Ludzie pragną czasami się rozstawać, żeby móc tęsknić, czekać i cieszyć się z powrotem.
Brooks and Sam Simon helped to shape the program with their years of experience in the production of high- quality television programs such as Taxi, Cheers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Lou Grant. Add a superb writing staff, and The Simpsons had, from the very beginning, just the right mix of ingredients to make it a popular television sitcom, while avoiding the banality and insipidity that have often marked that genre.
The Simpsons is justifiably famed for its satire of American suburban life and for its parodic engagement with American popular culture, especially the television culture of which it is itself a part. It is, however, first and foremost a family sitcom, and its most important satire and parody are aimed at that genre, which it has significantly revised, along with its fellow Fox program, the slapstick family sitcom Married with Children (1987–1997), and the edgy, working-class sitcom Roseanne (ABC, 1988–1997). The Simpsons
mounts an all-out assault on the idealized representation of the American family in such classic sitcoms as Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show.
Indeed, it is set in the fictional town of Springfield, which happens also to be the name of the hometown in the classic 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best, precisely the sort of idealized sitcom that The Simpsons is meant to unravel.
In any case, The Simpsons enjoys the double distinction of being perhaps the most important animated program ever to air on American television as well as one of the most important sitcoms. These two aspects of the program reinforce each other: The success of The Simpsons as a sitcom has helped it to gain new audiences that would not previously have been interested in an animated program, while the show’s animated status has helped it to break new ground and go where no sitcom had gone before.
Over the years, of course, The Simpsons would come to be renowned for its amusing use of material from any number of previous television shows as well as movies—such as Citizen Kane in the “Rosebud” episode (October 21, 1993)—and even literary classics such as A Streetcar Named Desire —in the episode “A Streetcar Name Marge” (October 1, 1992). This effective use of the vast storehouse of material that is American popular culture has helped to keep The Simpsons fresh year after year. Meanwhile, the Simpsons themselves have become beloved figures of this culture, and much of their success has come from the ways in which the travails of the Simpson clan appeal to a basic American yearning for family. While the dysfunctional Simpsons serve in obvious ways as a parody of idealized television sitcom families, they are still very much a family and typically come together (in their own way) in times of crisis. It is not for nothing that, in the show’s signature opening sequence, the entire family rushes home to share a couch and watch
Animation’s New Age: Meet The Simpsons 49
television: Their lives may revolve around the television, but at least they revolve together.
The Simpsons also appeals to a yearning for stability in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. After all, the Simpsons have a unique sort of family stability in that, as animated characters, they all remain essentially the same age year after year, creating a sense of continuity that is rare in the rapidly changing landscape of American culture. The husband and father of the family and star of the show is Homer Simpson (brilliantly voiced by Dan Castellaneta), a fat, bald thirty-something who typically seems more devoted to drinking beer and eating doughnuts than to taking care of his family. Homer (whose middle name is Jay, in tribute to Rocky and Bullwinkle
creator Jay Ward) is also ostentatiously lazy and stupid, a fact that makes his status as a nuclear-safety technician in the local power plant seriously problematic. Indeed, he frequently causes near-catastrophic crises at the plant, though things always somehow work out in the end. Yet Homer is at heart a good soul, oddly lovable, and given to doing the right thing in the final analysis, however grudgingly. He loves his wife and kids—though maybe not as much as beer and doughnuts—even if he doesn’t always
show it.
If anything, Homer tends to get more stupid and oafish as the series
proceeds, though in the episode “HOM ” (January 7, 2001), we learn that he is naturally quite intelligent but was rendered stupid when he rammed a crayon up his nose and into his brain at age six (though there is no explanation of why he would do such a thing if he had been intelligent until that time). Scientists discover and remove the crayon, suddenly making Homer a brainiac, at least compared to the other denizens of the Springfield—
a sort of microcosm of America that in some episodes seems to be a
typical American small town and in others to be a big city. Actually, the episode stipulates that Homer’s IQ has been raised 50 points to a whopping 105, but even this modest level of intelligence makes him unable to enjoy the pleasures of such things as watching Julia Roberts movies or shopping at the Disney store—suggesting that only idiots could enjoy such things.
Homer’s new intelligence also makes him highly unpopular among his
former friends, with only daughter Lisa, the family brain, now being smart enough to understand him. Eventually, he opts to cram another crayon into his brain, thus returning to his former self.
Wife Marge (Julie Kavner) is the glue that holds the family together.