The Simpsons premiered just two weeks before the 1980s ended, instantly going beyond “hit show” and becoming a cultural sensation. 1990 was the year of “Bartmania”, famously epitomized by t-shirts emblazoned with a picture of Bart underneath the word “Underachiever”; slingshot in hand, he declared “And proud of it, man!”. The huge reaction to the show, both positive and negative, was greatly abetted by all those years of timidity and repetitiveness on the part of the three major networks. The revolt had begun with shows like
Married . . . with Children and
Roseanne, both of which took as a given a working class, explicitly anti-“Cosby” mentality.
7 But while those shows had the attitude, they were inherently limited by their laughtracked, live action, living-room-with-a-couch setup.
The Simpsons had no such restrictions, and cast its scorn over everything.
The reaction was as intense as it was polarized. For Americans who more or less liked television and America the way they were,
The Simpsons represented a near blasphemous rejection of things they held dear. For Americans who felt ignored on television and in general,
The Simpsons was a perfect send up of everything they’d been told to love but actually hated. Both groups had been inured to dumb and inoffensive programming, and something that was neither came as a shock.
The people who loathed the show, up to and including the sitting President and First Lady, had become accustomed to a television landscape that was rife with families that looked like them and messages that confirmed their beliefs.
The Simpsons, especially Bart, enraged them for not conforming to the usual television morality. That it was animated made it even worse. Cartoons were considered children’s programming and, in a classic case of the “Think of the children!” mentality
The Simpsons would skewer later that year, Bart and Homer were derided as terrible role models who would surely lead America’s youth astray.
The people who loved the show had the opposite reaction but for the same reasons. They too were desensitized to the repetitive blandness of most television, but they embraced
The Simpsons wholeheartedly. Suburban white kids, city black kids, and every non-stereotypical demographic in between tuned in every week. Soon even the repeats were scoring big ratings, merchandise of various legality was consumed in a frenzy, and Bart became the literal poster boy for what was wrong with America.
The hysteria was due at least in part to the way
The Simpsons deliberately attacked the sacred cows of American television. Unlike all those shows where things always work out and kids learn lessons, in Springfield there isn’t a single institution that’s run by an honest and caring public servant. The local government is presided over by a corrupt womanizer modeled on the worst aspects of the Kennedys. The police force is staffed by morons and commanded by a man whose incompetence is matched only by his corpulence. The school is run by a principal who is ramrod straight in public but who doesn’t particularly care that most of the kids in his charge aren’t going anywhere in life. Likewise, the teachers and the staff go through the motions but are contemptuous and comprehensively apathetic toward the children they are theoretically educating.
Generations of television shows had treated these institutions with deference and respect;
The Simpsons mocked them harshly and relentlessly. The mayor’s adultery wasn’t a scandal; it was taken for granted. The same was true of the indifference of the teachers and the incompetence of the police. There weren’t any crusading journalists or hero cops. There weren’t any reforming politicians, caring teachers, or righteous lawyers who locked away the guilty and kept the innocent from prison. Every person with authority or responsibility was resigned to the crappiness of the system.
Authority figures like these weren’t usually mocked on television, and when they were, it was only in the gentlest of ways (think Don Knotts on
The Andy Griffith Show).
The Simpsons didn’t merely disrespect them, it was outright contemptuous of them. Season 1 mocked the police, the schools, the government, and the churches, all while portraying their leaders as wretched human beings. There were gullible school administrators, quack therapists, dimwitted preachers, and a justice system so poorly run that its mistakes could be spotted by a ten-year-old. The show took as its axiom an America that sucked and failed not because of laziness or moral collapse, but because it was run and inhabited by idiots and assholes. Above all, the show went after the holiest of television holies, the Teevee Dad.
The first episode shown, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” is a half hour of total patriarchal failure. Homer Simpson is incompetent, stupid and insecure. He does everything in his limited power to give his family the kind of Christmas that television families have long enjoyed, but tinsel and trimmings are simply beyond his reach.
) but not anymore.
