You Can’t Go Homer Again
Why we’re so obsessed with working out when it all went wrong for The Simpsons.
When did The Simpsons get bad? It’s the answer we (and by we, I mean obsessive fans of an animated sitcom about a bunch of yellow chinless weirdos) seem to fixate on — countless clickbaity articles and obnoxious vlogs from websites like “Tech Radar” or “Screen Rant” or “Culture Spaff” claim to pinpoint that exact moment when the show went off the rails, like they’re locating the Higgs Boson, or isolating the dork chemical Poindextrose¹.
The answer, of course, is that there is no answer — at least, not a single answer that will satisfy everyone. It depends when you started watching the show, to an extent — if you’re my age, and you grew up with the The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favourite Family, then you probably regard Seasons 1–8 as untouchable gospel, and perceive that the show’s serious decline began in Season 11 with the death of Maude Flanders² or the revelation that jockeys are canonically goblins³. It may or may not have something to do with the fact that you have to waste a Christmas present buying a new “complete” guidebook every two years.
If you’re younger than me, you might think the show is classic until at least Season 19, after The Simpsons Movie came out (which sounds ridiculous until you remember that was 2007 and 2007 was fourteen years ago, time is a cruel unstoppable joke). If you’re older than me, you might think the show went off the rails when it went super meta in Season 8 (Frank Grimes, Poochie, space coyotes⁴), or even that it jumped the shark at Deep Space Homer in Season 5 (which again sounds ridiculous to me, but then again, “Main Character Goes To Space” is basically Sharkjumping 101). I’m sure there are folks out there who think that the show died when it stopped being a short on The Tracey Ullman Show. I haven’t met them, and frankly I don’t want to. This is all subjective — and above all else, deeply, deeply personal.
But why is it so personal? Why do we have this strange desire to pore over the show and work out the exact moment when it all fell apart, like a devastated teen sitting in their room after a break-up and analysing every moment of the relationship? Probably because being a fan of The Simpsons is a special kind of torture, a torrid, cruel relationship that after so many highs and moments of joy can only end in one way for every single fan — with the show reaching into your chest, grabbing your heart and dropkicking it into a wastepaper bin⁵. To fall out of love with The Simpsons is to fall out of love with a part of ourselves, a part of our identity, a part of who we thought we were — and yet it is also an inevitable rite of passage.
At its best, falling in love with a good TV show is like a whirlwind summer romance — it makes you laugh, it tugs at the heartstrings, but more than that it seems to really get you. You’ve only just started watching it but it sums everything you feel about the world, or it speaks to you in a way you’ve always felt but have never been able to verbalise — you want to spend every minute of the day with it, to learn more about it, to live within it, if that’s possible. It is perfect. It can do no wrong.
You quote it incessantly to your friends (“oh no! There goes the glue after all!⁶”, “I for one welcome our new insect overlords⁷”, “Hello! [sound of a police siren]⁸”), you get every piece of the show’s merchandise under the sun (ie, a cuckoo clock of Moe’s Tavern with a woo-hooing Homer that goes off on the hour, every hour and drives your family insane), and you steadily fill your social media with gifs of the show as a substitute for your own personality. You want to create a machine that makes a TV show into a person and then marry that person.
At some point, that feeling ends. (Of course it does. You can’t marry a TV show, you weirdo.) The best version of the end of the affair is when it’s taken too soon — maybe it’s a self contained story that has finished, or maybe it’s cancelled after two series, or maybe the creators go into film and make two very good films about Cornettos and one really bad one. You’re left with a perfectly crystallised set of episodes that you love intensely — but more than that, you’re left with the thought of what might have been. “If only there were more. Imagine the heights it could have reached.”
Of course, with most shows — and with The Simpsons especially — that’s not how the feeling ends. Instead the sheen comes off the summer romance, and the show does something to, in effect, betray you, to betray that connection you had between you and the show. Maybe it’s putting two characters together who absolutely should not be together (Josh and Donna in The West Wing, Frasier and Roz in Frasier, Rachel and Joey in Friends), or maybe a character crossing a red line for reasons you don’t understand or respect (Mathias sabotaging his own daughter’s career just to impress his new boss in Call My Agent!). Whatever it is, it’s the beginning of the end — characters you thought you knew act in inexplicable, cruel or wacky ways, and the mechanics of a world you thought you understood suddenly go awry. Maybe you stop watching, or maybe you’re aware that the show isn’t long for this world so you hate-watch the final few episodes, rolling your eyes at every woefully manufactured twist, screaming at your TV every time one of your former heroes says something they’d surely never say, and taking to social media afterwards to gleefully tell everyone what was wrong with this episode. No matter what though, you can comfort yourself that it will be over —the show will be brought to an end, and you no longer have to watch your former love embarrass itself like this.
