XFL! XFL!
Sunday
is my favourite TV evening, since we get the consecutive block of War
At Home, The Simpsons and Family Guy. I haven't checked the listings on
the PVR yet, but I hope we get new episodes tonight and there isn't
again some stupid football game going on overtime before them!
Jokes aside, everybody knows how The Simpsons has changed during the years. The first season was total crap, even though we didn't know it at the time, but the show was at its best in the seasons three to six or so. After that, it just became a different show: an enjoyable show in its own right, but it's a totally different show nonetheless. For example, the modern version of the show includes a lot more real things, people and phenomena instead of springfieldized caricatures of these things. And I can still actually remember the exact moment when I realized that the show had changed forever, when everybody was kind of acting out of character. These days, all characters have done pretty much everything that they can do, so the only way for the show to proceed at all is to have them encounter even more fantastic situations.
Even so, there are two things in which the America depicted in The Simpsons throughout its run differs from real America, so that life in Springfield actually resembles the typical European lifestyle or the way things used to be in America a few decades ago. I would guess that the latter is one reason why Americans like the show without knowing it, since they can kind of recognize the past society even though they can these days experience it only in a few simulacra. (Look, I learned another $5 word.) First, people in Springfield seem to walk around a lot instead of zooming in their cars everywhere, and during these walks they encounter other people and communicate with them. Heck, in Springfield someone can make an announcement about something on the street and people gather up and listen. Of course, this is necessary since having the characters solitarily commute in cars and filling their shopping carts in Sprawl-Mart wouldn't make a very interesting show. But this is still revealing nonetheless.
Second, of course the size of Springfield varies according to the needs of the episode that sometimes it is a major city with an international airport, but usually it is a small town where everybody knows everybody else and even if you don't, you can tell by their dress and way of behaviour what they are. In the modern world, pretty much everybody is the same so that if you go to a BBQ or a party, you can't just look at people and instantly tell who is a doctor and who is a trucker and so on, but you have to find this out by asking it, since everybody looks and acts and talks pretty much the same. In Springfield, form follows function much better in this respect. It would be interesting if some episode depicted minor characters such as Disco Stu or Sea Captain being themselves in a place full of realistic people, perhaps visiting Shelbyville.
Other shows as Family Guy and especially Futurama are/were more consistent so that their latter seasons are similar to the first season. (In Futurama, one difference is that Hermes and Amy didn't have any personalities at all in the first season, the writers obviously putting them in as placeholder characters but didn't have time or need to flesh them out yet.) Futurama was and still is my favourite show in the sense that if I could choose to see a new episode of any of these shows, I would choose Futurama without hesitation. I really hope they bring it back.
We actually didn't watch any Family Guy until last summer, since the short clips that I had ever seen looked like the whole show had been put together from jokes that The Simpsons writers had rejected. But we started watching the show and quickly learned our mistake. Boy, was I disappointed when it turned out that we had watched all three seasons in reruns, even though it felt like that I had seen maybe at most 20 episodes altogether. (This is an interesting psychological illusion that I would like to understand better.)
I actually like Family Guy more than The Simpsons these days, although my enthusiasm is somewhat waning. The writers seem to have forgotten the first rule of farce, which is that the farce has to be grounded to reality as much as possible for it to work. Since by now it's quite clear that there are no rules whatsoever governing the characters or constraining their actions, even the most outrageous stunts fail to actually be anything at all. If anything can happen, nothing can. These days, Peter could bang Stewie's head against the floor and then set him on fire and that still wouldn't be anything at all. Pretty soon, anything less than something out of The Aristocrats will fail to arouse any laughter. For this reason, I'm not very optimistic about the future of the show: certainly it will not have a 20-year run like The Simpsons.
For some reason, I don't like American Dad at all, and have watched only a couple of episodes. (OK, that one part where the feminist daughter fell in love with the Muslim terrorist since they both hate America and think it is oppressive was great.) Perhaps the main reason for this dislike is that the roundfaced women of that show are so inane compared to Lois and Meg, and the alien and fish are equally inane compared to Brian and Stewie. Stick to good characters, I say.
If I was a writer of Family Guy, I would write a joke inspired by the topic of the posting "Chocolate-Flavoured Poo" of the blog "Philosophy, Et Cetera". This joke would come in three parts, each placed into one act of the show. In the first part, Peter asks Brian the question of that posting and they argue about the right answer, the reality-based Brian preferring the poo-flavoured chocolate over the chocolate-flavoured poo, the appearances-based Peter disagreeing. In the second part, they would argue about this being much angrier. In the third part, Peter would come to Brian with a tray that seems to have a chocolate bar and a poo, and announce that the chocolate bar is really specially treated poo so that it looks and tastes exactly like chocolate, and vice versa with the poo. Brian, to prove his point, takes the poo and starts chewing on it. Watching this, Peter gradually loses his angry face and tries really hard not to laugh, but eventually makes his trademark neener-laughter. Hearing this, Brian stops chewing, realizes that he was had and runs to the bathroom trying not to throw up while the rest of the family roaringly laughs at him. Man, I can already see this whole joke playing in my mind.
