America’s most famous family? It is not the Kardashians, that turbo-manicured, face-full-of-plastic, regnant Instagram dynasty. Nor is it the standard-bearers of the patrician Democrat class – who have spawned thousands of attempted copycats – the Kennedys. The Clintons, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts? Please. America’s most famous family is 2D and bright yellow, and it’s time to let them die.
20th Century Studios has announced a second – and pray to the heavens, a final – Simpsons feature length film, to land in the summer of 2027. The last film, 20 years before that, was a triumph. Almost everything else this family has been forced to perform on screen in the intervening period has been badly written, badly drawn, poorly conceived, out-of-date, laden with millennial cringe, and an insult to the legacy of one of the world’s greatest cultural products. Enough!
Conventional wisdom goes like this: from 1989 to about 2000, The Simpsons was the cutting edge of American TV – it showed a Midwestern nuclear family burdened by post-Reagan economic anxiety, it refused to sugar coat the sharper edges of domestic life (the patriarch Homer’s penchant for strangling the son, Bart, for example), it mocked and poked fun at the flyover states of the United States, but never ever held them in contempt. The politics were ambient: the youngest daughter Lisa was a vaguely bohemian social justice warrior; matriarch Marge was shorthand for trad values; Mayor Quimby stood in for lassitudinous and corrupt small government, Mr Burns for rapacious capitalists. And so on.
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But then the world changed and The Simpsons tried to change with it: the show slowly started to adopt the language and concerns of an increasingly socially-conscious American elite (we might call this “woke”), and relied increasingly on big-name celebrity guest stars aided by poorly written scripts, and everyone lost interest. What a shame it was to watch the hollowing out of The Simpsons – the once great ventriloquists of the lower-middle class political condition. Gone was the timelessness the original writers room aspired to, replaced instead with lazy contemporary reference. And none of the attendant insight.
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Why, you might ask me fairly at this stage, should you care? Well, first – it is important to venerate our cultural institutions, mirrors to our souls and all that, even if they come in the form of cartoon characters. We need to protect these institutions against decline. The Simpsons was not adequately shielded from the political demands of the 21st century and has been destroyed because of that. There is a moral contained in all of this about the fragility of the artistic realm, and how quickly the good stuff we make can become bad stuff. As the world descends further into the maws of AI-generated dross, clogging up our social media feeds and rotting the brains of adolescents, now is very much the time to be concerned about the quality of the TV we make and the books we write.
The kind of genuine, daring and opinionated originals who made the first seasons of the Simpsons are at risk of total extinction, replaced by huge data servers that destroy the environment, capable only of making mimetic and uncanny AI short-form videos. I do not think it is moral panic to suggest that this could be one of the defining pivots of the 21st century; the first slippage of snow in the ensuing avalanche of sloppy and soulless culture.
But bubbling under the surface of all of this is something more existential than the sad demise of a once-great comedy. In 2020, a writer in The Atlantic made the case that the life depicted in the Simpsons – single income, nuclear family, unionised manual labour work, home ownership, three children, two pets et cetera et cetera – was no longer attainable. Forgive me for indulging in the often-tedious generational warfare for a second: but that is not a world recognisable to young millennials or Gen-Z, who are supposed to be the primary audience for the show now. Home ownership, even with a dual income no kids household, remains a distant prospect for most of the urban young.
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And so, allow the film in 2027 to be the final act of redemption for the yellow family, then let it go. The writers are not good enough any more, as they trash one of the most important legacies of the late 21st century. Think about what TV is really for – to inform, educate, entertain, as the old adage goes. What it is not there to do is to reflect a world back to working America that no one living in it could conceivably recognise. The Simpsons hangs in the culture now not as a mirror to our souls, but as a spectre of a world long lost. There is nothing noble in keeping it on life support. But much to lament in all the forces – political correctness, lazy groupthink, mass-generated AI content, rapacious studios – that led to its death.
