The nature and location of the city changes as the situation requires. Sometimes they’re on the ocean, other time near a desert or next to the world’s most unclimbable mountain. When Bart sold his soul, they even had a subway. The town changes like the interior layout of the Simpsons’ house changes.
And Rocky and Bullwinkle.
3rd Street Subway Station is marked, but no actual subway line shown. Perhaps it’s just a fancy name for an underground shopping center?
And there’s “F Is for Family” on Netflix, though that one’s a 70s period piece.
I feel I acknowledged this.
But my point was that Springfield is not typically portrayed as a suburb. The only other community that is mentioned with any regularity is Shelbyville and that is portrayed as Springfield’s equivalent, not as the big city that Springfield is a suburb of.
Capital City is occasionally mentioned and it’s a major city. But it’s portrayed as being some distance from Springfield. It’s certainly not portrayed as being a major factor in the lives of Springfield residents.
And that’s not true of suburbs. I’ve lived in suburbs (and live in one now). Part of living in a suburb is you’re involved in what’s going on in “the city” even if you live outside of it.
I give you the Springfield Subway System!
I guess I figured, they seem to keep putting episodes of The Goldbergs out there, each one often followed by an episode of American Housewife — and I figure there’s at least some conceptual overlap with that new sitcom where Kenan is raising two daughters; and, despite the ‘prequel’ gimmick, some overlap with the kids on Mixed-ish and Young Sheldon; and I figure that Modern Family was still sucking up plenty of air this time last year, when Man With A Plan was wrapping up its run shortly after Fresh Off The Boat did.
Because like a lot of mediocrity, it is ubiquitous. W a second my question, why does my opinion trigger you so?
Dino, and the other dinosaur slaves, broke the 4th wall all the time. Though not in an adult manner, I guess.
“Eh, it’s a living.”
Well, no. I think the article writer was upset that the show wasn’t trying to make some kind of deliberate statement, and my point is that the show has rarely tried to make a deliberate statement of any kind, and where there is any political bias, it’s more in the background about how characters are treated and things like that. The Simpsons doesn’t do “Very Special Episodes”.
Not to hijack about another animated comedy, but that’s a good argument as to why Arlen in “King of the Hill” isn’t a thinly masked Garland, TX, and is its own fictional small/medium town.
I think that’s a big piece of it; it’s been thoroughly lampooned and mutated by The Simpsons and other latter-day family sitcoms like Arrested Development, Modern Family, Married with Children, etc…
Plus, I think it’s well worn ground where there’s not so much stuff left to go into in the family sitcom anymore; it would take a fairly unique show to succeed after all that as a straight family sitcom.
I think the article has a point, but I’m not convinced that the political salience of the Simpsons is that relevant to its quality. When I think of the best episodes of the Simpsons (and my favorite ones), the socioeconomic plight of the Simpsons is only rarely a major issue.
I also am going to disagree with the claim that the quality of the writing has dropped off as much as people think. I watched the Simpsons from the early 90s through the mid-00s, but I also occasionally watched an episode or a season after that, and they’re still good.
Mostly what’s changed is that there are a lot more avenues for the type of humor that the Simpsons was the cultural touchstone of. It was a pillar of television culture at the time, and now it’s not, and that has more to do with the fracturing of entertainment and the long tail of streaming than it does with the writers room at the Simpsons or the salience of politics.
The top rated primetime shows in the 90s had 20+million viewers. The top-rated shows now are barely over 10 million.
I think this is the answer. Satirizing the big happy family depicted in sitcoms is the whole point of the Simpsons. I don’t think the point was ever to be an accurate depiction of an American family except when it was necessary to deconstruct the tropes it was making fun of.
Also I agree with the article that the lifestyle depicted is much tougher to live nowadays than it was in the 90’s, but I don’t think that it’s impossible to be apolitical nowadays. I think for most Americans, politics isn’t something that occupies all that much mental space, even with Trump. I think everyone has an opinion on the pandemic, but I think afterwards it’s going to be a lot like it was 10 years ago where most people have a vague feeling that the country is leaving them behind but aren’t necessarily going to be paying attention to it more than on a casual basis.
Rocky and Bullwinkle was at least as subversive and adult than was The Simpsons. Looney Tunes was aimed at both adults and children. The thing is, many of the ‘adult’ jokes involved a culture that no longer exists, so people don’t get the references. A few are timeless like their riffs on Wagner and the Barber of Seville, but lots are riffs on movies and actors and politicians of the time who are no longer remembered.
