The Simpsons existed for so long that its parodies are foundational. This summer’s Apple TV reboot of Cape Fear faced more comparisons to the classic The Simpsons episode “Cape Feare” than it did to either prior film adaptation, and The Simpsons’ “A Streetcar Named Marge” introduced far more millennials to the Tennessee Williams masterpiece than Elia Kazan’s 1951 adaptation did. Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, the directors behind this year’s horror hits Obsession and Backrooms, respectively, cited segments from “Treehouse of Horror” as inspirations. As is the case with many properties that won't go away, The Simpsons has faced an issue where its longevity has made it cyclical. Classic The Simpsons writers drew from all sorts of pop culture references during the writing of the first few seasons, with homages to everything from The Godfather: Part II and Planet of the Apes to John Milton and Herman Melville. Today, The Simpsons writers can only draw from older episodes of The Simpsons.
The Simpsons is hardly the only animated show that has stayed on the air too long. Currently, the “Animation Domination” block on Fox is composed of The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad!, and Bob’s Burgers, which is the relative “youngest” at 15-years-old. Family Guy may have suffered in the wake of Seth MacFarlane’s exit from the core writing staff, but its cutaway-based humor has ensured that its “joke machine” style is more-or-less consistent. There’s also shows like Futurama and King of the Hill that had comebacks after extended absences, but The Simpsons hasn’t ever disappeared long enough for it to feel like a novelty. The Simpsons has the widest margin between its height and its current iteration; within its first 10 seasons, The Simpsons routinely released bona fide classics with an unprecedented joke-to-minute ratio.
It’s easy to forget that 2007’s The Simpsons Movie was conceived as a means to generate enthusiasm when ratings were at an all-time low. The complication faced by The Simpsons isn’t necessarily one of continuity, given that internal logic was depressed decades ago; that Marge and Homer are now millennials is an irony, since The Simpsons had originally split the difference between Baby Boomer “family values” and Gen X humor. The show already explored so many avenues and established formulas that any new installment can be categorized into a specific subgenre; Season 3’s “Homer at the Bat” was a groundbreaking satire in 1992, but there’s now a robust catalog of The Simpsons’ “sports episodes.”
There’s also the factor that current The Simpsons parodies are time-sensitive in a way that the show has never been before. It’s unlikely that all the young viewers who watched 1993’s “Rosebud” were aware that Mr. Burns was a stand-in for Charles Foster Kane, but last year’s “The Day of the Jack-up” contained allusions to M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, a film that hasn’t had a long tail. The Simpsons is more famous than anything it’s satirized in the past decade, meaning that the show’s only options are to punch down or tug on nostalgic strings. The most recent “Treehouse of Horror” episode of The Simpsons contained a parody of Waterworld, and nothing in the eight-minute segment was funnier than the Kevin Costner's Waterworld arcade game that popped up in the Season 8 episode “The Springfield Files.” A more relevant box office bomb to lampoon would’ve been a more recent disaster, such as The Marvels or John Carter, but those are both unlikely because they were released by The Walt Disney Company, which has owned The Simpsons since the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney closed in 2019.
The Simpsons will face the issue of an aged-out cast. Despite the innumerable opportunities to introduce new cast members, 68-year-old Dan Castellaneta, 75-year-old Julie Kavner, 68-year-old Nancy Cartwright, and 82-year-old Harry Shearer haven’t missed an episode since 1990. Those who grew up with the series are unlikely to have watched all 37 seasons, especially when the characters have been stripped down to their most generic defining characteristics. That The Simpsons is now on Disney+ has ensured there’s even less incentive to check out new installments; anyone watching for the first time is better-suited to check out the “Golden Age” from 1990 to 1999. It’s not that much different from Seinfeld, which experienced a cultural resurgence when it was added to Netflix in 2021.
The most painful aspect of the Disney+ era of The Simpsons has been the forced cross-promotions. Although The Simpsons already had an active presence at Disney’s theme parks, the streaming service is cluttered with short films in which the Simpsons family interact with various brand ambassadors, including Iron Man, Mickey Mouse, R2-D2, and the princesses from Frozen. It’s a stark contrast to the era in which, despite its commercial appeal, The Simpsons could be ruthless; “Itchy & Scratchy Land” from Season 6 is a brutal takedown of theme park commercialism that drew a connection between Disneyland and Jurassic Park.
The rare contemporary instances in which The Simpsons has approached innovation are in the “specials” released exclusively to Disney+ as part of the contract stipulation with Fox. These episodes are more cleanly defined as parodies, but lack the cynical corporate tie-ins of the shorts. This summer saw the release of the clever (albeit overlong) “Extreme Makeover: Homer Edition,” a satire of HGTV, and the gorgeous black-and-white installment “Simpsley,” in which Homer and Marge represent contrasting iterations of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. They’re inventive enough to suggest that the occasional The Simpsons one-off might be worthy of pursuit, but they also place a greater spotlight on how mundane the episodes on air have been.