Early Simpsons is Weird

The Simpsons is one of those weird memetic entities where you can, in a sense, give accurate summations of the cast and characters by consuming Simpsons memes into your soul. Everyone I know is aware of Steamed Hams and if I asked them to write a short essay answer on what Smithers and Chalmers' dynamic is, I wager 90% of them would hit the mark.
And it's been that way for a very, very long time. Some of the first VHS tapes we ever owned growing up were Simpsons tapes, and it didn't take that long of a watch-through for the character personalities to solidify. Bart is a serial slacker with a heart of gold and is much wiser than his academic performance implies, Lisa is the soulful thinker who's perhaps too in tune with the world around her, Homer is the easygoing idiot whose anger is only ever comedic and who, despite a penchant for greed and impulsiveness, is usually won over by his strong moral core, while Marge is the walking sanity checker and overprotective parent who nonetheless has a tendency to engage in stupid shit because she's an extremely repressed middle class housewife. It's like clockwork.

But like... Okay so I've been experiencing pretty bad executive dysfunction lately. Just a total inability to Do Things without other people pushing me into them. The mere act of booting up Final Fantasy XIV for the sole purpose of entering my house, opening a door and click "redeploy" 2-4 times is sometimes too much. My game drive is infested with games that I thought "oh hell yeah I'll play that" about only to install 100GB~ and then not touch it. It's bad, man. So in lieu of doing anything, I figured my aimless digital wandering may as well have some background noise to it. Since it's been on my mind lately - after my replay of Hit & Run a while ago - I decided to hop on the Simpsons from the start.

And, as you may have inferred from the title and header, it's weird, man. Weird both as a component in the wider Simpsons Franchise and weird as a piece of art.

Homer Simpson eating a donut while riding a kart.

As insane as it sounds, this episode predates Homer being a donut-fiend by a few real life years.

If you've been in online fandom spaces then you've likely heard the term 'retcon' and it's even more likely that you've heard it deployed in condemnation of things that textually aren't retcons. Early Simpsons? Full of 'em. Characters' entire races change between episodes - sometimes even shots, thanks to an abundance of bloopers - and a lot of things that can feel familiar if you've watched a Simpsons episode/season before are completely absent. It's common knowledge that the Simpsons family know Apu and frequent the Kwik-e-Mart often, yeah, so it's jarring to go back and see a time where they just don't recognize one another as anything more than customer-provider.
To say nothing of how strange the side characters are. Series mainstays like Skinners' mother, Krusty, Smithers and even the news guys are here but just... Not. They're concepts thrown in to advance the plot that got kept around for one reason or another. I imagine as a new viewer these wouldn't even register in your mind but for me, who watched a lot of Simpsons growing up, it's jarring as all hell.

But what really strikes me about the earlier seasons is how... Anxious, to use one word, I suppose.

The Simpsons family are, at the start of the series, poor. They have a nice house and a sole breadwinner, but the literal first-ever broadcast episode of the series is Homer having a prolonged depressive fit because their entire Christmas plan was based around him getting a bonus which never materializes. He tries his best to hide this development, digs himself a bigger hole, and takes up a temp job that helps but does not fix the problem whatsoever.
Subsequent episodes - technically, prior episodes due the broadcast order being massively out of sync with production order - aren't really much kinder; one sees Bart subject to academic abuse for being obviously behind and opens on a "joke" about Skinner offloading the financial cost of vandalism to his obviously working class family, Homer tries to end his life after being fired and subsequently has to compromise his morals to get his job back and provide for his family, Lisa suffers a bout of severe depression that everyone struggles to handle because she's like 10 and they're adults, and just... Life kinda sucks for the Simpsons, man. Bart is obviously stifled by an education system that's not capable of dealing with his presumed-to-be-ADHD, Homer constantly has to compromise himself to make a living wage, Marge is clearly unhappy with the mundanity she inhabits, and Lisa isn't taken seriously by anyone who could deal with her melancholy. It's pretty bleak!

This is what makes it so compelling, though. Later seasons of the show love to do that "awww! look! they really love each other thing!" but the personalities are so flanderized that it's hard to really take seriously. There's countless episodes where Marge textually abuses Homer, or Homer near-fatally neglects his family, or Lisa unloads the kind of verbal abuse onto Bart that'd normally get a kid taken to behavioural therapy, and these naturally make the continued affirmations that the Simpsons really do 'love one another' kinda hollow. Like, even as a young Ham, I found it weird that Strong Arms Of The Ma has Marge implicitly assault Homer and it's treated as a joke.

