How The Simpsons lead to the TV of today eschewing contemporary life for fantasy

We live on the internet. This is a genuinely new way of being — this morning, for instance, I did my job, talked with friends, attempted to flirt, and read some things which made me laugh (memes) and some which didn’t (the news). I did so within ten minutes, from my bedroom, silently and nearly motionlessly. That’s new.

It’s a newness TV doesn’t seem to have caught up with. Although we live on the internet, the characters in the tv shows we most like don’t. Tyrion Lannister doesn’t, Saul Goodman doesn’t, the characters from Stranger Things and Westworld and The Walking Dead all don’t. These shows span themes and periods and genres — the only common factor seems to be the lack of internet.

That’s puzzling — why do the tv we watch and the lives we lead diverge in this way? One of the points of art is to try to make sense of how we live — why has the most popular contemporary tv seemingly abandoned this task? I hope to answer this question.

ESCAPISM?

Let me first consider a couple of answers which I don’t think are right. Firstly, you might think there isn’t really an interesting answer to my question. It’s just a fact about tv (and also movies) that it’s primarily an escapist medium. For every true to life show there’s also a fantasy; for every Friends and How I Met Your Mother there’s an X-Files and a Lost, and from Star Wars to Jurassic Park to the Matrix to the Harry Potter films reality has never been a primary concern of audiovisual art.

I think there must be something to this answer, but I don’t think it quite tells the whole story. One of the reasons for this is that even in non-fantasy — think Girls, for example, or Breaking Bad — there is not that much recognition of the primacy of the internet. It’s there, maybe, but it’s not focal. But the internet is focal in our lives. It’s weird that tv makers wouldn’t rush to portray this new way of life, and so I think even admitting that tv is to a large extent a medium of escape shouldn’t satisfy our curiosity.

INTERNET LIFE IS HARD TO PORTRAY?

Here’s a second answer — the reason such shows don’t have much to do with the internet is because the internet is to a large extent a written medium, whereas film and tv are audiovisual. It’s just an unfortunate fact, from the makers of tv’s perspective, that the anger which would formerly have been embodied in a frown or a raised voice is now embodied in a text which ends in a period. While one can portray this, one has to do so more indirectly (say by having a character tell someone how she’s upset because the period was missed out), and one loses something in this indirectness. Because of the internet our lives are mediated by text, and this mediatedness is difficult to dramatically represent. The second answer has it that we’re in an unteleviseable era, and so it’s natural that the television makers would flee to televiseable eras, like Westeros or the 80s.

As above, I don’t want to discount this answer. I think it makes a lot of sense, and properly to come to terms with moving to a writing culture is something which we need to think long and hard about. But, again, I think it can’t be the whole story.

To see why I think this, rewind twenty years. It’s at best doubtful that you had an internet connected device in your room then but there’s a very good chance there was another screen you stared at for many hours a day — I mean, of course, a television.

In 1997, a typical American watched over five hours of tv a day. That’s a lot, and just as my internet-filled morning would have been inconceivable then, so at the end of the 70s the glossy, hundred channel world of network tv of the 90s would have likewise been hard to imagine. If we’re now firmly in the internet era, we were then firmly in the television era.

And a very similar argument to the above could be run here: that the tv era, just like the internet era, and ironically, is untelevisable. Those five hours you spent in front of a television are not exciting to watch. Television, as a medium, is not apt realistically to portray the day to day lives of people who watch a shitload of television.

This seems, initially, borne out by having a look at the popular tv of the 90s — think about Friends, or Seinfeld. Two shows about 90s people living everyday lives, but, ironic references to, say, the pilot Jerry and George make or Joey’s soap Days of Our Lives, tv doesn’t much impinge upon the lives of the two gangs.

So is that it, then? Was tv defunct already as a medium for portraying media-saturated contemporary life in the 90s? Is it just the case that once we started spending all our time looking at screens, tv lost the ability to speak about our day to day lives?

THE SIMPSONS PORTRAYED INTERNET-LIFE BEFORE THE INTERNET

No. A tv show managed to portray the television era. Indeed, the tv show that managed to represent tv life is most likely the greatest tv show there’s yet been. I mean, obviously, The Simpsons (for the purposes of this essay, The Simpsons means roughly seasons 3 to 8; for at least the last fifteen years, as most admit, The Simpsons has been both poor quality and culturally irrelevant, and so won’t figure in my discussion). The Simpsons, I’m going to suggest, despite its surreal, fragmented, cartoon surface, is in fact something like a realistic account of a mind on tv. It’s not a surreal portrayal of ordinary life, but it’s an ordinary portrayal of a surreal life, of the surreal life of one who spends most of their non-working life watching television.

