I wish it was the sixties
I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen
—RADIOHEAD, “The Bends”
Once in a great while, we are privileged to experience a television event so extraordinary, it becomes part of our shared heritage. 1969: Man walks on the moon. 1971: Man walks on the moon … again. Then for a long time nothing happened. Until tonight.
—KRUSTY THE CLOWN, EPISODE 4F12
(“The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”)
ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 1993, AROUND 8:20 P.M. (Eastern Standard Time), I was standing on the edge of a dance floor at a campus pub called Alfie’s with a glass of cheap draft beer in my hand. The dance floor before me was packed with people, all of them waiting—as I was—for the next mind-blowing riff from the in-house entertainment.
There was no band up on the stage at Alfie’s on this night, though, and no dancers gyrating sweatily out on the dance floor, either. Instead, all the pub’s chairs and tables were jumbled into a kind of auditorium arrangement, covering the stage and half of the dance floor and every other inch of available space. Every seat in the joint was taken, and all eyes were fixed on a big-screen TV set up in the middle of the dance floor itself, where the third and final act of Episode 9F11 of The Simpsons (“Selma’s Choice”) was about to begin.
Now, 9F11 had already had some crowd-pleasing moments. The premise of the episode is that one of Marge’s aunts, Gladys, has died a bitter spinster, setting a panicked Selma (one of Marge’s ghoulish twin sisters) on a quest to have a child before her biological clock runs out. The episode opens with a TV commercial for Duff Gardens—a theme park inspired by Springfield’s favourite brew—that shows the Duff “Beer-quarium,” an enormous mug of beer full of “the happiest fish in the world.” (This joke played especially well with the Alfie’s crowd, with hooting and cheering accompanying the image of one fish, cross-eyed and smiling, bumping repeatedly into the glass.)
As Selma sets about the doomed task of finding a father for her child—via video personals, random passes at assorted minor characters and a visit to the sperm bank—9F11 fills in with the usual grab bag of great gags: Selma shows her sexy side by tying a lit cigarette in a knot using only her mouth; while on a date with the blind, shrivelled midget Hans Moleman, she imagines a rec room full of sightless children bumping cluelessly into each other; the Sweathog whose sperm is available for purchase turns out, to everyone’s disappointment, not to be Horshack; and, in a stellar example of The Simpsons’ ability to condense note-perfect parody into a few short seconds, another TV commercial for Duff Gardens features a brief snippet of the teen variety act Hooray! for Everything singing a saccharine bastardization of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” in a wonderfully silly send-up of Up with People. All in all, it had been a solid episode so far, and certainly no one nursing their beers through the second commercial break that night had any reason to be disappointed.
By 1993, however, the crowds that gathered around North America to watch The Simpsons had come to expect each episode to be not just solid but full-on transcendent. By this time, The Simpsons was what network executives call an “appointment show”—that rare breed of TV program you schedule your evenings around, the kind you want to share with your peers. In the consummate college town of Kingston, Ontario, where I kept my Simpsons appointments each Thursday at 8:00, observance of the show verged on a religious rite: pretty much every pub in town broadcast The Simpsons live every week because otherwise nobody would show up for cocktails until 8:30 at the earliest. Which is to say that for many of us watching that Thursday night—at Alfie’s and elsewhere—the critical bar had been set vertiginously high, and this new episode had only one act left to meet this lofty standard.
The show came back on, and the crowd at the pub went quiet. Because Homer is sick (he’s been picking away at a rotting ten-foot hoagie for weeks) it has fallen to Selma to take Bart and Lisa to Duff Gardens. Chuckles from the crowd as Bart and Lisa point out four of the beer-bottle-costumed Seven Duffs: Tipsy, Queasy, Surly and Remorseful. Somewhat scattered but deeper laughter as they enter the Hall of Presidents to watch tacky animatronic former statesmen (including Abraham Lincoln recast as “Rappin’ A.B.”) sing the praises of Duff beer. Cut to the Simpsons’ living room, where Marge and Homer are settling in to watch Yentl. Cut back to Duff Gardens, where Bart, Lisa and Selma are poking around a souvenir stand. Bart approaches a display of clunky sunglasses. He reads the label: “BEER GOGGLES—See the world through the eyes of a drunk!”
