In an increasingly tense world, few things generate as much consensus as the first ten years of The Simpsons, collectively adored and with a profound cultural impact. Similarly, another clear consensus is that The Simpsons then plunged into an endless twilight, with annual portions of new episodes discouraging even its most die-hard audience. But, in turbulent times, the most rigid certainties are shaken. In 2023, Vulture magazine surprised with what might seem like a provocative headline to many at the time: 'The Simpsons' is good again. In the article, journalist Jesse David Fox interviewed writers and producers to understand what had happened in seasons 33 and 34 to suddenly generate so many comments about their rebirth among fans, critics and crew members.
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The changes in the process implemented in 2020 as a result of the lockdown, the promotion of Matt Selman as showrunner after twenty years of Al Jean in the role and the encouragement of more authorial work were some of the reasons given. The audience has responded: according to Parrot Analytics, in its most followed episodes in recent seasons, it has grown by 24% in the United States. In 2023, it was the fourth show with the most hours watched on Disney+. "They're producing some of the most ambitious, poignant, and hilarious episodes in the show's history, which, after so many years, manage to expand our understanding of the characters and why they still mean so much," Fox wrote. Selman, the showrunner, said, "You have to make sure that every episode is poster-worthy. What's the exciting visual idea that makes the chapter unique for you to put it on and not just say, 'They're in the kitchen' or 'They're in the living room'?"
The penultimate season was completed with episode 750, Homer's Adventure Through the Windshield, which took place in the seconds before (extended to 22 minutes) the possible death of the father of the family in a car accident, in which Homer reflected on his relationship with Marge and the role of caregiver he had played with him throughout their marriage. The episodes of the new season, season 35, have been premiering every Wednesday on Disney+ since the end of December, and one places Marge on a similar journey, when fever plunges her into an existential panic that Bart's childhood is over.
The fact that Marge Simpson and other female characters in the series have in the episodes of the most recent seasons extensive and exclusive plots in which no other men appear has been hailed as one of the great advances of the series.20thCentFox ©/Courtesy Everett Collection / Cordon Press
Retrieving the emotional core – that old Simpsons ability to string together laughs but introduce a nice twist, or reveal tenderness in Homer after showing him doing something very stupid – is key. In a video essay by YouTuber John Walsh, better known as Super Eyepatch Wolf, he observed a change of pace. With an average of 118 jokes per episode in two of the worst seasons (the 29th and 30th), it seemed that the priority criterion in the last years of the series was to include as many gags as possible, which made thinking about its plots be, Walsh joked, "like trying to remember the face of a man with his face covered in bees".
The average dropped to nearly half (65) in seasons 33 and 34, suggesting a willingness to explore another type of storytelling. And that The Simpsons was ceasing to imitate itself. The Pixelated & Fearful chapter is a new classic. Walsh said, "It's the first one in decades that has made me understand why Homer and Marge are still together." And he described the Emmy-winning The Treehouse of Horror XXXIII as "an incredible episode not because of its resemblance to the Gilded Age, but because it couldn't have existed at that stage."
Kirk van Houten is an incel
In his recently published book The Simpsons Will Never End (Ed. Applehead Team), screenwriter and comedian Juan Damián Pardo exhaustively reviews the history of the series and studies the circumstances that have conditioned each stage. Asked by ICON, he also believes that "there has been an appreciable comeback" in recent seasons, compared to the "stagnation" over Al Jean's permanence as showrunner. Jean was responsible for the third and fourth seasons, and his return from the thirteenth was initially received, according to The Simpsons Will Never End, as a return to the essence, after the series had become entrenched in absurd plots in the eyes of its fans. That optimism soon faded. For Pardo, Jean wasn't necessarily responsible for the show's shipwreck, but his 20 years in the position resulted in a loss of freshness.
TV's most famous family (pictured with neighbor Ned Flanders) has modernized its dynamics, thanks in part to a new batch of younger, more diverse writers.20thCentFox ©/Courtesy Everett Collection/Cordon Press
"Watching some episodes was, at times, like reading the column of an angry 50- or 60-year-old man," says the author, who attributes part of the improvements to the arrival of young writers, in some cases born after the premiere of the series in 1989. The team has been renewed and is more diverse: "They have been bringing in new writers per season and none of those who have remained fixed were a white man." A paradigm shift from its origins, when Sam Simon, the first showrunner, did not want women "because he was going through a divorce", as revealed in 2017 by Mimi Pond, signatory of the pilot of the series, Sin blanca Navidad.
In season 34, viewers got their first glimpse of the Black neighborhood of Springfield thanks to a story centered on Carl, Homer's friend and partner. "In the seasons that everyone reveres as pillars of comedy, there's not a single plot entirely about Marge and Lisa," Pardo says. "To find the first episode focused on both, you have to go to season 16. Now it doesn't happen. You no longer feel like they do one episode of Marge a year, but you find seven a season that make sense."
