PulpLit.net

Worst Article Ever

A few years ago, The Simpsons celebrated its 100th episode with an allegorical tale in which the show's "cartoon within a cartoon," Itchy and Scratchy, attempted to boost its sagging ratings and prevent its stagnation by introducing a new character. It's a time-honored television gimmick, like weddings, births and deaths. But the gimmick itself wasn't as important as the question the show was asking: could a popular cartoon continue to deliver quality entertainment after six years and more?

Ultimately the new character, Poochie, proves very unpopular and the "dramaturgical dyad" of Itchy and Scratchy is returned to its binary status. The episode is filled with in-jokes for both the makers of the show and its fans. But it is to the latter group that The Simpsons unwisely chose to preach as well.

This sermon occurs in the comic book shop in a discussion between the aptly named Comic Book Guy (CBG) and Bart Simpson. Having seen the Poochie episode, CBG declares it "the worst episode ever" and adds, "rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust with the world." Bart admits it wasn't great but asks, "what right do you have to complain?" CBG: "As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me." Bart: "What? They've given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them." CBG pauses, then repeats his now-clich?d "worst episode ever" line.

In this scene, the writers commit two grave errors. First, they give Bart lines that are out-of-character. This type of preachy talk might work if spoken by Lisa, but from Bart it's unprecedented. In fact, the serious and even chastening tone, so unusual from Bart, only draws more attention to the writer's second mistake: blatant preaching. The lines sound like a declaration of war on critical Simpsons fans.

This volley was only the beginning. In future episodes, fans - or at least, fans who discuss the show in the Internet - became frequent targets for backhanded insults. In one episode, when a character suggests that Bart and his friends publish some scandalous information on the Internet, Bart replies, "No, we have to reach people whose opinions actually matter!" In another episode, Homer creates a website composed entirely of swiped graphics. Lisa chides him for it, pointing out that it's a form of theft. This may be a veiled reference to Twentieth Century Fox's war on fan websites. A few years ago, the company sent nastygrams to dozens such websites asking them to remove sound files, video clips and images.

The question is: why this attitude? George Lucas and almost any other owner of a popular franchise has come to recognize the immense value of viral marketing. Fansites are free publicity. Unless the site is putting up video files of the show or putting up Simpsons videogames for download, it isn't competing for revenue with the show itself - the site is only increasing awareness of the product. Closing down a fansite is simple bad business.

The writers are also on shaky ground when they suggest that viewers owe the writers. This is just wrong. Matt Groening and every other employee of the Simpsons empire gets paid because people watch the show - lots of people. Including loyal viewers. The salaries of the Simpsons employees come from News Corp (Twentieth Century Fox), which in turn comes from advertising revenue, which comes from - you guessed it - viewers who buy the advertisers' products. Just because the money passes through a few hands doesn't discount the fact that the writers are essentially being paid by the viewers. Television is not free - not really - and writers as smart as those of The Simpsons should know that. Any claim to the contrary betrays a streak of arrogance. The popularity of the show has made the writers haughty, and they have turned their backs on the diehard fans who supported them through those first few seasons.

Ever since the Poochie episode, the writers seem to have adopted an attitude of, "You'll watch anything!," giving us one ridiculous storyline after another. Homer hasn't had a meaningful thing to say in years. Lisa is often demoted to a shrill liberal mouthpiece. The writers treat Marge with a kind of cruel misogyny - pointing out how oppressed she is while rarely letting her break out of that oppression. Only Bart remains fairly uncorrupted - except when he's haranguing the fans.

But the discussion between Bart and CBG raises another point. Why is there any discussion of "owing" at all? The Simpsons is a form of storytelling, itself a form of art. Such a claim may seem a bit naive in an age of plot-free, special effects-laden blockbusters that are more rollercoaster than film. But The Simpsons also draws attention to another problem, this one as old as art itself: the question of art versus entertainment. Wise critics know the two are not mutually exclusive. But art and entertainment share, at best, an uneasy truce. These issues are highlighted the writers/fans conflict.

