Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Folks, I come to you as a lapsed fan of The Simpsons. I’m old enough to remember the first funny shorts that appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show. I watched the first season from my freshman dorm room in college. I was as devoted a fan as anyone during the show’s first dozen seasons. But I haven’t watched a full episode in many years; in fact, considering it’s in season 28, I’ve been avoiding it longer than I watched it.
But I’m also not here to say that the show isn’t as good as it used to be when I watched it. To be perfectly honest, I really have no idea. What I do know is that, after 28 years, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about plots like “Homer finds a new app to help his life” that seem similar to “Homer gains weight to work from home,” just with newer technology.
However, the show’s humor, brought to life by showrunner Al Jean and his cadre of writers that are likely younger than the show, is still pretty sharp. It’s evident in the shorts that are periodically released on Fox’s animation YouTube page.
The latest of these one-offs shows Donald Trump tweeting about his first 100 days in office. The 80-second clip is jam-packed with jokes that could have been ripped from Full Frontal or one of Alec Baldwin’s better SNL Trump sketches: Sean Spicer hanging himself in the White House press briefing room, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon choking each other with Kushner haltingly telling Bannon to not touch his suit, and Trump surrounded by books with titles like Killing a Good Thing by Bill O’Reilly.
Watching that video made me think that The Simpsons, as a series, outlived its usefulness, and that the show could get back into the cultural conversation —and last indefinitely— by releasing shorts online.
Looking back at some of the show’s other shorts, most of them over the past two years have been Trump-related: Homer being sucked into the future president’s hair as the two of them descend the golden escalator before DJT’s announcement that he was running; a take on Hillary Clinton’s infamous 2008 “3 AM” campaign ad; Homer discovering Vladimir Putin voting for Trump. But what’s striking about them is the freshness of the jokes, some of which seemed like they were literally ripped from the headlines.
That’s something that the main series, whose episodes take a minimum of 6 months to go from script to airtime, just can’t accomplish. In a media environment where anything that’s a week old is considered old news, the need to be quick and immediate is paramount.
Looking at some of the view counts for the shorts – the “3 AM” short had over 11.5 million views, an audience the show hasn’t had in at least a decade – shows that, given the right topic, a Simpsons video can go viral. People still enjoy what Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie and the denizens of Springfield are up to, just not in the unnecessarily rigid form of a 22-minute, plot-driven episode.
More evidence that The Simpsons should ditch episodes for shorts are the couch gags that have been a signature of the show since day one. In the past few years, the most viral clips from the show have been couch gags, either because they’ve been epically long and involved, incorporated crossovers with other animated shows, or have been a collaboration between the writers and big-time Hollywood types. One in the latter category, a “Treehouse of Horror” couch gag from the twisted mind of Guillermo Del Toro was viewed almost 29 million times.
Of course, the big problem with making The Simpsons an online-only entity is money. It costs a lot of money to make an episode, not the least of which are the millions that are paid to the primary voice actors. Would Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, Dan Castellaneta, et al, take drastic pay cuts to do these shorts? Would people accept different people voicing these roles? Writers, animators and directors all cost money, whether the product is 22 minutes or 90 seconds. If Fox could find a way to monetize the millions of eyeballs watching Simpsons shorts online, they could sustain the series almost indefinitely.
It’s remarkable to think that there are adults approaching their thirties that have never known a world without The Simpsons. Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and everyone who’s been involved in the show should be proud of such an unprecedented achievement. But if they want their creation to be relevant to a third generation, they need to move online and just make shorts, like during their Tracey Ullman Show gestation period. Then, like Tupperware and cockroaches, the show will be around long after we all cease to exist.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