Not with The Simpsons. It is horrifyingly, dizzyingly infinite — not just in sheer number of episodes (710 as of October 2021) or years (quickly speeding towards its 35th birthday), but in its awful timelessness. There’s no development — Bart has been stuck at age 10 for more than three times the length of his own “lifetime”. There’s no memory — what you regard as seminal moments in the show’s life are forgotten either by negligence or design. It is a yawning expanse of nothingness where characters learn and forget the same lessons over and over. Whereas most shows will have a sense of continuity, still holding onto the treasured memory of the golden years, The Simpsons must forget in order to survive. The show has had to unmoor itself from history and float through a beige existence, retaining only the tiniest memory of who they once were. What you remember about them is an ever-diminishing part, buried under 550 different mediocre adventures, and only getting more and more lost as the seasons go on.
You hate the show now, but unlike other finite shows, it will not break up with you by ending or getting cancelled — no, like a terrible passive boyfriend, it will treat you terribly but keep stringing you along for years of mediocrity. If you want out, you have to break up with it.
The death of a fan’s relationship with The Simpsons, therefore, is a painfully slow affair. Like a romantic break-up, there are in fact many stages — you don’t go from obsessive fan to never watching another episode overnight. There’s the first betrayal — the first moment when you realised that this thing you love is capable of being, at least periodically, truly awful. After that there’s the period where you try to ignore that nagging feeling in the back of your head that this thing that you’ve based your personality around is, in fact, not good any more. Then there’s the moment you accept that this show is more Bad than Good — when the show’s awfulness becomes irredeemable and you know you should stop watching. Then, finally, comes the break-up itself, when you actually stop watching.
For me, the last episode of The Simpsons I remember actively watching and caring about came in Season 14 (Large Marge, where Marge gets breast implants. It’s as terrible as it sounds). But the moment I knew the show was irredeemably bad came long before, in Season 11.
(Sidenote: it wasn’t actually either of the aforementioned moments (Maude’s death or “jockeys are goblins”), but the one where the Simpsons go to Florida and kill an alligator⁹, which, having rewatched it recently, is a weird time to mentally check out of the show. It’s not a terrible episode (it’s John Swartzwelder, so there are at least three genuinely brilliant gags in it), but it’s just relentlessly unfocussed to the point that it inspires a kind of draining nihilism, a sense that none of this matters and you should feel quite stupid for thinking that it does.)
Because the show goes on for so long, and because you can’t quite believe that something you used to love can really be that bad now, you can be stuck in this terrible hatewatching relationship for years. Watching every 22 minute episode is punctuated by exasperated groans and angry rants (“Why has the show just implied Homer has been raped by a panda?¹⁰ Why has that happened?”). People ask you why you’re still watching this show that makes you so mad, and you have no answer — you’re not even watching it in the hope that it gets good again. In fact, when the show suddenly has a moment of quality in these hatewatching years it makes you even angrier. You feel almost even more betrayed for it teasing you — the fact that it can still be good when it wants to means that it’s actively choosing to be bad.
Of course, the worst stage is not the actual break-up, nor the moment you realised the relationship was irredeemable, but the first betrayal, when the show veers wildly from what you think it should be. This is the moment on which the direction of travel is set, the first crack in the wall that lets all the rest of the doubts flow in, the first moment your unshakable faith in the whole thing is shattered, and no matter how hard you try you can’t patch it up. It is broken.