"Fans" and fandom in its modern form developed over the course of the twentieth century. Perhaps the first fan community was that of the pulp magazines in the twenties and thirties. Later in the century the rise of mass media (in television, film, print, and music) gave people greater access to entertainment (and thus, more things to be fans of). The rapid technological advances of the century allowed fans to congregate more easily - through letters, conventions and finally, that Promised Land of fandom, the Internet. With the creation of the Internet, fan communities have become so prominent that some are now an economic force to be reckoned with. Fan groups grew from a few thousand readers of Weird Tales in the 1930s to millions, perhaps even billions of fans of Star Wars in the late 1990s.

Exploring this question of "owing" may serve to shed light on the nature of the fan's relationship to that which she is a fan of - her interest, for want of a better term. When CBG says that, as a loyal viewer, he feels that the creators of the show "owe" him, it's not explicitly stated what form this debt should take. But from the context of the conversation it can be reasonably inferred that CBG feels the creators owe him "good" or high-quality episodes. The immediate problem is what constitutes a "good" episode. It is possible that what CBG would find a good episode of I&S (and what the members of alt.fan.simpsons would find a good episode of The Simpsons) is not necessarily what the much larger non-fan viewing public would find a good episode.

Since the ratings of The Simpsons continue to be as high as ever, the point would seem moot, unless one wants to bring in the age-old highbrow/lowbrow humor debate. Over the last five seasons The Simpsons has slowly but surely been moving away from cohesive narratives and into increasingly absurdist fantasies. The absurdist style allows for more experimentation, more rapid-fire humor and more cultural commentary, but this comes with a price: that of character development and meaningful plots. Lisa and Bart never move beyond fourth grade; after thirteen seasons their characterization is now just as stagnant.

In a Salon article two years ago, Jaime Weinman outlined the struggle between the writers and fans as centering on the question of character - namely, that the show has allowed its characters to fade into one-note grotesques (Homer's stupid, Marge is repressed, Lisa is liberal and Bart is a hellion). However, it is arguable that this stagnation of character may be an inevitable result of The Simpsons's basic format. Since the characters don't age, there isn't much opportunity for growth. Bart and Lisa have both had their crushes, but they'll never hit puberty. The show is running out of ideas. Both Marge and Homer have had an episode devoted to a temptation toward adultery; just recently, the supporting character Apu Nahaseemapetilon did commit adultery, cheating on his lovely wife Manjula. The Simpsons's first five seasons gave us all the usual sitcom plots, but the changes that lasted are so few and far between that they can be easily recalled: Apu's marriage, Maude Flanders's death, Sideshow Bob's repeated incarceration and escapes. The rest of the episodes - as Lisa herself has often pointed out in metatextual asides - begin and end like a Mobius strip, with the family at the exact same point it started at. The lack of aging sometimes causes strange continuity problems, such as the episode where Homer told the story of Maggie's birth; though the show was first broadcast in 1989, this episode took place in 1994 and Maggie was still only a year old. Thus, Homer began the tale of Maggie's birth with "The year was 1993..."

Of course, one must accept all these continuity errors with a wink (if that) or risk being labeled an anal nerd - the "it's just a show" mentality. But the uniquely self-aware and socially conscious nature of The Simpsons means that it must continually be timely even while the characters never change (compare this to the relatively microcosmic world of a cartoon like that of The Flinstones). This conflict between timeliness and character stagnation may be part of what necessitated The Simpsons's move toward absurdist fantasy. By freeing itself entirely of the constraints of realism-based situation comedy and embracing the cartoon medium, The Simpsons was able to stave off the stagnation of the show itself.

Today, a typical episode of The Simpsons will contain at least one or more unlikely or impossible events. Homer has met countless celebrities and went on a space mission, all while ostensibly working at a nuclear power plant and living in a huge house. One recent episode had an excellent and funny plot about Lisa pretending to be a college student. The plot was both well-written and (fairly) believable. The episode featured very little Homer, who has dominated the series for almost half its run now. Moreover, it demonstrated that it was still possible to write a funny episode using a down-to-earth, cohesive narrative. The only false note was a fairly unfunny subplot that put Bart in a plastic bubble after contracting the "Panda virus."

But such episodes are rare. The Simpsons was originally the representative family of the early 1990s, railed against by George Bush Sr. (though, ultimately, The Simpsons turned out to be vastly more popular than Ole Georgie). Then the show became more of a sharp political satire. Now it's an absurdist fantasy - with perhaps a few too many coarse jokes thrown in, always the first sign of a series' decline.