The Homer Simpson way

Now, 25 years on, it’s a cultural touchstone, too. Tyler Shores has seen, by his own admission, thousands of episodes of The Simpsons.

It’s his job – the Stanford academic was a pioneer in the study of the hit TV show, and is now at work on a book about The Simpsons’ cultural impact over the last 25 years. As he described it: “How ‘d’oh’ made it into the Oxford English dictionary, that sort of thing.”

He explained why he believes The Simpsons is the most influential television show of all time.

“It’s almost impossible to imagine what television would look like in a world where The Simpsons had never existed,” he said.

That’s because The Simpsons changed the way television was written: “Suddenly, intelligent TV writing became the norm, instead of an anomaly,” Shores explains.

The Simpsons and their multilayered cultural references were born in the age of video-cassette recorders, enabling viewers to go back and watch episodes again and again to spot subtle details.

The show was written with what he called “an eye toward further consumption” – a concept that is taken for granted today.

The show’s subject matter broke new ground too. In the early 1990s, family sitcoms largely avoided “politics and religion, education, environment, race relations, gay marriage,” Shores said.

The Simpsons became revolutionary by tackling such topics.

The show’s impact was felt not just in the US, Shores said. For better or for worse, the show has become an ambassador of American culture around the world.

“There was a BBC poll a few years ago, and Homer Simpson was chosen as the greatest American ever for people in the UK,” Shores recalled.

“The funny part is that Homer is not a real person, and, if you look at the list of people that he beat out, like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and all these other people, that’s very telling.”

The show’s global popularity comes from the “honest mirror” it holds up to American life, warts and all, he said. “A large amount of the humour works precisely because it celebrates and makes fun of the American cultural excess.”

But it isn’t all fun and games.

In 2003, as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Shores developed a course called The Simpsons and Philosophy, using the show as a cultural text to explore larger ideas.

“I thought philosophy was very important because it talks about: what is a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? How do you think about these things? But it was just too boring and too out of touch for too many people,” he recalled.

Shores developed a curriculum utilising The Simpsons, expecting a few dozen students to register.

“We ended up cramming almost 600 students into the auditorium for that class,” he said.

Asked for an example of a Simpsons teaching moment, he recalled an episode in which the Simpsons’ brainy daughter Lisa joined a local Mensa chapter, where all of The Simpsons’ smart characters decided they wanted to run the town.

“It’s a very loose parody, based on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s The Republic, which basically says that philosopher-kings are the ones best suited to run society, and that they should be in charge because they’re more enlightened than the common masses,” he said.

The Simpsons poked fun at the theory by taking it to its logical end: “It starts off really well – the smart people are making smart decisions – but then just like anything else, there is human fallibility. And it kind of devolves into chaos.”

While the Berkeley course is no longer offered, other Simpsons classes are in the course catalogues at several other universities.

The Simpsons may not be as relevant today as it was 10 or 15 years ago, he said – because The Simpsons blazed a trail that the rest of television has followed.