I suspect every Simpsons fan would have a different moment of when exactly that moment was for them — for many it would be the second episode of Season 9, when it’s revealed that Principal Skinner is actually an army veteran bad boy called Armin Tamzarian who stole the “real” Principal Skinner’s life. It’s an episode which angers fans because it seems to actively punish people for investing in the show — a carefully realised secondary character that people had come to love is exposed as a fraud, and ultimately the resolution of the episode (where the town decide to legally forget that any of this happened in a wildly lazy finale) is effectively designed to smash the concept of continuity within the show. For some reason though I never really minded The Principal and the Pauper: the ending is lousy, but the concepts it explores around identity, and whether it matters who a person was before you met them, are at least uniquely ambitious. More than that, however, it treats Skinner’s (or Tamzarian’s) plight with a kind of compassion — the scenario itself is inherently ridiculous, and it’s perhaps a betrayal of the Skinner that the audience thought they knew, but you at least get a sense of the human tragedy of his situation when he is made to leave “his” “home”.
The moment when my faith in the show was rocked forever came eleven episodes later. In some ways, The Joy of Sect is quite a forgettable episode — on a typically “later Golden Age” zany whim, Homer joins The Movementarians, an insidious cult, and signs his family up into the bargain. Maggie, Bart and Lisa are soon brainwashed alongside Homer, picking lima beans in service of a mysterious “leader” — it’s up to Marge to flee the cult and save her family with the help of Ned Flanders and Reverend Lovejoy. A few hijinks later, Homer reveals the cult is a scam, the cult leader gets his comeuppance by being held up at gunpoint by Cletus, and the episode ends with the family sitting in front of the TV and watching the real brainwashing cult, FOX (ahhhhhhh). Credits, Gracie lady shushes, 20th Century Fox trumpets and we’re out. Great.
I’ve thought a lot since about why I found — and still find — The Joy of Sect a uniquely disturbing episode. I’ve talked to a few friends who don’t mind it, and I find myself struggling to verbalise exactly what it is about it that upsets me so much. Is it that the characters are in mortal danger? Not necessarily — Homer has been milliseconds away from being punched to death by Drederick Tatum¹¹, Bart has been on the cusp of being murdered by Sideshow Bob repeatedly, and those are some of my favourite episodes. Is it that it’s particularly outlandish? Again, no — I didn’t baulk at killer theme park robots¹² or Homer becoming the head of a secret society¹³. Do I just hate cults? I mean, sure, who doesn’t — I think I watched this episode a couple of months after I was accosted by some Scientologists in Tottenham Court Road and strong-armed into taking a Personality Test, which was incredibly awkward and weird (basically a bunch of adults trying to convince a 13 year old that he was irreparably damaged and the only way to fix him was to give thousands of pounds to some alien worshippers).
Having reflected on it for far, far too long, I think the thing I can’t forgive about The Joy of Sect is the way it introduces this terrifying, existential horror into the show so casually and so lazily, without acknowledging the human cost on all of its characters. It’s not just The Simpsons who join this cult — it’s the entire town. It’s almost instantaneous — one minute the cult is a fringe at Springfield Airport, the next minute almost every single citizen of Springfield is at their camp being brainwashed. There is no motivation, no crack that the cultists exploit — they are just able to flip a switch and watch as two hundred secondary characters (Moe, Apu, Kent Brockman, Edna Krabappel, Sideshow Mel) give up their humanity and submit to a life of indentured servitude. Sure, Springfieldians aren’t the most intelligent people — they allowed a charlatan showman to build a failed monorail in the town thanks almost entirely to his ability to carry a tune¹⁴ — but at least there there was a conman, a town taken in by a smooth talker. They’re not panicked into groupthink by a traumatic event like a comet threatening to destroy Springfield¹⁵, or blinded by greed thanks to the allure of a Hollywood producer filming the latest Radioactive Man in the city¹⁶. Here, the plot requires that they must happily give up their lives to a cult, and so that’s what they do. It is an event so traumatic, and so profoundly unmotivated, that it forces the audience to no longer invest in these characters as real people — because if they did it would be too awful to comprehend.
I think in a sense the show knows that the evil they’re imposing on their characters is unforgiveable — why else would they make the organisers of The Movementarians so aggressively bland and devoid of personality? They aren’t wide-eyed victims, taken in by the Leader — they’re fully aware of the scam that they’re perpetuating, and they have zero qualms about carrying it out. There’s a reason that these are new, unique characters, never seen before or since in the show — the cruelty that they have to display (waging psychological warfare on the people of Springfield, stealing their homes and seeing them as ‘property’ to be exploited) is so heinous that no pre-existing characters in the show are capable of it. The writers must have at least explored the idea that the cult should be based around a known character — Mr Burns being the most obvious choice, a concept backed up by the way the final episode has a strange tangent where Smithers tries to make his own sect around his boss with a wax Zeus bodysuit. In the end though, even the man who stole the sun from Springfield¹⁷ would baulk at this — it’s a level of inhumanity that’s beyond even our cartoon villain.
