If only The Simpsons’ horror was confined to its Halloween episode
It will always be better than Family Guy, but The Simpsons still isn’t the same
This past Sunday night, viewers sat down to once again take part in an annual tradition: The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror,” the annual Halloween special of the longest-running TV cartoon series ever. This year’s entry was divided, as is customary, into three parts. The first segment took the Simpson family to Hell: a city, it seems, very much like Springfield. It was amusing to begin with, but soon pointlessly repeated itself. The last segment had the family confronted by doubles of themselves: a comment, I think, on the endless proliferation of Simpson images and on the repetition compulsion referenced above. The middle segment — well, I can’t tell you about the middle segment because I’ve forgotten it already. Honestly.
It’s true that the Halloween specials have always provided a concentrated dose of Simpsonian self-satire, and that the same element, in more discreet doses, used to crop up in regular episodes. In either format, it was funny because the show had a self to satirize. Now it’s down to satirizing the idea of satirizing itself: to coasting on its own reputation. It’s sad.
The Simpsons has now been bad for longer than it was good, but when it was good it was great. Television has never provided as many inspired jokes per minute, sometimes per second, as The Simpsons did; has never been as consistently, ruthlessly, creatively irreverent as The Simpsons was. It taught a generation to revere wit and to distrust authority, two hugely important achievements. Now the irreverence has shrunk to mere random rudeness, and the jokes are flabby and far between. Everything’s gone slack.
Surprisingly, this season’s premiere was actually one of the better recent efforts. It showed Krusty the Klown’s career crashing to earth, giving his father the rabbi a fatal heart attack en route. The rabbi is still being voiced by Jackie Mason, and it’s encouraging to find that the thick kosher sauce of his delivery has not been diluted by issuing from beyond the grave. All the same, we’ve seen the Krusty-on-the-skids plot more than once before and this time it hardly sustained the running time. In the golden days it would have been supported by one or more parallel actions. Now, we just kept flashing back to aimless scenes of Lisa worrying over Homer’s weight. No story went with this; it was merely reiterations of a joke we’ve heard for years. The point of cartoon characters is that they never change — but they should find new ways of not changing.
Ironically, the Simpsons’ finest recent moments have come on somebody else’s show. I’m referring to the season premiere of Family Guy in which the Griffin clan found themselves paying an unplanned visit to their Fox TV colleagues. There has long been an undeclared war between these two shows, or at least between their fans. People who love The Simpsons tend to loathe Family Guy; we (you may count me in) regard the later arrival as an illtempered scattershot rip-off. It may seem ridiculous to fault a cartoon series for being unrealistic, but a show about an American family whose members include a talking baby and a talking dog is not one I can take seriously enough to find funny. It’s also monotonously obnoxious. Peter Griffin is a boor. So is Homer Simpson, but Homer, unlike Peter, believably loves his family. That may sound sentimental, but it’s what gives the character, and the show, texture and tenure. It’s not just a matter of Homer having a saving grace; it’s because of the constant conflict between that grace and everything else about him. And of course Marge is a genuinely, and credibly, good person.
The Griffin family’s best line in their shared episode was actually a riff on the competition’s mythology. Adrift, with their car stolen, they came upon a signpost pointing to Springfield. “What state is that in?” they asked, the answer being “We’re not allowed to say.” It’s significant that the show had to depict the Griffins visiting the Simpsons; if it had been the other way around, there would have been no one there. The Simpsons live in a community, one that has been established over the years in extravagant detail. The Griffins also have an identifiable hometown (in an actual state) but there’s nobody among its honchos with the personality, joyous even in monstrosity of a Mayor Quimby, a Police Chief Wiggum or a Mr. Burns. The famous cutaway gags are like Stewie’s sarcasm: selfflattering hipness trying to pass itself off as humour. When the Simpsons nudge the fourth wall — and they do nudge rather than break it — they do it with style:
The Simpsons has now been bad for longer than it was good
Lisa: “Dad, do you even know what rhetorical means?”
Homer: “Do I know what rhetorical means?” Or: Marge: “Homer, you loved Rashomon.”
Homer: “That’s not how I remember it.”
All right, those were a long time ago. But imagine Family Guy coming up with anything comparable, ever.
I don’t know how the animation responsibilities were parcelled out for the confrontation, but both sides were visually very much themselves. The Simpsons, though, were the clear winners, playing on their own turf even if the other side owned the broadcasting rights. The visitors got to bathe in the reflected glory of a virtual parade of Springfield favourites; Apu was in especially good form in a Kwik-EMart scene almost of vintage quality. We even got a glimpse of Sideshow Bob.
The actual plot wasn’t so much; it climaxed in an inordinately prolonged dust-up between the two dads, followed by their appearance in a court presided over by Fred Flintstone. That was a nice touch, since The Flintstones might claim to be the progenitor of both shows. A Simpsons episode once paid explicit homage, with Homer carolling his own version of the Flintstone theme song while driving his car into a tree. Family Guy, though, bears the stronger resemblance, The Flintstones being a supremely dumb show whose idea of being clever was to dress its characters in animal hides and have them talk about Brontosaurus burgers while adhering in every other respect to the corniest conventions of 1950s domestic comedy. (I tend to believe the rumour that it was based on unused scripts from The Honeymooners.)
There was a good Family Guy moment at the end, though, with Peter carelessly and callously tossing into the garbage the saxophone generously bequeathed by Lisa to Meg, the despised and downtrodden Griffin daughter, who had discovered a virtuoso talent for the instrument: the first time in her life she had ever been good at anything. It was reminiscent, too, of a particularly poignant and pitiless moment on The Simpsons itself: a flashback episode in which a kindergarten Bart displayed precocious abilities too original for his teachers to recognize, and so was condemned to a lifetime of underachievement. It happened in a flash, like all the best things on the show. But that too was long ago.
The Simpsons can teach Family Guy a thing or two when it invades their territory, but when left to its own devices it seems content to sink to Family Guy level. Do yourself a favour this season and watch reruns. Or download a vintage “Treehouse of Horror” episode, one in which those superbly superior extraterrestrials Kang and Kodos end up running the show. They weren’t even in this one; that’s the depressing news I’ve kept till last. As Bart once said of a Where’s Waldo in which the hero was hiding in the plainest of sight, they aren’t even trying any more.