TV is the New Reading

400 episodes: ‘The Simpsons’

milestone airs this weekend

It’s not completely unheard of for 10-year-olds to have lived through four presidents. I know I did. As of my 10th birthday, I’d seen Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan in office.

But only one 10-year-old I can think of has lived through four presidents in the course of his 10th year of life.

Bartholomew J. Simpson, better known as Bart, together with his wacky animated family “The Simpsons,” airing 7 p.m. Sundays on FOX, has proven to have more staying power than even the two-termers serving during his run.

Though to be perfectly honest, I sometimes wonder why.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The show is a great deal of fun. When I tune in. Which I don’t always, because honestly, 19 years later (counting the clips from “The Tracy Ullman Show”), I feel like I’ve seen it and seen it.

Lisa and Bart have reconciled their sibling rivalry countless times, and Maggie has said her first word and promptly never spoken again. Bart has fallen in love for the first time several times. Homer has done the most stupid things imaginable. They’ve traveled to the future and to the past and to other shows and all around the world and every afterlife and made every possible self-referential joke.

And even when the writing is milk-through-the-nostrils hilarious, the show almost defies viewership.

It’s not trite. It’s not glib. The characters – really, a cast of thousands at this point – are drawn with depth and care, and the show’s many talented writers are clearly literate and familiar with a vast storehouse of classical references and world philosophies.

I think what really drove my disinterest were the too-often meandering storylines in search of a point.

An episode about Marge and Homer being soulmates wandered for far too long through a psychedelic desert scene following a chili cookoff. A show about a cross-country journey of reconnection between Homer and Bart was as much about Bart being sent away to boot camp – not to mention how it was determined he should be sent there, and how relatively lame it was once he got there.

And yeah, it’s a refreshing kind of Zen to come to the end of an episode and wonder what it was about. Structur-ally, it can be fun to really have no idea where the show is going from one scene to the next. And maybe the show has grown beyond all narrative constraints.

But when Bart converts to Irish Catholicism for half an episode and then it’s never spoken of again, and Homer was once a manager of Globex and a zillion other things, it’s hard to ignore a tinge of attention-deficit disorder in the production.

That said, I think I’m actually looking forward to the 400th episode airing on Sunday – a “24” crossover featuring the voices of Kiefer Sutherland and Mary Lynn Rajskub. If only to see for myself – after “Drive” got canceled in four episodes – that FOX is capable of sticking with a project for 400 episodes.

Truly, it should be a sight to see..

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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