Jokes aside, everybody knows how The Simpsons has changed during the years. The first season was total crap, even though we didn't know it at the time, but the show was at its best in the seasons three to six or so. After that, it just became a different show: an enjoyable show in its own right, but it's a totally different show nonetheless. For example, the modern version of the show includes a lot more real things, people and phenomena instead of springfieldized caricatures of these things. And I can still actually remember the exact moment when I realized that the show had changed forever, when everybody was kind of acting out of character. These days, all characters have done pretty much everything that they can do, so the only way for the show to proceed at all is to have them encounter even more fantastic situations.
Even so, there are two things in which the America depicted in The Simpsons throughout its run differs from real America, so that life in Springfield actually resembles the typical European lifestyle or the way things used to be in America a few decades ago. I would guess that the latter is one reason why Americans like the show without knowing it, since they can kind of recognize the past society even though they can these days experience it only in a few simulacra. (Look, I learned another $5 word.) First, people in Springfield seem to walk around a lot instead of zooming in their cars everywhere, and during these walks they encounter other people and communicate with them. Heck, in Springfield someone can make an announcement about something on the street and people gather up and listen. Of course, this is necessary since having the characters solitarily commute in cars and filling their shopping carts in Sprawl-Mart wouldn't make a very interesting show. But this is still revealing nonetheless.
Second, of course the size of Springfield varies according to the needs of the episode that sometimes it is a major city with an international airport, but usually it is a small town where everybody knows everybody else and even if you don't, you can tell by their dress and way of behaviour what they are. In the modern world, pretty much everybody is the same so that if you go to a BBQ or a party, you can't just look at people and instantly tell who is a doctor and who is a trucker and so on, but you have to find this out by asking it, since everybody looks and acts and talks pretty much the same. In Springfield, form follows function much better in this respect. It would be interesting if some episode depicted minor characters such as Disco Stu or Sea Captain being themselves in a place full of realistic people, perhaps visiting Shelbyville.
Other shows as Family Guy and especially Futurama are/were more consistent so that their latter seasons are similar to the first season. (In Futurama, one difference is that Hermes and Amy didn't have any personalities at all in the first season, the writers obviously putting them in as placeholder characters but didn't have time or need to flesh them out yet.) Futurama was and still is my favourite show in the sense that if I could choose to see a new episode of any of these shows, I would choose Futurama without hesitation. I really hope they bring it back.
We actually didn't watch any Family Guy until last summer, since the short clips that I had ever seen looked like the whole show had been put together from jokes that The Simpsons writers had rejected. But we started watching the show and quickly learned our mistake. Boy, was I disappointed when it turned out that we had watched all three seasons in reruns, even though it felt like that I had seen maybe at most 20 episodes altogether. (This is an interesting psychological illusion that I would like to understand better.)
I actually like Family Guy more than The Simpsons these days, although my enthusiasm is somewhat waning. The writers seem to have forgotten the first rule of farce, which is that the farce has to be grounded to reality as much as possible for it to work. Since by now it's quite clear that there are no rules whatsoever governing the characters or constraining their actions, even the most outrageous stunts fail to actually be anything at all. If anything can happen, nothing can. These days, Peter could bang Stewie's head against the floor and then set him on fire and that still wouldn't be anything at all. Pretty soon, anything less than something out of The Aristocrats will fail to arouse any laughter. For this reason, I'm not very optimistic about the future of the show: certainly it will not have a 20-year run like The Simpsons.
For some reason, I don't like American Dad at all, and have watched only a couple of episodes. (OK, that one part where the feminist daughter fell in love with the Muslim terrorist since they both hate America and think it is oppressive was great.) Perhaps the main reason for this dislike is that the roundfaced women of that show are so inane compared to Lois and Meg, and the alien and fish are equally inane compared to Brian and Stewie. Stick to good characters, I say.
If I was a writer of Family Guy, I would write a joke inspired by the topic of the posting "Chocolate-Flavoured Poo" of the blog "Philosophy, Et Cetera". This joke would come in three parts, each placed into one act of the show. In the first part, Peter asks Brian the question of that posting and they argue about the right answer, the reality-based Brian preferring the poo-flavoured chocolate over the chocolate-flavoured poo, the appearances-based Peter disagreeing. In the second part, they would argue about this being much angrier. In the third part, Peter would come to Brian with a tray that seems to have a chocolate bar and a poo, and announce that the chocolate bar is really specially treated poo so that it looks and tastes exactly like chocolate, and vice versa with the poo. Brian, to prove his point, takes the poo and starts chewing on it. Watching this, Peter gradually loses his angry face and tries really hard not to laugh, but eventually makes his trademark neener-laughter. Hearing this, Brian stops chewing, realizes that he was had and runs to the bathroom trying not to throw up while the rest of the family roaringly laughs at him. Man, I can already see this whole joke playing in my mind.
While I still enjoy the Simpsons on the relatively rare occasions I catch an episode, it deterioriated to some extent several years ago when Homer became the main character in most episodes. It simply was funnier when Bart was at the center of the show. Homer is yet another one of the stupid-dad stereotyped characters seen in any number of shows. Bart was more or less unique.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 11:05 AM