27 Year Old American Family

On the Solvanam (Tamil) web magazine, there was an article about television shows in the west (U.S. & European). I wrote a follow up Tamil piece to that article. It got published yesterday as the lead/cover story of the latest issue! This is a quick & dirty translation of that article for your enjoyment.

When I watch a movie or a TV show, rather than being a superficial viewer, I try to learn what I can about  the thought/creative process that went into developing the show. This is not in preparation for me to become a movie director or TV show producer in future. I just think understanding background details will help me enjoy the show/movie with more depth. That’s all. Perhaps once I retire, this knowledge will help me write some useless books. But for now being able to enjoy few good shows like Breaking Bad in depth is RoI enough. :-)

One TV series that should be part of that good shows collection while being a show of very different kind is The Simpsons that has been on the air for the past 27 years on Fox.

Adults who may not have watched this show closely brush it aside thinking it is a children’s show like Tom & Jerry. You may remember ex-first lady Barbara Bush commenting in the early nineties that it is the stupidest show she has ever seen. That is the height of this ignorance. But the Simpsons show not only laughed aside such silly comments but made fun of the elder Bush and Barbara Bush themselves in one episode and is cheerfully running along till date.   

Serious TV shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter continue to narrate one overarching story without any logical error from episode to episode. So, you need to watch them from the beginning and continue till the end. But Simpsons follows the sitcom model and so each episode comes with self-contained stories allowing a new viewer to watch & enjoy any random episode.  

The main characters in this show are the Dad, Mom and the three children forming the nuclear family the show revolves around. They live in a small town called Springfield somewhere in the US of A. The location/state where Springfield is located is never revealed paving the way for so many jokes by itself. This fictional town is similar to Indian writer R.K.Narayan’s Malgudi that forms the backdrop for many of his stories/novels. Though the town is fictional, noting down various remarks & references that have appeared in various episodes, superfans have put together a very detailed map of Springfield that is fun to virtually roam around!

In cartoon shows such as Tom & Jerry, generally there will only be a small set of (single digits) characters. Where they live, their family members and other such details will not be important to the kind of simple stories being told. In contrast, some TV shows like Jetsons and Flintstones that were popular in the 1960’s have tried to create consistent broader backdrops with recurring office, home, small/large story characters and so forth. Simpsons creators have taken this idea an order higher creating a complete universe within the show. Click on the picture below to enlarge it. You will see ~400 characters that have appeared just once or few times or hundreds of times on The Simpsons!

A very unique characteristic of the show pioneered by the writers of this show is its layered approach to storytelling. Even a five year old child can enjoy the show watching the brightly colored cheerful looking characters that often do a lot of slapstick comedy. Slightly older teenagers can notice and enjoy how the two or three story threads weaved into each episode nicely blend with each other to form a coherent story line. For the enjoyment of older audience, there are references to American culture, politics, religions, world events, latest technology, sports and so on strewn all over the show with very funny takes.

Writers of this show don’t bother explaining each joke or story detail at length to ensure audience get it. As you learn more and more about the show and the world in general, you will find more and more details hidden in the show waiting for you to discover & enjoy! It is practically impossible to note and enjoy all the details packed inside any given episode when you watch it for the first time. This model encourages fans to watch the same episode multiple times to identify details they missed on their previous watching sessions. Superfans that have caught on to this model have been listing details hidden in the episodes on Did you notice? themed websites for decades! After watching any given episode couple of times, you can visit one of these sites to read & realize how much you have failed to notice yourself despite watching the episode more than once!

Several books have been written about this show. For example, “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets” by Simon Singh discusses all the math related details, theories and subtleties that have appeared in various episodes. Let us look at just one example. The Dad in the show Homer Simpson is portrayed as a not so clever dimwit. In one episode, realizing that he hasn’t accomplished anything worthwhile in his life, Homer attempts to become an Edison like inventor/scientist quickly. As a part of that effort, the figure below appears on the show for a second or two.

Scene is designed to make it look like Homer is scribbling down some meaningless numbers/symbols on the blackboard. But take a closer look at the second line alone. In the world of mathematics, the Xn + Yn = Zn equation is quite famous. Everyone remembers the instance where n=2 as Pythagoras Theorem that we encounter in middle school trigonometry. But as per Fermat’s Theorem, that equation does not have whole number solutions when n>2 is well known in math circles. (We can ignore the stories where many lost their hair becoming bald like Homer over 300 years trying to prove it. It is an interesting story in itself discussed here.) If that is the case, then how can 398712 + 436512 = 447212 be true? It will certainly make Fermat’s Theorem false! Even if you plug in these numbers into your calculator, it will come out right forcing you to think perhaps Homer has disproved Fermat’s Theorem! But in actuality this is a near miss solution since the correct answer for that sum is 4472.000000007112 which is way too precise for any of our regular calculators to compute correctly!  Unless we know these details, it is really hard to even notice this joke passing by right in front of our eyes when we watch the show! In fact, the first line on the blackboard talks something equally arcane about Higgs-Boson particle physics! Notice the level of details packed into a seemingly innocent shot that floats by in a jiffy! If such details tickle you, try watching this 4 minute long YouTube video. There Simon Singh explains the math secrets hidden behind 3 different numbers that flash by in another Simpsons episode innocently asking how many people are watching a baseball match in a stadium.