In the early days of cinema, cartoons were often very adult. Don’t forget Betty Boop, whose sexual innuendo and tiny flapper dress was found to be in violations of the Hays act. Later there was Fritz the Cat, the first cartoon to get an X rating. In fact, the idea of cartoons as ‘children’s entertainment’ only even started after the Hays code forced removal or modification of adult content, but then ‘safe’ cartoons like Looney Toons and Rocky and Bullwinkle slipped adult content in under the eadar. You can find dirty or otherwise adult jokes and adult references in many of the old cartoons of the 50’s and 60’s.
And it made sense that they would be like that, as the primary place people saw early cartoons was at the theater, where adults and children coild both be found.
One example was an old Three Little Pigs cartoon, where there was a picture of ‘father’ on the wall, and it was a picture of some linked sausages. In another one, Daffy Duck is reading “Playduck”. Tame now, but at the time Playboy was considered slightly scandalous.
There’s lots more. During WWII there were cartoons featuring “Private SNAFU”. SNAFU is an acronym meaning, “Situation Normal - All Fucked Up”. I’ll bet parents had fun explaining what that meant to the little kids…
When would the little kids ever have seen a Private SNAFU cartoon? They were shown to members of the military.
Only to them? I thought they played with newsreels during the war. But you may be right. Still, it’s a cartoon aimed at adults… There were a LOT of WWII themed Looney Toons cartoons.
Modern Family is quite famous as show not about a nuclear family but 2 generations of a family, and the patriarch is remarried. A nuclear family sitcom would be mostly focused on the Dunphys, perhaps.
Goldbergs, Young Sheldon, and Fresh Off The Boat are deliberately set in the past.
I believe that Man With A Plan, Mixed-ish, and American Housewife don’t do all the well with ratings (Man With A Plan got canceled).
I’ll be interested to see if this new Kenan show can make some waves. Although the premise there is that the father is recently widowed and lives with his father-in-law and brother.
But, as noted above, there are family sitcoms, they just have different conceptions of what “Modern” families are like (no pun intended) - well, or are nostalgia trips.
Maybe you’re right, and the change actually started long ago- I’ve always thought All in The Family was something of a skewering of that, by having Archie Bunker be sort of the anti-dad when compared to Mike Brady, Ward Cleaver or Stephen Douglas (My Three Sons), or any of the other pre-1971 family sitcoms. It was sort of like the proto-Roseanne/The Conners in that I suspect at the time, many more families were like the Bunkers, and not like the Bradys or Cleavers.
Either way, the Simpsons were definitely a long nail in that coffin, as it has always clearly been a sort of satire of both the classic family sitcom AND the idyllic small/medium sized town as portrayed in those shows (and movies like Back to the Future for that matter).
Fair enough, but: I was thinking that, while Modern Family was doing plenty of other stuff, the go-to move was still right there as needed. Sure, go write a B plot for Gloria or Mitch or whoever; but then keep the episode moving along by cutting back to a sitcom kid, making their way through a classic sitcom-kid scenario, and getting set up to deliver a sitcom-kid line.
At that: yeah, The Goldbergs can always do a quick Remember-The-‘80s bit about a sitcom kid geeking out about some brand-new thing called Indiana Jones or Knight Rider or whatever; but you’re writing an episode here, so also throw in a coming-of-age subplot for him for him to quip about in front of his school locker; and, right as that’s about to overstay its welcome, cut to Sitcom Dad exhaustedly saying something appropriate upon coming home to watch TV from his easy chair after a day at work, and then get his reaction after Sitcom Mom perkily gives him a heads-up about some big parent-teacher thing. You know.
And so on: whatever the show, you’d write stuff that plays into that show’s gimmick, because of course you would; but if you also have the advantage of being able to write Standard Sitcom stuff as appropriate — with lines that you could’ve given to Lisa Simpson or Bart Simpson, or lines you could given to Homer or Marge, or whatever — then you pad an episode out with it, or even build an episode around it while using the gimmick for mere padding.
Classic sitcom-kid scenario in a very different look of what family is. The kids would be trying to get away with stuff from not just their mothers, but either their step-grandmother (for the Dunphys) or technically half-sister (for Manny). Not to mention a long plot point where Phil is turned on by his step-mother in law who is the same age as his wife.
The argument made about the Simpsons isn’t classic sitcom tropes, but rather whether the sort of family that is demonstrated still resonates with TV audiences, aside from a nostalgic way.