All at once, the pub shook with a single great roaring laugh. It was like a force of nature, this laugh, spontaneous and open-mouthed and enormous. It was as if a train was suddenly there in the room, its horn blaring. It nearly drowned out the next line: Bart puts on the beer goggles and turns to Selma, who has morphed fuzzily into a voluptuous babe, striking a seductive pose. “You’re charming the pants off of me,” she says in a sultry voice. The laughter seemed to expand exponentially. People were doubled over, had tears streaming down their faces, were pounding tables with fists. I’m not kidding—the gag just destroyed the crowd. It was as if that single gag were written for precisely this audience, an act of clairvoyance in which some TV-writer wizard had invaded the brains of everyone in the bar, rooted around for just the right common reference and then brought it flawlessly to life.
The last few minutes of the show played out to continued laughter, especially after Lisa drinks the water that carries the boats through the “Little Land of Duff” ride, which causes her to hallucinate like an acid-head on a bad trip and proclaim herself “the lizard queen.” In the end, Selma realizes she wants not a child but a little version of herself, and the episode closes with her singing Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman” to her iguana, Jub-Jub. As the credits rolled, the exhausted Alfie’s crowd fell to aftershock giggles and happy recountings of newly minted favourite lines. The feeling was much like that moment when the house lights come up after a brilliant musical performance and the audience members blink incredulously at each other, all of them united in the certainty that they have just witnessed something huge—something, maybe, that’s never been seen before.
By the standards of The Simpsons’ Golden Age—roughly, early 1992 to mid-1997—this was not an extraordinary episode. This was par for the course. This was the minimum payoff that could be expected every week. In Alfie’s and a thousand other campus pubs, in dormitory common rooms and rec rooms and living rooms, in local taverns and sports bars—in all of these and more—we gathered by the millions to watch a TV broadcast that was delivering, in half-hour instalments, a landmark event akin to the Beatles taking the stage on The Ed Sullivan Show. Or, in another, more accurate way, something like the band’s whole career: each week was a new hit single that could delight or enlighten or transform, or do all three at the same time.
This was especially true by the time Episode 9F11 slayed the crowd at Alfie’s in January 1993. After two seasons or so as a clever cartoon—a smart, irreverent and innovative TV show—The Simpsons had vaulted onto a higher plane of satiric expression. To belabour the Beatles analogy just a little more, The Simpsons had, midway through its third season, pulled off a transformation much like the Fab Four’s move from the lovely but featherweight pop of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the paradigm-shifting complexities of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper.
In the fall of 1992 alone, damn near every new episode of The Simpsons that aired had been an instant classic. 9F02 (“Lisa the Beauty Queen”)1 offered a vicious but ultimately touching take on beauty pageants, combined with a scathing indictment of cigarette advertising. 8F18 (“A Streetcar Named Marge”) seamlessly—not to mention hilariously—lampooned Broadway musicals, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and The Great Escape. There had also been a genuinely thoughtful meditation on the nature of God (9F01, “Homer the Heretic”); an elaborate self-satirizing spoof of movies based on TV shows (9F03, “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie”); a re-imagining of Lord of the Flies that mercilessly satirized the merchandising machine of the modern entertainment industry (8F24, “Kamp Krusty”); and a handful of warp-speed romps through gags and references so dense they almost defied cataloguing. Episode 9F07 (“Mr. Plow”), for example, took well-aimed satirical shots at infomercials, pretentious Calvin Klein ads, commercials in which middle-aged white men attempt to rap, America’s car dependency and the environmental damage wrought by same, and the celebrity-laden, circus-themed variety shows of the 1980s. It featured guest-voice performances by Linda Ronstadt, Adam “Batman” West and voice-acting genius Phil Hartman, and worked in smart, funny references to Nazi Germany, President George Bush Sr., former Reagan aide and Ross Perot running mate James Stockdale, Leave It to Beaver, the board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, third-rate Fox Network “current affairs” programs, and Citizen Kane—all in twenty-three seamless minutes.
