: “He prefers the company of men!” Homer: “Who doesn’t?!”). One time flipping through channels I happened upon what has to be a Top 5 Simpsons gag, a real hall of famer:
The memory that sticks with me the most, though, came before all of that. It’s less the memory of the episode itself — all I can remember is that a mob was involved, which, in Springfield, narrows things down very little — and more the circumstances involved. My family was having dinner with another family at their home, and the dad and son were watching The Simpsons, and my dad walks into the room and starts laughing hysterically, before suddenly stopping himself and looking a little embarrassed. “I wish this show wasn’t so bad, because it really is funny.” I feel like I’d need a whole ‘nother essay to really unpack the way I see that statement now, but as a child, I think what it did was unlock something in me. For the first time, it gave me permission to enjoy a show even if my mom and dad didn’t.
For much of my adolescence, that option was exercised by my watching weird anime behind my parents’ backs, but eventually I did start watching The Simpsons regularly when I met my friend Dave, who had the entire series (at the time) on DVD (Dave’s becoming a bit of a regular in this newsletter: I wrote here about our time playing in garage bands together in our early twenties, and here about our idiotic odyssey lost on country roads on foot at 2AM). It’s hard not to start such a well-known show without expectations. Given its reputation, I was expecting it to be ridiculously hilarious, but also risqué, profane, somehow dangerous. That was the power the taboo gave it. That was the label my family and the moral crusaders of the early 90s gave it. And while the show was as funny as I’d been promised, I found the rest to be…wildly inaccurate.
Sure, The Simpsons occasionally contained a curse word or two. It was frank about sex, at least in the fact that it dared to admit it existed at all. Yes, Bart was a prankster, often a “disobedient” child. But none of those elements were some sort of subversive, family-destroying agenda, as I’d repeatedly been promised. In fact, they were on par with what you could find on, say, Home Improvement, a show my parents adored even as they simultaneously demonized The Simpsons.
By the time I got around to watching The Simpsons, Family Guy had already come along, and its very existence brought into light how overblown the Simpsons controversy had been. The casual cruelty of Family Guy, the disdain and sheer lack of affection the various characters had towards one another, was exactly what The Simpsons had been accused of for so long. Family Guy made The Simpsons look like Ozzie and Harriet, but also just highlighted what true fans had known all along: there was real heart and affection at the core of The Simpsons.
You can see this in almost any episode, but my first experience with the true heart of The Simpsons came with “And Maggie Makes Three” (Season 6 Episode 13). It finds Lisa wondering why there are no pictures of the baby, Maggie, in the house, and leads to an episode-long flashback to the events leading up to Maggie’s birth. Homer had come to detest his job, and the family had managed to rearrange their budget so that Homer could devote his life to following his dream of working at a bowling alley instead. Marge’s pregnancy, though, ends that, and in order to support his new family of five, Homer has to beg for his old job back. The sadistic Mr. Burns grants it, but only after installing a plaque in Homer’s office reading “Don’t forget: you’re here forever” to taunt him. Where do Maggie’s baby pictures play into all of this? Well, Homer hung them in his office, changing the plaque to “Do It For Her,” an eternal reminder of the reason why he works his soul-sucking job.
It’s a scene that completely changed my perception of what the series was and what it could do, and as far as I was concerned, proved wrong all those who declared The Simpsons the downfall of modern society. They clearly didn’t know what they were talking about.
Yet, a part of me always held onto a bit of doubt. Dave largely showed me episodes from Seasons 7-12, which are, depending on which Simpsons fan you ask (hint: don’t actually ask any of them, it’s a trigger), either the tail end of the series’ golden age or far past its prime*. I had a lot of curiosity about the “classic” episodes, but I perhaps had even more about the first few seasons, the ones people don’t talk about as much. I knew the animation was bad, I knew the voices were rougher, I knew they weren’t quite as funny. But perhaps they were also a bit more risqué, a bit more vulgar? Perhaps they didn’t quite justify the hysteria, but at least helped explain it more?
