In the shallowest way, Our Favorite Family has been accepted by the popular media as "one-dimensional characters with a silly catch-phrase." Unfortunately, far too many people know only this one-dimensional view ofThe Simpsons. (That was my view as well before I ever actually saw an episode. Once I actually watched it, however, I was hooked.)
In another way, The Simpsons has been accepted, particularly by critics, as satire. Yes, it's true that it is satire, and very good satire at that...but isn't satire "what closes on Saturday night"? If all there was to The Simpsons was satire, it certainly wouldn't have survived to this day.
If not a one-dimensional cartoon or a wicked satire, then, what is it? Alf Clausen, the show's resident composer, recently called it a drama rather than a sitcom. That statement gets right to the heart of the matter: the finest episodes of the series were neither sitcom nor "high concept." They were the continuing dramatic story of an American family.
No matter how hard you laugh at the Simpson family or how funny you find them, the characters are totally plausible and completely serious. Homer is a man who vaguely remembers his younger days as a freer spirit, but whose soul has been crushed by a workaday existence, and finds solace only in beer and television, the opiates of today's masses. Marge also had a promising childhood which did not turn out the way she had hoped. Rather than her spirit being broken, however, she repressed herself to make her the woman she is today.
Bart mindlessly rebels against authority: he shows great promise but will probably end up like his father. It's very likely that he suffers from an undiagnosed learning disorder. Many have expressed hope for Lisa's future, and it is very likely that she will escape the mind-numbing conformity of Springfield to the world outside. Still, it is even more likely that she will never find happiness. She may realize her potential, but will never enjoy it. Maggie, of course, is the sphinx-like observer of all. It is more difficult to see what lies ahead for her; perhaps her alienation will even outstrip Lisa's.
This portrait of the Simpson family I have just drawn is admittedly dark. But it is real: there is no sitcom moralizing here. The love that exists in the Simpson family is not a saccharine "TGIF" or "Full House" emotion designed to draw an "aah" from the studio audience (particularly since there is no studio audience) but a genuine love: it is all that they have to make their existence bearable.
Besides the Simpson family, many of the other characters are frighteningly real, from the children's friends (Nelson, the eternal bully; Milhouse, the eternal victim) to the teachers (Krabappel and Skinner, the lonely middle-aged educators) to extended family (the resentful sisters-in-law) to work acquaintances, and so on. Add your own examples as you like.
In the history of television, there are few series that have had so many realistic characters: "Taxi," "All in the Family," and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," perhaps. And even these shows played nearly everything for laughs; among comedies only "M*A*S*H" and "The Honeymooners" ever approached their subjects with comparable seriousness.
Add to the realistic characters a number of real-world situations that make up the plots of the show: Bart is victimized by a bully, Lisa deals with depression, Homer and Marge get into a major fight after he gets drunk, and so on. While later seasons indulged in more fanciful plots, the characters stayed far more human than any live-action characters. At its best, the resolutions to the show were not sickeningly sweet like so many sitcoms, nor melodramatic like the soaps, but real. At times, the Simpsons ceased to be fictional; they were simply too lifelike.
Taken all in all, The Simpsons is a less cynical take on life than Groening's other well-known cartoon. The moral of The Simpsons might be "Life may be hell, but it does have its moments."
A myriad of writers, directors, actors, and producers, too numerous to note here deserve kudos on this anniversary date. To those personnel: Thank you. Your efforts have made real life slightly less hellish. Thanks above all to Tracey Ullman (without who show The Simpsons would never have seen the light of day), James L. Brooks (a big-time producer who took a chance on a prime-time cartoon), and of course, Matt Groening.
There have been some who have called for the cancellation of The Simpsons, arguing that current mediocre episodes (_their_ opinion, not mine) sully the series as a whole. Whether you agree with this view or not, I think I can speak for many when I say I dread the morning after the final episode appears. It will be a very cold and dark day in a world that has just died a little.