Sir, – Writing as someone who has watched The Simpsons since I was a teenager, I’m reluctant to accept the reasons outlined by Finn McRedmond that it “should have been off air long ago” (Opinion & Analysis, November 9th). It still draws in millions of weekly viewers across the US, and elsewhere, probably because it has in many ways adapted to various changes in society and its mores. Thus, as Finn McRedmond says, it’s “unrecognisable from its original incarnation”, but those crude sketches would draw few viewers now.
The major shortcoming the show now faces, I believe, is that its central premise no longer holds. The blue-collar working-class family that defined US society through the 20th century, and which The Simpsons lampooned, barely exists now. Manual jobs have largely disappeared, family units have become smaller and less stable and the casual use of addictive substances like alcohol, as exemplified by Homer, have been replaced by more frightening successors. Quite simply, the main trope of the comedy has ceased to be funny.
In outlining its origins, Finn McRedmond referred to programmes like The Cosby Show and Family Ties. They, in portraying wealthy families facing what we now call first-world problems created the niche for the Simpsons to expose as archaic and sepia-tinted their version of American life. Oddly now, three decades on, the rebel has now become a conservative. The once iconoclastic Simpsons now portrays a lost America, where parents stayed together raising children on modest salaries, solving problems with their neighbours, agreeing with them on the greatness of their country and indulging their vices by drinking the occasional beer.
In bringing me back to my teens it takes me to a time when, for its various limitations, America was the epitome of “cool” and offered a vision to the rest of the world of what was possible rather than the cautionary tale of polarisation it has since become.
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One of the writers of the program Al Jean, astutely observed in 2021 that while some “say The Simpsons isn’t as good as it used to be, I would say the world isn’t as good as it used to be. But we’re declining at a slower rate”. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.
Sir, – Finn McRedmond suggests that The Simpsons should have been taken off the air long ago. Perhaps it is all because of the constant need for the TV series to adapt to ever-changing social mores. Writers no longer can express what is but rather what should be. I am still recovering from the loss of The Flintstones all those years ago. A classic and, like The Simpsons, one of the most influential animated series of all time. We need escapism, laughter, wit and humour. – Yours, etc,
AIDAN RODDY,
Dublin 18.