After controversies such as the documentary The Problem with Apu (2017), where Indian people talked about how the stereotype of Apu had negatively influenced their lives, the series, which first dismissed complaints as a problem of political correctness and easy offense, has experienced a change in sensitivity. "I didn't have a problem with how we did it so far, but we don't want to please the rancid ones either. There's nothing wrong with seeking more representation and equality," Matt Groening, the creator, told Vulture in 2021. The political satire has also been fine-tuned by other changes in character dynamics. "I don't know if they have other opinions or if they want to be better liked, but it's true that now they're more up to date with the topics that are talked about on social networks, because there are screenwriters who are 30 years old," says Juan Damián Pardo. Case in point: how Kirk van Houten, Milhouse's father, has displaced Ned Flanders as a representative of the retrograde.
Al Jean and Matt Selman, the old and new showrunner of 'The Simpsons' at the San Diego Comic-Con International in 2022.Amy Sussman (Getty Images)
"It's a reinvention that I think is nice. They've turned a frustrated loser like Kirk into someone who spends his days complaining about cultural shifts or encouraging conspiracy theories, a prototype of incel that has more to do with the show's enemy now," he explains. In a move similar to that of South Park when the teacher, Mr. Garrison, was turned into a transcript of Donald Trump, in one of the episodes of season 34 Kirk ascended to power after trying to change the content of the school's history subject ("My children, my truth," read his slogan). "Flanders was used after 11/<> as a model of the Bush-era mad Christian, a kind of Mel Gibson, but he ended up becoming a stereotype to fall back on easily," says the author of The Simpsons Will Never End. "Were you going to do a chapter on the theory of evolution? You put Flanders in the bad light, who was against it. A chapter on censorship? You'd leave Flanders writing a letter to complain about something. Now they're doing a more complex satire, similar to BoJack Horseman."
The Problem with Homer
For Pardo, the greater or lesser quality of The Simpsons is directly related to Homer's personality. "Homer is never portrayed as a role model, but the show is on his side and makes you sympathize with him. That's why, when Homer became unbearable, the show also became unbearable," he reflects on that intermediate era of The Simpsons in which the character, humanized in the early years as a father, husband and friend, became selfish and petty. "The Homer of the Matt Selman era is more like the protagonist of a show about comedians, like Seinfeld or Louie. A more modern reference, not especially silly and more millennial [literally, and according to the current chronology, he was born in the eighties] in his way of seeing the world."
An equally striking aspect of the new installments is their ambiguous relationship with the past. In The Horror Treehouse XXXIII, the third of his usual three Halloween stories, was set in a Simpsons theme park, where Homer was a robot who became aware and discovered, terrified, how fans forced him to replay his famous moments over and over again. At the same time, despite the exercise in critical nostalgia, the series has brought back characters such as Jacques, the French bowling instructor with whom Marge weighs an infidelity in the first season, and introduced a huge number of flashbacks and nods to her old days.
Kirk Van Houten portrays in the new episodes the reactionary and 'conspiracy theorist' man who sees the new realities as threats to his world.20thCentFox ©/Courtesy Everett Collection/Cordon Press
Precisely as a mockery of the eagerness to blindly glorify the old, the youtuber John Walsh introduced in his aforementioned video essay a furious critique of a viewer adrift from the series and passed it off as current; Then, to say that it was actually a comment made in the nineties against season 6. That is to say, the season that included emblematic chapters such as the one about the Stonemasons sect or the first part of Who Shot Mr. Burns? was, at the time, seen by some as a degeneration. A message that invites us to stop measuring The Simpsons in terms of how it was and more in terms of how it is in the present.
More open to new stories rather than rehashes, exploring previously ignored characters, relationships, and places in Springfield, or depicting contemporary conflicts, the series nevertheless still has unfinished business, such as dignified trans representation. Something more flagrant if we take into account that, at least, a trans woman is an important part of her story: as recounted in the book The Simpsons Will Never End, whose prologue is signed by the comedian Elsa Ruiz, an essential chapter like the one on the death of the jazzman Murphy Bleeding Gums was written by Jennifer Ventimilia (then in the closet). "There are a lot of topics that are noticeably controversial within the screenwriting team," says author Juan Damián Pardo. "I follow a lot of people and these days you can see how radically some are in favor of Israel or Palestine. The show isn't going to position itself having that division among the writers. It's probably the same with the trans issue."
And now that the series has regained its creative momentum, is a second film any closer? "I'm sure we'll see it, but maybe on platforms and not in theaters," Pardo believes. "The 2007 film came at exactly the right time, when the series was declining but the performance was incredible. Now the way we consume and the way we watch The Simpsons has changed. I doubt it was that successful. They are aware that going to cinemas would be showing a weakness."
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