Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 22, 1990 TAG: 9003212172
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From wire reports
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In fact, televisions' truest portrayal of family life, circa 1990, is found in a cartoon - "The Simpsons," an animated series that has become the surprise hit of the season with its wildly funny and decidedly unsentimental depiction of hearth and home. It airs Sunday nights at 8:30 on WJPR, Channel 21 in the Roanoke viewing area.
The Simpsons are sort of the anti-Brady. They invert every convention of what we expect a TV family to be. They are family as post-nuclear mutants - bug-eyed, malevolent, TV-addled yet somehow sympathetic and, truth be told, a lot more like us than the Cleavers ever were.
The best word, though, to describe the Simpsons is hot. Cynical Simpsonspeak is starting to crop into the slang of the day and their weird visages are turning up on T-shirts and walls of their fans. And, last Sunday, they broke into the Nielsen's Top 20, winning their time slot for the first time.
"There's room on TV for a dysfunctional family you can laugh at," cartoonist-writer Matt Groening (pronounced Graining) says of the soulfully geeky animated characters he designed in about 15 minutes.
Who are the google-eyed, buck-toothed, dysfunctioning Simpsons?
Homer. Father. Works at nuclear power plant. Understanding parent ("Why you little . . . !").
Marge. Mother. Blue hair. Whiny. Known for sage advice ("There, there . . . ").
Maggie. Infant. Communicates distinctively (by sucking pacifier).
Lisa. Typical second-grader ("How can we sleep at night when there's so much suffering in this world?").
Bart. Fourth-grader. Spiked hair. Sensitive ("Oh, gross, man!").
"They're anarchic. They're anti-social," says Christopher Geist, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green University in Ohio. "They're a quick release. In the dorms here on campus, that's when everything stops. Everyone watches `The Simpsons.' "
At California State University, Stuart Fischoff's media psychology class has been discussing the Simpsons - as well as their Fox network neighbors and soulmates, the Bundys of "Married . . . With Children." You wouldn't find such families in the same neighborhood as Robert Young and Donna Reed.
"As much as `Father Knows Best' was a reflection of America as we want to be, the Simpsons reflect America as we are," Fischoff says. "They are de-mythologizing the American family and looking at the dark side of it."
TV has a long history of viewing families through rose-colored lenses that turned them into the Cleavers, Waltons and Bradys.
"But there were real problems with that," Geist says. "People watch those shows and think, `Why isn't my family sitting around the 6 1 SIMPSONS Simpsons table for every meal like the Waltons?' So there's been a backlash."
Ergo, the more recent, more imperfect and more blue-collar sort of family has pushed its loud way onto our screens, the theory goes. And so have the Simpsons, with their misbegotten camping vacations, warm family dinners around the television set and hapless attempts at succeeding at school, work and home.
"It's a cartoon conforming to what's going on with TV families in general," says Geist. "The blue-collar focus can be compared to `Roseanne.' Not all families are like the Bradys."
And the times are ripe for the Simpsons.
"There has to be a receptive climate for a show like this to succeed. It's kind of like America after Vietnam. We see we're not what we thought we were," Fischoff says.
The show's style is quirky, and the humor - Groening's motto is "entertainment and subversion, in that order" - is darker than anything else on mainstream TV without being bleak.
"You can say a lot if you couch it in humor," Fischoff says. "Americans need to look at themselves in a safe way, and that way is animation. It's like sugar-coating."
For many, the show boils down to son Bart's world. The dude is cool. He basically thumbs his nose at all authority, parental and otherwise.
"For all ages, there's always been the rebellious youth, like Ferris Bueller, who does things that kids would like to do," Geist says. "They can laugh at Bart and appreciate his disrespect for authority."
Not to mention that of the bearded, banged, shaggy-haired Groening, who usually wears Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian-style shirts to work and is shaped not unlike the barrel in which Bart rolled down a hill on a recent episode.
Before "The Simpsons," Groening was best known for his all-too-true "Life in Hell" cartoon series that he syndicates himself to 200 newspapers, most of them campus or alternative publications. A sample:
"Why Is TV So Cool?" asks the headline above goofy-looking rabbits in front of a set. "It allows several people who hate each other's guts to sit peacefully together in the same room for years on end without murdering each other."
Groening created the Simpson family in 1987 at the behest of James Brooks, a producer-director-writer whose lineage includes the movies "Terms of Endearment" and "Broadcast News" and the luminous TV series "Taxi," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "The Tracey Ullman Show," currently on Fox.
So taken was Brooks with a "Life in Hell" blowup on his office wall that he encouraged Groening to try animation for the Ullman show. Fearing that transfering "Life in Hell" to Fox would mean also relinquishing its rights, Groening instead decided to create new characters, all of them except Bart named after his own family.
Thus "The Simpsons" began appearing on the Ullman show as brief "bumpers" separating sketches, with the distinctive voices and grunts of Ullman regulars Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner as Homer and Marge, in addition to Nancy Cartwright as Bart and Yeardley Smith as Lisa (Harry Shearer would join the cast as infinite other characters when it became a series).
"The Simpsons" is not predictable. A coming episode includes a sendup of the Rob Lowe sex tapes. With Fox's "Married . . . With Children" already under fire for raunchiness, will "The Simpsons" be next?
"It doesn't give me a thrill to try to offend someone," Groening says, "but if we do, too bad."
Will the characters in "The Simpsons" ever achieve true happiness? Groening himself once posed that question in "Life in Hell" about his comic strip characters, and the answer he gave in the strip also applies here:
"What a silly question! At this very moment, they are as happy as you are."
by CNB