In another episode when the question P=NP? flashed by innocuously in the background of a scene, my friends and I have high-fived each other during my grad school days. If you know of Computer Science Professors, you can ask them about it. They might be surprised to hear you talk about P=NP? if you are not a C.S. major. Writers of the show possessing masters and Ph.D.s in Math, Physics, etc. is one of the reasons for such references popping up everywhere in the show.

You shouldn’t think that these references are limited only to the fields of Math and Computer Science. Two decades back, I came to know about the ancient Egyptian custom of burying a dead royal family member with hundreds of little servant dolls called Ushabtis that are meant to serve them in the next world only through a Simpsons episode!

Man of yester years Mr. Montgomery Burns (owner of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant where Homer works as a safety inspector) always answers the phone in the show with the greeting, “Ahoy Hoy”. It is because that is the appropriate greeting for answering the phone suggested by the inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell! Even though the world has moved on to adapt “Hello” universally, old man Burns is not ready to give up and change! One can keep writing page after page about these nuances. Berkeley and other universities in US have been offering courses centered around this series. For an example, see http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/muse/intro.html

Since this show has been on the air since 1989 continuously, averaging about 20 episodes per year, there are more than 550 Simpsons episodes on the planet. There has been a full length movie as well. During the last year, a new cable channel called FXX has been advertising that they are showing every episode ever created back to back and have done that more than once. Since each episode lasts about 21 minutes, even if they run them without any commercial interruptions, one run will consume more than nine days!  

Creators of the show have declared that the characters will not age. So, for the past 27 years Homer has been a 38 year old father, Marge has been a 34 year old mother, Bart & Lisa have been in fourth and second grades in the Springfield Elementary School consistently while Maggie has remained a pacifier sucking baby that never utters a word. Stories are always told as if they occur in the present day. So, the date of birth of characters get adjusted accordingly ignoring any inconsistency with what was said in another episode ten years back. While human beings have five fingers/toes in each limb, evolutionary biologists have argued that logically four fingers (three fingers + thumb) or toes are adequate. As per that notion, all the characters in this show are portrayed as having only four fingers/toes per limb! These are all intentionally introduced illogical paradoxes that have been maintained consistently!

Artists Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner,Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer have been the voices of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Apu respectively from the beginning of the show. Nancy who does the voice for Bart has even written a book called My Life as a Ten Year Old.   

Starting from India, Simpsons have been to England, France, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Iceland and even outer space in various episodes. There aren’t that many movies, cultural memes, games, politicians that have not been made fun of in the show. There are also several different experiments that have been tried out including recurring TV show within this TV show, clips of videos that are shown as trailers of a fictional movie that when sequenced form a self-contained storyline, 3D animation, real actors acting/appearing side-by-side with show’s cartoon characters, several dance and song sequences and so forth!

Depending on the storyline, new characters may appear in just one episode and vanish forever. Acting in the show by providing voice for a character is considered an honor by celebrities all over the world. So, starting from ex-British PM Tony Blair, Michael Jackson, Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Beetles band drummer Ringo Star, Nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus, Prof. Stephen Hawking and other hundreds of celebrities have appeared on this show either as themselves or playing a character. You can see a really long list of who appeared in what episode on this site. Even the crisp dialogs deserve their own mention/appreciation as they have captured the hearts and minds of the audience for decades. Couple of good samples will be Homer’s lines such as “Trying is the first step to failure”, “Alcohol: The cause and solution to all the problems in the world”, etc.

Following the success of this series, Fox itself has created (& cancelled) a slew of similar shows such as Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hill, etc. Since many of the Simpsons show writers/artists worked on Futurama as well, it had many similarities to Simpsons in the style of drawing, hidden mathematical references and so on. Other TV channels such as Comedy Central have created similar cartoon shows with a lot of consistent background (e.g. South Park). But AFAIK, no other show matches The Simpsons in depth, (though not always) humor suitable for the whole family, continuing quality and the permanence that is successfully leading the show towards its thirtieth year!  

In the early 1990’s when I started watching this show routinely, DVDs & Internet weren’t in existence. Since I liked the show, I started recording the episodes as they aired on VHS tapes, manually pausing the tape during commercials to edit them out. Since I was recording in SLP mode, I could fit about eighteen episodes per 2-hr cassette. Since I started the collection this way, despite all the digital technologies that bloomed since then, I stuck to it like Montgomery Burns till 2014, collecting more than 500 episodes in 28 VHS cassettes! I also maintained a spreadsheet listing which episode starts from what minute in which cassette. It was a labor of love. But now, going beyond DVDs, you can watch any episode you wish  from the cloud whenever you want. The days of popping in a six hour long VHS tape in the VCR and watching one episode after another with friends seems to be long gone. Current need seems to be more like searching for a specific two minute clip for a reference, being able to attach it to an email or create a pointer on the web. Since all trends point to this mode being the permanent one in the forthcoming years, people have started writing articles advocating for such distributions. So, about an year back I posted a note on our town’s freecycle.org site saying, “I have this 28 cassette VHS tape collectiion containing 500+ Simpsons episodes. Anyone interested in taking them for free?”. Next day an elderly gentleman stopped by and took away the whole box. I got an email from him after a few days that said: 

I don’t have close family or friends nearby. I am not rich and I struggle with multiple health issues these days. In this situation, the Simpsons collection you gave me gives me very good company, keeping me in good spirits making me laugh all the time. If we had met years back, probably we’d have become good long time friends who share good tastes. Thanks for your gift.

When I finished reading his email, I couldn’t help tearing up. Who said The Simpsons can only make you laugh?

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