EVENT Peabody/Willson Center panel ponders state of The Simpsons on Feb. 15
The Simpsons' milestone 500th episode is coming up Sunday, February 19, but is the animated sitcom still funny? That question and others will be kicked around in a roundtable discussion cosponsored by UGA's Peabody Awards and Willson Center for Humanities & Arts Wednesday, February 15, in Miller Learning Center's Room 150. The 4 p.m. event is free and open to the public as well as UGA students and faculty. It will open with the screening of a few clips of The Simpsons, recent and from way back when. Audience participation will be encouraged. The Simpsons, now in its 23rd season on Fox, is the longest running prime-time entertainment series of all time, having eclipsed the legendary Gunsmoke and outlasted Law & Order. But long-running TV shows invariably come to disappoint some of their early admirers. Nostalgia for better days and episodes, real or imagined, sets in quickly. Saturday Night Live has been written off by somebody or other as humor-challenged, if not dead, pretty much every season since its first – 37 years ago. One of the longest sections of Wikipedia's entry on The Simpsons is devoted to “Criticism of declining quality.” To hear some one-time Simpsons addicts tell it, the show peaked about the time Conan O'Brien left the writing staff. That was in 1993, three years before the series won its Peabody. If The Simpsons is indeed a pale parody of itself these days, it's to some degree a victim of its own phenomenal success. It's been the object of unprecedented merchandizing – games, candy bars, dolls, gumball machines, you name it. Syndicated reruns of its earlier episodes have been ubiquitous for years. And in addition to competing with its older self, it's the template for a type of dysfunctional-family sitcom – starting with the live-action Married with Children and continuing with various animated shows such as Family Guy – that Fox has made one of its signatures. Other networks and producers took heed as well. It's hard to imagine ABC's Modern Family or The Middle without The Simpsons. Then, too, the topicality, the cultural and political satire that The Simpsons once had almost exclusively to itself in prime time, has been diluted by shows that are less inhibited and that have shorter production turnarounds. Think The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Think The Colbert Report. Think South Park. These and other lines of thinking about the first family of curiously yellow Springfield, USA, will be debated by a group of panelists to include Cameron Bogue, a Flagpole cartoonist and animator of FX's Archer series; Jim Biddle, Grady College professor of mass communication; and Reginald McKnight, Hamilton Holmes Professor of English. Dr. Horace Newcomb, director of the Peabody Awards, will moderate. |
