A look back at the start of The Simpsons: Why no one talks about season one (and why they should)
As a child, The Simpsons was one of my favorite shows. My family had DVD copies of seasons one through eight, and at night I’d sneak them upstairs into the guest bedroom, boot up our combination CRT TV and DVD/VHS player, and watch them front to back. The seasons I watched possessed a dangerous combination of accessible, timeless humor, and the vague idea that I shouldn’t be watching it, which made it incredibly enticing for any child my age. As I grew up, I’d frequently revisit these seasons and my appreciation for them only increased, and – much to my friends, relatives, and doctors’ dismay – Simpsons referencing is a frequent occurrence whenever I’m talking with someone.
Contemporary discussions about The Simpsons are simultaneously unifying and divisive. Many agree that the show had a sharp drop-off in quality, but people tend to disagree about when it happened. Some will cite the infamously terrible season nine, episode two as the point when the quality dropped. Others say it stopped being funny in season twelve. Others will characterize its “Golden Age” as lasting all the way until season fifteen. Debates on this subject have been going on for decades and, by my estimation, will continue until the last members of the human race die off. However, I don’t want to focus on when or if The Simpsons suddenly got bad, but rather the far less discussed topic of when it “got good.” (For the record, season seven was the last truly great season. Season eight has some great episodes and some terrible ones; and calling anything beyond season nine “classic Simpsons” is sacrilege and should be punished as such.)
Seasons one of The Simpsons occupies a weird niche in online discussion. Either it’s included in peoples’ descriptions of “The Golden Age,” without any justification for its inclusion, despite its many distinctions from the other seasons, or it’s sidelined as people declare the starting point of “The Golden Age” as starting sometime during season three. Personally, I think it’s a shame such an important part in the history of one of the most well-loved shows on television be left nearly unmentioned in contemporary analysis, so this serves as my attempt to fix that.
Animation
The thing most people do mention when talking about the first season of The Simpsons is the shoddy animation. Season one, alongside seasons two and three, was animated by the animation studio Klasky Csupo, which had animated the original Tracey Ullman shorts where The Simpsons got its start. There are countless sloppy errors and unsettling designs left in the final product of season one, a result of pretty tight deadlines and limited resources. People love to point out the weird background character designs in “Homer’s Odyssey,” the single frame where the babysitter’s eye turns yellow in “Some Enchanted Evening,” or the upside-down background in one of the shots of “Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire.” But, in all honesty, the animation is still pretty decent. As the show went on, the animation would get much more polished but also much less creative and weird. The last season to really have stand-out creative animated sections was probably season four. The sequence of Mr. Burns talking to Smithers paying homage to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas in “Last Exit to Springfield”, and Homer’s heart attack in Mr. Burns’s office in “Homer’s Triple Bypass” stand out. So while the first season is pretty rough around the edges and features far more front-facing Simpsons than anyone should ever have to see, it also has some of the more unique and evocative sequences. We are shown extensive fantasy sequences from Bart’s perspective in “Bart the General” (where he is pursued through a warped version of his school by a gigantic Nelson) or “Bart the Genius” (where he tries to solve a math problem by visualizing it).
We also get a brief, but memorable, glimpse of Homer’s perspective on his family after they embarrass him at a company picnic, where he imagines them as devilish versions of themselves as he drives off into a mountainous hellscape. These sequences stand out as something The Simpsons would really never get into again. The biggest thing that strikes me is these sequences weren’t really played for laughs; they were used as a way to give us insight into the feelings of the main cast. As the show went on (even in the seasons people regard as “The Golden Age”), you’d almost never see extensive sequences that weren’t dedicated to a gag. The last example of that happening that I can think of is when Lisa visualizes the politicians as animals in “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” which was the first episode of season three. Nowadays, visual creativity is pretty decisively confined to couch gags and Treehouse of Horror episodes. Additionally, Homer is more animated in these early episodes than he’d ever be later in the show, even though his personality is more subdued. So yes, while there are a lot of gaffs that can make this first season seem sloppy animation-wise, I think it honestly has enough going for it that I still appreciate the animation.