Perhaps I’m being too sensitive, and trying to find a rational justification for my own weird taste. Certainly I didn’t have these thoughts at the time — I was just aware that something was wrong about the episode, and if you asked me to put my finger on what that was I would probably have said that it was the bit where Marge manages to deprogramme Bart and Lisa from the cult with the promise of hoverbikes, even though within seconds of being freed they discover that hoverbikes aren’t real.
But I think my hatred for The Joy of Sect stems from a sense of the show pursuing jokes without caring about the collateral damage to its characters, in the same way that fans who hate The Principal and the Pauper hate the way it pursues a wacky premise without caring about the damage to the show’s continuity. At its core, what separates The (Golden Age) Simpsons from its contemporaries is its care and affection towards all of its characters — sure, some secondary characters may be treated poorly occasionally, and there is a bit where it’s implied that Apu and his brother have been blown up by an errant grenade launcher off screen¹⁸, but the show will give them arcs and a pathos that encourages you to invest in them. Think of Lenny’s “Please don’t tell anyone how I live”¹⁹, or Moe’s sad quiet “Sears’ Catalog”²⁰. The characters are rich and layered — ridiculous, sure, but ones with real motivations. The Joy Of Sect is probably not, looking back on it, the first time in the show that these characters were swallowed up and stripped of their dignity and their personality in pursuit of a lazy broad premise, but it’s the most egregious example, and certainly the first one that made me question whether this was the show I thought it was.
Usually the act of pinpointing when a show went bad is, for a fan, an act of reimagining history. If only they hadn’t jumped the shark at that moment, you can tell yourself. If only they had resisted the temptation to betray everything I love about this, they could have continued to make something that remained perfect, forever. It’s similar to pinpointing causes of monumental and tragic events in history — part of you does it because you think if you can isolate and remove that single moment, you can create a timeline in your head where it didn’t happen.
But the sheer infinity of The Simpsons makes you realise how impossible that is. This show will always let you down, because it has an infinite amount of time to do so — you couldn’t stop it, it was always going to go bad. You were always going to grow apart — at some point your tastes would change, and the show would start to court younger viewers who liked Lady Gaga and Kid Rock. In a way, it’s not the show’s fault — it is time’s, distorting this perfectly formed show, forcing it to live long past its natural life, making it a bloated, cruel, careless monster, a mockery of the thing you once fell for.
Falling in and out of love with The Simpsons will always hurt. It can only end in pain. But like the best break-ups it also teaches, and it strengthens your own understanding of yourself. It tells you that perfection is just an illusion — that even your favourite things, that you thought you could love unconditionally, can be flawed. It teaches you to cherish what is good, and to accept that you cannot control it when it goes bad — when you realise it no longer speaks to you, you must simply let it go. No matter what it became at its worst, and no matter what it is now, it doesn’t change what you loved about it in the first place. We’ll always have the monorail.
- “Bye Bye Nerdie”, Season 12, Episode 16
- “Alone Again, Natura-diddly”, Season 11, Episode 14
- “Saddlesore Galactica”, Season 11, Episode 13
- “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer”, Season 8 Episode 9
- “New Kid On The Block”, Season 4, Episode 8
- “Bart’s Girlfriend”, Season 6, Episode 7
- “Deep Space Homer”, Season 5, Episode 15
- “Summer of 4ft 2”, Season 7, Episode 25
- “Kill the Alligator and Run”, Season 11 Episode 19
- “Homer vs Dignity”, Season 12, Episode 5
- “The Homer They Fall”, Season 8, Episode 3
- “Itchy & Scratchyland”, Season 6, Episode 4
- “Homer the Great”, Season 6, Episode 12
- “Marge vs the Monorail”, Season 4, Episode 12
- “Bart’s Comet”, Season 6, Episode 14
- “Radioactive Man”, Season 7, Episode 2
- “Who Shot Mr Burns Part 1”, Season 6, Episode 25
- “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Badassssss Song”, Season 5, Episode 19
- “Realty Bites”, Season 9, Episode 9
- “Who Shot Mr Burns Part 2”, Season 7, Episode 1