In contrast, Early Simpsons has them be kinda neurotic but rarely outright evil. Homer swallowing his pride and accepting Burns' obvious bribe is portrayed as a somber moment that really affirms how much he loves his family. Marge gives Lisa some truly dogshit "just smile :)" advice that backfires, and she immediately relents once she sees how much her daughter is truly suffering. Bart's attempts to Fit In lead him to misinterpret some advice from Homer, and the man pats his son on the shoulder in reassurance when everyone else wants him dead. They're not perfect - the show would be markedly less funny if they were - but it's their flaws and neuroses that make the heartwarming bits... well, heartwarming.

It's also just vastly funnier if I'm being honest. The jokes come at a rapid pace and a surprising amount don't even get any focus. Past a certain point the series becomes obsessed with either reference humour, or starts cribbing from Seth McFarlane's playbook, so it's nice to see an era of the Simpsons that... you know... tell jokes.

I've been thinking about Rot lately. In syndicated art it's called seasonal rot and in games or movies it's typically called sequelitis. If I use those terms around most people they typically don't know what I mean, but a brief explanation ALWAYS with "Oh yeah! Like [thing]!" In fact, in the middle of writing this I got into a conversation about Doctor Who that pretty much went that exact same way. It's something people grasp intuitively even if the exact wording isn't familiar... So why do people keep asking for more things?

I've become a somewhat annoying downer about this. Whenever people in earshot of me say "They should make a new [franchise/work]!" I just look at them and go "Why?". You may think this is overly confrontational - and it is, on purpose - but the replies I get have always alarmed me... Because I don't get any. I'm not gonna pretend there aren't any reasons why some things shouldn't get a continuation (I am confident Shenmue fans want the 'series' put out of its misery, the Trails guys clearly have some manner of a plan, and god knows there's a million creatives who've been fucked out of making their desired followup) but every time I ask I get one of the following responses:

Or some variation of these. It weirds me out, honestly. Sequel-begging is deeply embedded into our culture but I can never really find any justification for the existence of most sequels beyond "well i want it :(" which is just kinda... Pathetic?
Further to the point, though, The Simpsons is sorta the ultimate example of why you shouldn't beg for More. Because Simpsons fans got more and they hate it. For very valid reasons, too! This is the almost-literal poster boy for Seasonal Rot. It's so heavily associated with Seasonal Rot that the debate isn't so much "does the Simpsons qualify or not" so much as it's "when, exactly, did the rot begin?". I've actually made myself kinda sad by doing this rewatch, knowing that around once the 2002 hits there's a marked decrease in quality before the Simpsons graduates from Series to Franchise. Is this the fate of everything? They're throwing Blinx the Time Sweeper onto PC. Is the future just 1000 Blinx games? 10000000 Simpsons seasons? However many Assassin's Creeds they keep shitting out? Fuck, dude. This was meant to be comforting.

Homer staring at some loose change.

The most striking part about the Simpsons' continued existence is the family's financial status. In the early seasons they're firmly a poverty-line working class family but as time goes on that just stops being believable. In 2008 it already felt unbelievable that they could have two cars and a manor-sized house on a single salary. In 2016 it was beyond fantasy. In 2026 it almost feels like a joke in itself. The Simpsons, unmoving and unchanging, have paradoxically changed unfathomable amounts by staying the same. Attempts at financial-woe stories have popped up here and there but, as these episodes are near-universally derided, perhaps even the writers understand that it's ridiculous to even pretend they're working class.
And, you know, that kinda explains why newer Simpsons repels me so much. I grew up in a not-dissimilar household and it was... Rough. Being the sole breadwinner of an entire house, and thus your failings becoming their problems, isn't easy emotionally. It takes a toll that's difficult to quantify but easy to perceive even as a child, and I suppose for me what made Simpsons so appealing was that it was significantly realer than something like Seinfeld, Frasier, King of Queens, Friends or Everybody Loves Raymond. Life sucked for the Simpsons, and in turn it made them suck, but they pulled through. So when I look at Modern Simpsons, I find myself thinking that not only is it profoundly unrelatable, that perhaps it's impossible for anyone to relate to. The real has become hyperreal.

Ah well. It could be worse, I suppose. It could be South Park.