*I once asked Dave why he wasn’t showing me more of the “classic” episodes and he said that he didn’t want to because once he’d shown me all the classic episodes then I’d have seen them all and wouldn’t have any more new ones to see, which…is a very Dave kind of statement.
Last year, the launch of the Disney+ streaming platform brought with it every episode ever of The Simpsons. Much more recently, the premiere of WandaVision finally convinced me to actually get Disney+ (or, more accurately, to convince a friend to give me his password — remember, snitches get stitches), and thus my long-held, long-term goal of watching The Simpsons straight through from its beginning has begun in earnest. I finished the first season this past week, and was pleasantly surprised to find my hypothesis proven false. The first season isn’t more risqué or vulgar than latter ones; it’s the exact opposite. The first season is much more of a traditional family sitcom than latter ones would ever be, and in fact, is often downright saccharine.
Let’s start by talking about Bart Simpson, who was essentially the series’ mascot in its early years, the character who featured in all its advertising and commercials. Bart was the target of much of the moral crusading against the show from parents, given his penchant for mischief far above his fourth-grade pay grade, for graffiti and cherry bombs and prank calls and an occasional curse word. Hell, in the very first episode ever Bart goes behind his mom’s back and gets a tattoo!
Actually, though, that tattoo is a perfect example of The Simpsons’ heart. The tattoo Bart gets says “mother,” and he gets it because he thinks his mother will like it, that she’ll see it as a tribute to her and be touched by the thought.
The tattoo isn’t a “bad” child’s act of rebellion, but an act of love from a son to his mother, just filtered through the mind of a ten-year-old boy. It’s beautiful, in its own way. That bond between Bart and Marge would continue to pay rich dividends as the series continued, sometimes to heartbreaking effect.
The very next episode, “Bart The Genius,” puts aside the menace act and dives head-first into Bart’s perspective, revealing him to be a kid who likely suffers from some kind of learning disorder (the episode hints at ADD), who is taunted mercilessly by his own teacher and classmates for his perceived stupidity, and who craves affection at home and, when his poor grades seemingly prevent that, acts out instead. I legitimately had a hard time watching some of this episode, I felt so bad for Bart. Later, when he’s convinced everyone he’s a genius, Homer is so proud of Bart that they play catch outside in a scene that’s played entirely straight, no jokes whatsoever. It’s one of the most saccharine, touching, bittersweet moments I’ve ever seen on The Simpsons; sweet because it reveals Bart to be a boy who just wants his father to be proud of him, bitter because we all know it can’t last.
This kind of introspective, heartfelt writing holds true for the rest of the cast throughout the first season as well. Homer just wants his family to be proud of him, at one point pushed to the brink of suicide when he thinks he’ll no longer be able to provide for them. Lisa deals with depression in “Moaning Lisa,” and Marge shows both her best and worst sides trying to help her; worst, because Marge initially passes along to Lisa the same advice her mother gave her that made her miserable as a child, and best because as soon as she sees how this advice is stifling Lisa’s creativity and priming her to be manipulated by men, Marge swoops in like a vengeful angel, pulls Lisa away, and takes everything back, telling her to always be herself and giving her the kind of heartfelt apology only the best of parents can muster.
Can’t you just hear the studio audience going “awwww” at the end of that scene?
It’s not just the big dramatic moments that are full of heart either. “Bart the General” is mostly a silly parody of war movies, but its first act finds Bart and Lisa arguing over cupcakes Lisa made but didn’t want to share, which she eventually does once Bart apologizes and butters her up. It’s typical sibling banter, but also reveals the bond that ultimately lies between the two no matter how much they bicker, one that’s deepened in the next scene when Bart defends Lisa from the school’s biggest bully. These kind of moments, this heart, isn’t just saved for very special episodes, but is the building blocks of the relationships between its core characters that go on to define the rest of the series.