A lot can be and has been written about The Simpsons, and properly to do justice to its richness would require at least a book in itself. I’m going to focus on three crucial aspects important for understanding the show and the subsequent history of American comedy, which will eventually enable us to answer the question of this essay.

THREE FEATURES OF PEOPLE WHO WATCH A LOT OF CABLE TV

Here are three features it’s relatively uncontroversial to attribute to the watcher of a lot of television of the 90s — three states of mind that watching television fosters. Firstly, a sense of detachment and irony — one knows what one is watching is dumb, the plots are formulaic, the emotions mawkish, and so on, and that the shows are mere lures to cause you, a demographically valuable person, to watch the advertisements which make up a third of each allotted half an hour or hour segment. Yet you still spend all this time doing it. Second: a sense of being drowned by many voices — the sheer quantity of different shows available to someone with cable tv was and is immense: from news reports to comedians, from people going through real to people going through imagined catastrophes, old films and music videos, all laced between advertisements. Third, and related to this, an instability of attention — not only are you exposed to all these different voices, but you are exposed to them rapid-fire, within minutes. Not only could one go from a televised Gulf war to a rerun to MAS*H to an advert for a strimmer, one could do so more or less instantaneously, by flicking through the hundreds of channels available.

I’ll eventually want to claim that these features are common between the watcher of tv and the user of the internet. But first I want to show that they are mirrored in the style of The Simpsons, which thus functions to represent the televisual mind. First, a detached and ironic attitude towards television is as ubiquitous in the Simpsons as in the watcher of tv. Examples could be trotted out ad nauseam; but think, for example, of the scene in The Front (season 19 episode 4; almost all the examples that follow were found by selecting more or less at random an episode and either watching it or reading the script, and as such could be multiplied). Bart and Lisa are walking through the corridors of a studio which makes cartoons — past water filters, cleaning ladies, and so on — asking a producer about the costs of making animations. The producer says that sometimes they cut corners, for example by reusing backgrounds. As he says this the background of the scene is itself reused — the same water filter and cleaning lady reappear, emphasizing to the audience that what they’re watching is just another cheap cartoon like Itchy and Scratchy. Or think of Bart Gets Famous (s05e12), which begins with Bart walking down the stairs whistling The Simpsons own theme. The nature of tv is something the Simpsons is concerned with, and in that it is similar to the jaded 90s channel hopper.

The second aspect is the plurality of voices tv drowns you in. I think this is reflected in one of the central sources of humour in the Simpsons, in which characters saying things that are out of character. Consider the following exchange from The Day The Violence Died (s07e18):

Lisa: It’s one of those campy seventies throwbacks to appeal to Generation X-ers

Bart: We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.

While it’s maybe possible for overachieving Lisa to say this, Bart is here speaking like no underachieving eight-year-old on the planet, but rather channeling a disgruntled middle-aged sitcom conservative. The Simpsons constantly makes this move of having characters speak in voices other than their own. Another example, from the beginning of Homer Defined (s03e05):

Homer: Here’s good news! According to this eye-catching article, SAT scores are declining at a slower rate!

Lisa: Dad, I think this paper is a flimsy hodgepodge of pie graphs, factoids and Larry King.

This isn’t Homer’s voice at all (he doesn’t care about news, really, he wouldn’t say ‘eye-catching’). But he says it. Or think of the monologue when Marge suggests he give up his side venture selling loose sugar (Lisa’s Rival, s06e02):

Homer: Never, Marge. Never. I can’t live the button-down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors — oh, I’ll never be the darling of the so-called “City Fathers” who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards, and talk about “What’s to be done with this Homer Simpson?

Here’s another with Bart (Homer’s Barbershop Quartet, s05e01):

Bart: [incredulous] Barbershop? That ain’t been popular since aught
six, dagnab it.
Homer: [reproachfully] Bart, what did I tell you?
Bart: [abashed] No talking like a grizzled 1890s prospector…consarn
it.

Examples like this could be multiplied. Of course, a lot of this is just played for laughs, but I think there’s a point behind it: the source of these voices in which the characters speak must, surely, be television. We should think of these strange outbursts as the characters’ internalizations of the disparate voices they hear; just as one learns to speak from one’s parents, so the 90s person learns to speak from television, and this is portrayed in surreal out of character dialogue like above.

The third feature of the tv addict is their instability of attention. This, I think, is reflected in the fundamentally digressive style of the Simpsons — the way the show constantly cuts away to imaginings or scenes from the past or surrealistic futures, to news reports or a character’s imagining.

