By now, you’ve all heard of “The Simpsons.” It’s pretty hard not to, what with their cartoony faces being on everything from comics to cereal boxes to toilet paper. Heck, my eighth grade English teacher showed a clip from an early Simpsons episode as part of her lesson on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” (By the way, if you haven’t seen “The Simpsons‘” take on “The Raven,” you should watch it. It’s gold.)
“The Simpsons” have gotten so ubiquitous, it’s hard to imagine how much of a gamble it was to put them on television in the first place. There hadn’t been a successful animated series in prime time since “The Flintstones,” which ended over 20 years before “The Simpsons” premiered. Now, over 20 years later, there’s no shortage of animated shows finding success on late night, from “Family Guy” to “South Park” to “Archer,” and they all owe a debt of gratitude to “The Simpsons,” which defied every expectation of what a sitcom was capable of, what a cartoon was capable of, and what a media product in general was capable of.
Now going into its 26th season, “The Simpsons” shows no signs of slowing down. FXX, an offshoot of the cable network FX, just finished a 12-day Simpsons marathon, which got the channel its best ratings in the year it’s been alive. Due to this success, it recently announced that it plans to air 24 hours of Simpsons reruns all day every day for the rest of eternity. Now that they essentially have their own network, the Simpsons can finally claim that they’re as accomplished as Oprah Winfrey. All kidding aside, though, now that the Simpsons have a place to call home once when Fox inevitably kicks them out, they’ll be able to entertain even more generations of people to come.
“The Simpsons,” like all television series, will have to come to an end someday. It has proven itself extraordinarily resilient, but its age is quickly catching up to it, and there are only so many things left for the people of Springfield to do. I won’t make any predictions about when it’ll end, as folks have been doing that since the show started, and they’ve almost always been proved wrong. What I will say is that I’ll be sad to see it go, whenever that happens, because while it’s not as good as it was at its peak in the mid-90s, it still comes out with great episodes every now and then. The latest example of that would be the Lego episode, “Brick Like Me,” one of the last episodes of Season 25. It has the combination of humor and heart that drew viewers to “The Simpsons” in the first place.
And it will continue to draw them in, because “The Simpsons” isn’t going anywhere. If FXX ever gets tired of the boatloads of money it’s making off the show, another network may pick it up in a heartbeat. It’s entrenched in our culture in a way that no show has ever been and that I doubt another show ever will be. It’s the true definition of a television classic, and it’s one classic I’m sure the eighth graders of the future wouldn’t mind being forced to sit through.
The season premiere of “The Simpsons” airs on September 28 on Fox (University channel 11) at 8 PM.
“The Simpson”/”Family Guy” crossover will air the same night on the same channel at 9 PM.