Tone
The Simpsons, while ostensibly a parody of the family sitcoms of the 80s, honestly felt a lot more like one of them during its first season. While some of the anarchic energy from The Tracey Ullman Show shorts were still there, many of the episodes featured more traditional sitcom premises, had fewer jokes than the later seasons, and often had a morale or message tossed in. Bart the General famously ends with Bart talking straight to the audience about how war is bad, which unfortunately did not resonate with the US, who decided in the 21st century that war was the tops, actually, and we should get involved in as many armed conflicts as possible. If only we had listened to Bart Simpson.
There are a couple of season one episodes that, while featuring jokes, are mostly serious in tone. “Moaning Lisa” is almost entirely an emotional episode, and while “Crepes of Wrath” has a pretty comical premise of Bart being tricked into forced labor by French farmers who put antifreeze in their wine (despite the fact “Antifreeze Wine” did not contain actual antifreeze and occurred in Austria, not France) and being replaced at home by a child spy for communist Albania (which would fall a year after the episode’s release), it’s genuinely a pretty dark story for the majority of the runtime. While I do adore these episodes, it makes sense it’s something The Simpsons would move away from. They really don’t fit in with the highly comedic tone the show would move into. Of course, the show’s shift into full comedy wouldn’t just affect the tone…
Characters
Flanderization is a term that refers to a formerly multifaceted fictional character slowly being reduced to just the most recognizable aspects of that character. It’s named after Ned Flanders, who certainly was one of the more notable victims of it, but almost all the characters in The Simpsons have undergone this to a degree, some going through it far earlier than many people claim. As The Simpsons went on, character depth didn’t really aid the gag-a-minute nature of the show. The modern Simpsons’ cast more resembles a Comedia dell’arte lineup than fully fleshed-out characters. All the characters are instantly identifiable and their actions are always motivated by their one or two most recognizable traits. Homer is a buffoon and alcoholic, Marge is a worrywart and a nag, Lisa is a holier-than-thou smartypants (Lisa has undergone likely the earliest and most devastating character assassination in the series, going from a principled, well-meaning kid to a joyless busybody as early as season seven), and Bart is a mischief-maker who says “ay caramba” and “don’t have a cow.” When there is character conflict in the newer seasons, it can only happen through the clashing of any of the aforementioned traits. While season one’s characters are far less consistent from episode to episode, they also manage to not be as brutally boxed in. Lisa joins Bart in heckling the Opera, Marge gets drunk at the picnic and embarrasses Homer, and Homer actually cares about safety inspection. While these events don’t fit very cleanly into our modern understanding of these characters, they never feel like particularly blatant writing errors in the context of that first season.
Jokes
I’ve saved this one for last because, in all honesty, this is probably the part of season one that holds up the least. The fact is that, when stacked up against the seasons that would follow it, season one really isn’t as funny. But, to be fair, it also wasn’t really trying to be.
None of the jokes in season one really reached the level of quotability that the later 90s seasons had. Its funniest lines are more humorous through delivery than by ingenious writing. It’s more “sitcom funny” than actually funny. And this, I think, is probably why people just don’t talk about it as much. Not only is it much harder to reference thanks to a lack of iconic lines, but its gags just aren’t as memorable. So, while it avoids many of the criticisms leveled at what people consider “the worst seasons,” e.g. still using traditional animation, still having character depth, featuring almost no guest stars, and using very few immediately dated jokes, I think not having the sense of humor the series would go on to be best known for is probably what keeps season one largely out of modern discussion. I tried multiple times to ask people online what they thought about season one and got almost no answers. Meanwhile, posts asking about people’s favorite moments will get hundreds of answers as people recount the same quotes from seasons three through eight, ad infinitum.
So now, after having rewatched the entirety of season one for the first time in years, I do believe it has gotten a bad rap. It’s not unwatchable or boring, it even has some really great episodes (my personal favorites are probably “Moaning Lisa,” “Crepes of Wrath,” and “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”). So if you’re a fan of The Simpsons and have watched seasons three through eight to death, maybe try revisiting season one. It’s got issues and it’s not the series at its peak, but it’s still thoroughly entertaining and an incredibly interesting look at the show’s history.
