The Simpsons Outdated?

This is a response to Chris Doggett's post on the Simpsons. http://thatbeerguy.blogspot.com/2010/06/one-more-reason-why-simpsons-changed.html

Some very good points about the changing of society, and I hadn't really thought about it. I suppose like anything else, the Simpsons is due to get outdated eventually. I'd have liked to see supporting statistics, which I could probably google, and will, if it wasn't already past my bedtime. It was only a rant though, so I don't entirely expect a lot of work to go into it. Just like I don't plan to put a lot of work into this post either.

Conan was apparently one of six children in his home growing up, so his own experiences couldn't have synced completely with the Simpsons. And my experience, along with a number of my friends growing up, was somewhat similar to the Simpsons model, with minor variations like my mom having the occasional teaching job.

I mean, we all have our own little versions of what's real and relatable, but I think that the standard sitcom 2.5 kids format is treated as a kind of vanilla flavor for television (with unfortunate consequences for questions of ethnicity and television). If anything, the Simpsons was riffing on the TV trope more than it was basing its foundation on real life.

The other reason they need to have all these things in the show is because they want to relate to as many people as possible. How many dads, single, married, divorced, or remarried, get compared to Homer Simpson on a regular basis? If Marge was single, and there was no stupid dad character, well that whole cultural phenomenon of "D'oh!" wouldn't exist. There's a similar reason for the show having a cat, a dog, a baby, a boy, and a girl. Because the cat people will ask why the Simpsons don't have a cat. Or the dog people will ask why the Simpsons don't have a dog. Or worse, they'll simply never have that laugh-out-loud moment when the dog eats something gross, or scoots his butt across the carpet, and they'll never get hooked into the Simpsons.

And it's not just the audience, but the writers will want characters and material to work with too. What if a writer has a great story about a baby? Can they somehow adapt it to use Bart instead? Not really.

But maybe we shouldn't even be asking about viewers' actual life experiences, but instead look at what else they're used to seeing on television (and to a lesser extent other media). How many examples of *fictional* families conform to the 2.5-kid-picket-fence standard? And has this decreased significantly over the years?

But I take your point about it feeling alien, at least to some people, to imagine that all these useful characters somehow managed to end up in the same house for a significant length of time (how many years has Bart been in 4th grade and living at home? How come we're not talking about that?). My argument that it's necessary doesn't make it any less weird, at least to people who have not had that specific experience.

How would a new generation create the Simpsons today? Would they find a way to fit all these interesting characters in one household, or would they create another setting? One of the things about animation is that it ought to be cheaper to create new sets and environments, so there's really no need to confine the franchise to one household, which is what they did with live-action family sitcoms.

Southpark accomplishes some of this by having the focus on the friendship of four (five with Butters?) elementary school kids, rather than exclusively their families. But like the Simpsons, when a sister story or a cat story ("NO KITTY! That's MY pot pie!") is needed, they have those characters somehow built into the town.