Think, for example, of the following sequence from Homer Badman (s06e09). Homer has been wrongly accused of sexual assault, and records an interview to clear his name, which gets edited absurdly to make him appear guilty; we then cut to his reaction, which cuts to his famous sung suggestion that the family escape their troubles by going to live ‘under the sea’. We then cut to footage filmed outside his house, followed by more tv: Gentle Ben, a talk show like Oprah, the presenter of which is a grizzly bear. Incredibly this all occurs within about 3 minutes, and while this is perhaps an extreme example, this rapid cutting between markedly different scenes is undoubtedly a central feature of the Simpsons’s style (evidence for which is the way it was further developed in (clearly obviously Simpsons-influenced) Family Guy and related shows, where it plays an even more pivotal role). It should be taken, I hold, to be a staging of the instability of attention of the person channel hopping. The Simpsons jumps around because it represents the 90s tv viewer, whose attention itself jumps around.

We should view these features — and, again, this isn’t close to exhaustive — as ways in which The Simpsons, despite surreal appearances, is in a sense mimetic. It portrays a mind hooked on television, and it is surreal only because to be hooked on tv is surreal. But this shows us something very important: despite the seeming obstacles, you can portray what it’s like to live a media saturated, glued-to-your-screen culture. You just need to use non-realistic artistic techniques. The Simpsons shows us how.

TV CULTURE AND INTERNET CULTURE

But this leads on to a related point. Although there are very notable differences between internet culture and tv culture, there are nevertheless similarities. In particular, the three things I focused on seem to be examples of similarities. We have the same sort of distanced, ironic relationship to the internet that we have to television. We know that we’re essentially providing content for twitter and that we are its products, that it polarises debate in a bad way, that it’s really addictive. We create and spread memes, an activity so laced with irony and distance I can’t even begin to explain it. We use uber despite knowing uber is bad, and spend a decent amount of time hate-reading thinkpieces we know in advance we’ll dislike. There’s something ridiculous about all this, and we know it, yet we persist in it.

Similarly, we get the same plurality of voices on the internet that we got on tv. Twitter is again a good example. It is, in this respect, like tv amplified many times — in literally one minute our brains go from memes to politics to friends, in 140 character bites. Opening my feed at random I read a tweet about anxiety from someone I met once, a couple of memes, an ad, a story about the Manchester May 22nd terrorist attack. And we get the same instability of attention, as I go from thinking to laughing to ignoring to horror or fatigued indifference.

If this is so — if internet culture is like tv culture, at least in some respects — then the style of the Simpsons would be well placed to give an account of our internet life. So if it’s possible and indeed available, our question returns, and can be reposed — why don’t we have art that captures internet life? We don’t we have Simpsonian tv in 2017?

THE ANSWER

Basically, because we had Simpsonian tv in 1997, and fashions change. The reason we’ve sought the escape from reality typified by the shows I mentioned at the start is just because the depiction of our internet reality, which would have to be Simpsonian, is artistically passé. As the title of a South Park episode has it, Simpsons Already Did It.

Looked at in this way — as a reaction to the Simpsons — the last twenty years of sitcom history make a lot of sense. There has been a gradual deSimpsonizing, a process whereby shows have progressively got less and less similar to the Simpsons. Arrested Development, for example, in the early 2000s has many cutaways and plays with the notion of itself as television, but doesn’t have the striking Simpsonian feature of characters speaking in voices other than their own. A little bit later, The Office and Parks and Recreation move yet further away. These shows can be seen to want to have their metafictional cake and eat it too — by using the mockumentary format, they in essence move the fourth wall into the universe of the show, enabling simultaneously fourth-wall breaking while keeping to a realist, non-self referential premise. We should view such shows, I think, as attempts to slowly wean us off self-referentiality — it can’t be done too quickly, or the self-aware viewer would revolt, but by downplaying it it allows the makers to inject genuine feeling into the show in a way that would have been difficult earlier (difficult, not impossible — Friends stands out). Finally, the current era has moved yet further, dispensed with the framing, and now presents essentially straight comedies, of which Brooklyn Nine Nine is a paradigm. Such shows are entirely straight, and have gotten away from the Simpsons. The problem is, if I am right, they’ve also thereby lost the chance to give an account of our fragmented experience. It’s hardly surprising that newer shows like The Last Man On Earth or The Good Place are set in the post-internet age.

So this is my answer to the question of why so many television shows don’t depict life on the internet. It’s not reflective of some deep artistic impossibility, but rather it is explained by its possibility — by the fact that it has already been done, and artists look always to the new. Ironically, if the makers of television want to portray our new way of life in all its fragmented, attention-sapping weirdness, they should turn the clock back and seek inspiration from The Simpsons.

(originally posted on medium 7th February 2018)