Long debated for the rest of eternity will be the exact moment when The Simpsons jumped the shark. Not even the show’s most devoted fan would dare suggest that the show hasn’t declined sharply in quality, even if most of the recent episodes have still been decent. It’s just a tale of two shows – one which was revolutionary, entertaining and hilarious, and one that is merely entertaining.
The biggest issue with recent (read: the last few seasons) episodes has been how quick the show is to derail. Our Favorite Family is often derided as of late for their outlandish plots and unbelievable schemes, forgetting that Homer’s Job of the Week Parade started back in the show’s prime – they just kept the anarchy grounded in the classic years. I don’t think the problem today is necessarily how ridiculous the plots are as much as how everything plays out so haphazard and silly, as if Al Jean’s writing staff is trying outweird Seth MacFarlane and Williams Street at the expense of what little logic The Simpsons contained in its glory days.
Watch the first few minutes of any recent Simpsons episode and you won’t notice any problems. The show still starts smart, sliding the Simpsons into the plot in a bass-ackwards fashion through an unrelated opening scene (or scenes.) From there, though, the writers seem to take reasonable plots – like the annual trip overseas (England! Brazil! Planet Xena!) and go in stupid directions, making the episode sillier and sillier until the mantra “Worst. Episode. Ever.” has been replaced with “Well, I guess that one won’t be considered canon.”
One episode that seems to pop up incessantly in syndication that shows this problem off quite clearly is 2004’s “Bart-Mangled Banner,” where OFF gets in trouble when Bart accidentally moons the flag and Marge tells off the United States on television. For the first act, this is classic Simpsons: the setup for the flag goof is sharp and original, beginning with the classic alternative setup as we start in Dr. Hibbert’s office as Bart and Lisa have vaccinations forced upon them. From there, random events escalate to give us our True Plot, which is taken to extreme and way-too-silly lengths by the writing staff. The Simpsons are locked in liberal prison on an island with Elmo and Bill Clinton, and escape in the middle of the penitentiary’s variety show. Escaping to France, they eventually return to America on a circa 1910 European immigration ship through Ellis Island, but only because they miss all their stuff.
What?
This isn’t to say that classic Simpsons is anything mainstream, but there was a limit to the show’s madness, a boundary that is trampled over twenty-two times a year this century. Compare two episodes, one from the previous sixteenth season, “Future-Drama,” and one from 1995’s Season Six, “Lisa’s Wedding.” Both featured OFF traveling through time, though the older episode set this up much more smoothly, with Lisa visiting a fortune teller at at Ren Faire opposed to Bart and his elder sister crashing through the window of Professor Frink’s basement and using his computer to forecast the future.
Comparing what works in each episode provides startling differences. In “Wedding,” we see the story of, duh, Lisa’s wedding to a British suitor (my boy Mandy Patinkin, tearing it up) and how her family disgusts this uptight Brit. We don’t go off the deep end: the family has aged realistically, with Bart doing demolition – not a hippy hanging with Ralph as we see in a third, unexplored-here future-vision episode (yes, they have a lot of those.) The episode ends sweetly, with Lisa, having realized in her vision just how much she loves her father despite all his faults, returning to the fair with him. It’s a smart, enjoyable plot that provides the usual multitude of laughs, and establishes the precedent that Maggie never, ever speaks, even if she’s old enough. It’s the template for a perfect episode: original, entertaining story with a smart setup that explores every possible one-liner; logical plot; believable ending.
“Future-Drama” is quite different. This is one of the funnier Simpsons’ episodes of late, but falls apart midway though as the writers throw anything that sticks to the screen while navigating through a lazily constructed plot; there’s no fine arc with a connecting b-plot, but rather characters – lead and supporting – run on and off the screen in a rather distracting fashion. What does work are the little, modern jokes, from the TiVO sound effects on Frink’s computer, to the opening conversation between Lisa and Bart where they debate who Bart is “gay for” (producing the classic line, spoken by the depressed subject: “No one’s gay for Hans Moleman.” The setup is clumsy though, lazily dropping (literally) our characters into Frink’s basement; “Lisa’s Wedding” had Lisa chase a Chief Wiggam-created “medieval creature” into the woods to find the fortune teller, a far more elegant segue into the main plot.
I don’t think there’s a solution to The Simpsons’ woes, and for the first time ever I would float the idea that Fox should wrap up production within several years. Newer shows like Family Guy and Aqua Teen excel in the area where The Simpsons fails – wacky, outlandish and unbelievable plots – because they were born into that format and appear as naturals in their ability to exploit it. Futurama, thanks to its thirty-first century time frame, shared their talent to delve into the strange and unpossible since, well, what do we know about what will be strange and unpossible one-thousand years from now? OFF, though, developed in an era of sincerity, a pre-Seinfeld era that pitted Bart and Company against The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote long before Desperate Housewives was a gleam in Mark Cherry’s eyes. Earlier scripts had to be “serious” and traditional, and though the show weaned itself from the usual and paved the way for today’s offbeat animation by stretching the boundaries of believability, it was a slow transition that could only be taken so far before the show became a completely different program. The show is at its best when wacky but grounded, something long forgotten by today’s writing staff.
It’s become a completely different program.