The Sipmsons: Th-th-th-that’s all folks?

It’s like this: the main cast cashes 8 million per season each, then they get a paltry union mandated residual for reruns and syndication, but nothing else. The novelty and the freshness wore off a long time ago; hence the ratings are not what they used to be (a paltry third of its prime). The main cast boss is even more reviled than Charles Montgomery Burns and a standoff was unavoidable.

Dan Castellaneta (Homer, Grampa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, and others), Julie Kavner (Marge and others), Nancy Cartwright (Bart and others), Yeardley Smith (Lisa), Hank Azaria (Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon), and Harry Shearer (Mr. Burns, Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders, and others) each earn about $8 million annually for about 22 weeks’ work. Fox offered a 45% pay cut with absolutely no sweeteners. The counteroffer took the form of a 30% cut with a tiny fraction of all the huge back-end profits the network receives from syndication and franchising. Fox said no way.

In the end, after 500 episodes and absolutely no fear of diluting a winning franchise, Fox says it’s not afraid of axing the longest running series in American TV history, either.

I say it’s about time.

The Simpsons and I parted ways the season when Homer and Marge ate uranium and Bart ate tomacco. I found the movie okay and that was pretty much it. It’s sad the animated sitcom didn’t find its Great Gazoo that would mercifully kill it, so that the memories of seven or eight good seasons could be preserved. But no, we have to endure craptacular irritating annoyance season after season in order to appreciate only two good quality episodes.

I cannot understand why people are raving mad about the series cancellation; even now we’re not sure if this is not a gimmick to embig a little bit the ratings. I cannot understand the twitter threads. I cannot understand the facebook frenzy. 500 episodes is not enough?

Another fact is that The Simpsons were so groundbreaking that they had to take the same path of Citizen Kane and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They became revered artifacts but are not paid attention anymore. Don’t you think so? South Park is experiencing some of the same problems now; hey, even Family Guy is more interesting and funnier now (it will take the same path eventually).

The Simpsons started with the truly remarkable ambition of being more realistic than any flesh-and-blood sitcom of its time (Family Ties and The Cosby Show were on the crosshairs). It succeeded. Then it departed from its initial goal having already changed pop culture forever; while the new flesh-and-blood sitcoms tried to capture its irreverence and joie de vivre, The Simpsons began its slow demise into irrelevance. By having a huge and loyal following, nobody noticed this.

It should have ended with a bang. Instead, the acrimony of a nasty divorce takes the spotlight instead of the series.


And no catchphrase will lighten me up now. Meh, indeed.

Related articles

• The Simpsons: history of the series (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Simpsons: Perfection of the Imperfect Family (imanuelkristianto.wordpress.com)
• Woo Hoo! The Simpsons could be given their very own TV channel (telegraph.co.uk)
• Money dispute may end 'Simpsons' (thedailybeast.com)
  
• Do Yoga With Marge Simpson (fitsugar.com)
• Who turned The Simpsons into a cartoon? (Slate.com)
• The Sipmsons: Th-th-th-that's all folks? (paulmarsic.wordpress.com)
  

With Titus every episode was a very special episode...

...and that alone makes Titus the best sitcom ever! According to our now-familiar expression “jump the shark”, a clear symptom of fatigue in a series is the conscious effort to attract waning audiences by announcing a "very special episode", by definition an episode that “either deals with a serious or controversial social issue or is unusually dramatic in some way (a notorious attempt to boost failing ratings with cheap appeals to emotion, but which ultimately destroys the levity of the series)”.

If you watched any given episode of Titus, you could find the use (but not the abuse) of themes like death, attempted and committed suicide, rape, child molestation, mental illness, road rage, gun violence, drug abuse, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and terrorism. For newcomers this would look like a Nip/Tuck precursor, but in reality, this show was a sitcom with very dark humor. You never noticed there were the typical ingredients of a “very special episode” because there was no truculence, no melodrama, but just a lot of jokes and punchlines in a story with a fractured structure, based not so loosely on the life of the main character, the one and only Christopher Titus.

It’s incredible, despite the nature of the show, how realistic it looked sometimes. It must be because there is a big deal of death, attempted and committed suicide, rape, child molestation, mental illness, road rage, gun violence, drug abuse, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and terrorism in real life, with a difference: you just suffer it, you don’t laugh at your own misery.
Consider Ken “Papa” Titus, a real intimidating and insensitive dad, who never missed “a drink, a joint, or an opportunity to get laid in his life” but “never missed a day of work or a house payment”, who lost everything everytime he got divoced. That’s telling a lot. If you watch the series you inevitably will arrive at the conclusion: an abusive but strangely caring father is the real star of the sitcom and the glue that holds together the rest of the cast. Without the outstanding acting job of Stacy Keach, the antics and the quirks of Christopher, Dave (Zack Ward), Erin (Cynthia Watros) and Tommy (David Shatraw) would not be as amusing and understandable as they are when they share the common ground of a father figure that is not as uncommon in real life as you might think. It is completely unusual in TV, that’s for sure, but in real life you’ll find a father who tries by any means necessary to make a man out of you, imbuing the late underappreciated value of true and pure manhood by any costs, with a twist of responsibility and work ethic in the mix. Somebody to remind you that feelings and acknowledging weaknesess are for wussies, not real men.
Did the sitcom ever jump the shark? I’m not sure, but when we learned Titus had a sister, I think that was just too much for a “surprise character”. Anyway, the series got cancelled by the reason of internal fights between the Fox TV execs and the creators, i.e. real “creative disputes” and not ratings drops.

Too bad for the cast, because there was no syndication and no residuals, but the sitcom never suffered from noticeable quality decline. For the people that watched it for the first time, Titus was a staple of the early naughts. For the people still watching the episodes in DVD or in youtube, it is still a kick-ass show.

BTW, Wikipedia did the memory hole trick again with its Jumping-the-Shark article. Looks like I will have to take a look in the Wikipedia trashcan... again.


Click.

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• Which of Your Favorite Shows Have Jumped the Shark? (omg.yahoo.com)