With so much (often downright sappy) heart so plainly evident even in its earliest episodes, how did The Simpsons become the target of such vehement hatred, of an entire mob campaign convinced it was out to destroy the very moral fabric of America? Well like I said, I was two when the series premiered, so I don't have the first-hand memory of the worst of the hysteria, so if anyone has any experiences about this they’d like to pass along, I’d love to hear it. That said, I do have a few theories I’m pretty confident in.
First of all, The Simpsons is a cartoon. There will always be a segment of society that refuses to believe that animation can be for adults, who are convinced that every single cartoon needs to be a completely pure and innocent morality tale for little kids; so when they see a cartoon that isn’t, they’re immediately convinced that it’s designed to “corrupt” children, not entertain adults. It doesn't matter that The Simpsons aired in prime time, that some episodes ran with disclaimers before them, that it wasn’t even the first adult-oriented cartoon (hello, Flintstones!) — nothing will change their minds.
The Simpsons was also guilty by association. It aired on the (at the time) young upstart Fox broadcast network, which was making a name for itself as a home for edgy, boundary pushing material (such as Married With Children, which was guilty of many of the “crimes” parents were accusing The Simpsons of); the association obviously rubbed off on it, and was possibly even encouraged by Fox (any press is good press, right?). The merchandise and advertising likely didn’t help; they pushed the show’s edgiest elements without its more wholesome ones as balance, and Bart merchandise especially was targeted at kids in a way the show itself wasn’t.
(It should also be noted that many of those rallying against The Simpsons — such as my mother — had never even watched the show; they were just jumping onto the outrage bandwagon, engaging in the kind of mob mentality the show so often parodied and warned against.)
One vital piece of this puzzle that I think is often overlooked, though, is the fact that the Simpsons weren’t your traditional sitcom family. They were noticeably lower-class, often struggling for money. They bickered and feuded with one another, no matter how much they also loved each other. They made an effort to attend Church every Sunday, but only Marge enjoyed it; the rest muddled through the best they could. The Simpsons reflected the lives many of their viewers lived at the time — it’s part of why it became so popular, but just as a big of a part of why it received so much backlash, because the kind of people who protested the show hated to see themselves reflected that way.
The type of programming created by the more conservative, evangelical types who crusaded against The Simpsons is noticeably different. Be it in more “traditional” sitcoms or in their own custom-made “inspirational”/instructional material, their characters aren’t meant to reflect reality as it is, but to represent reality as they think it should be. The families in these programs are perfectly polite, buttoned-down, chaste automatons who never raise their voices, speak entirely in inspirational scripture, and wear button-ups and khakis to the beach; an entirely unachievable fiction, but a fiction their viewers will practically kill themselves trying to achieve nonetheless (and the fact that they can’t achieve it makes them feel shame and guilt, which is the whole point). Whether they know it or not, many of these viewers hate the Simpson family because they reflect back at them all the things they hate most about themselves. Of course they took to the street to protest it. They couldn’t live with their greatest “flaws” propelling The Simpsons to the position of the most popular show in America.
It’s a shame too, because those qualities are exactly what made The Simpsons in its prime so sublime. No show is for everyone, but the sheer amount of heart inherent in this show from the very beginning has me convinced, once and for all, that its loudest critics have never had a leg to stand on.
FUN FACT
For those of you who weren’t around for those early years of The Simpsons, I’m not exaggerating about how hated it was by certain segments of the country. It eventually escalated to the point where the First Lady of the United States of America, Barbara Bush, called the program “the dumbest thing [she] ever saw” — and this was back when the President or his wife taking the time out of their day to trash a piece of pop culture still had some weight behind it, and wasn’t just an everyday occurrence on Twitter.
This comment lead to the Simpsons writers sending a letter to Bush in the voice of Marge herself.
It’s pretty much the perfect rebuttal, witty and satirical, appropriately shaming, but also demonstrating the kind of heart inherent to Marge and the rest of the Simpsons that proved Bush wrong in the first place. To her credit, Bush wrote back with an apology — or, at least, signed her name to one.
Sadly, I don’t think this squashed beef translated over to the rest of the agitated mothers of America.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
Logo by Lewis Franco, with respects to Saves the Day.