In subsequent weeks and years, The Simpsons brewed a mix of killer one-off gags, laser-guided social satire, robust character development and pure comedic joy into a potion so intoxicating that it became by far the most important cultural institution of its time—the equal of any single body of work to emerge from our pop-cultural stew in the last century in any medium. It was the Beatles and the Stones. It was Elvis and Chuck Berry. It was that big, that unprecedented and that important. And it also grew so monumental—so fixed on the cultural map—that it now seems impossible to imagine contemporary pop culture without it.
But the rock & roll metaphor is not quite right. Rock & roll hit with the singular force of an atomic bomb, and was indeed a perfect cultural expression of the massive shift in consciousness rent by the splitting of the atom. The Simpsons was more like climate change: it built incrementally, week by week, episode by episode, weaving itself into the cultural landscape slowly but surely until it became a permanent feature, a constant reminder that just beneath the luxurious surface of this prosperous time lurked much uglier truths.
Pop music, as the force that more or less invented youth culture—and the force that most clearly defined its first couple of generations—has an inimitable pride of place. There can never again be an explosion to equal Elvis’s first shimmies of hip or the Beatles’s first tosses of moptop. This, indeed, was a key component of the evident malaise that afflicted pop culture in the early 1990s. “The question of the death of rock comes up because rock & roll—as a cultural force rather than as a catchphrase—no longer seems to mean anything,” decreed the rock critic Greil Marcus in the August 1992 issue of Esquire. “It no longer seems to speak in unknown tongues that turn into new and common languages, to say anything that is not instantly translated back into the dominant discourse of our day: the discourse of corporatism, selfishness, crime, racism, sexism, homophobia, government propaganda, scapegoating and happy endings.” Rock & roll had given several generations in the West its blueprint for change and its idiom for criticizing the mainstream, but now it was the mainstream, a reinforcement of the status quo. It once provided a “myth of wholeness” (Marcus’s phrase), but now it spoke mainly of fragmentation—across genres and subcultures, across age groups and ethnicities, across demographic clusters and product lines.
And if rock was dead, was the counterculture laid to rest alongside it? Was it the end of (pop) history?
Don’t have a cow, man.
With the emergence of The Simpsons, the myth of wholeness was reborn, no longer codified in three-minute pop songs but in half-hour cartoons. Western culture has in recent years become an almost irredeemably fragmented thing, counted in webpage hits and record sales, endlessly quantified and analyzed and synthesized and then co-opted and thus corrupted by advertisers, focus groups, test audiences, pollsters, pundits and on down the line, all the while changing so quickly and in so many directions that it has never really been nailed down. (Maybe no cultural moment ever really is.) But when they watched The Simpsons, all those scattered, slivered Is became wes, if only for thirty minutes each week (more often after the show went into syndication). We were being defined by the show. Shaped by it. Even united by it, or as close to that state as we came, anyway.
There’s a tendency, when attempting to discuss the broad strokes of a cultural era, to lapse into a royal we—to invent a mass phenomenon out of one’s own passion for the subject. With respect to The Simpsons, though, I’ll embrace the we, because here it is accurate. If there was a single cultural signpost announcing the emergence of a generation/era/ movement/whatever, a monument to a widespread yearning for progress, truth, honesty, integrity, joy, a final goddamn rejoinder to every vacuous corporate press release and cloying commercial script and prevaricating political sound bite—it was The Simpsons.
Greil Marcus and other rock historians speak of a secret language created by rock & roll, of its role as the passport into a new and all-encompassing worldview. It was not just music: it was a gateway. Inside the club there were new constitutions, new laws and freedoms, a radical reconfiguration of democracy. The key was the secret language of the music—and if you didn’t get it, you were forever locked outside. “Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is,” Bob Dylan teases the hapless, square Mr. Jones on “Ballad of a Thin Man,” in one of rock & roll’s most direct acknowledgements of its exclusivity. But pop music, as Marcus admits, had lost its status as gatekeeper by the early 1990s. It was no longer the mystic rune of the culture, and decoding its riddles no longer necessarily revealed the true spirit of the age. Better, in the 1990s, to look to The Simpsons.
Come back with me to my bucolic university campus—Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario—for a clear picture of this shift in pop-cultural equilibrium. Step inside Clark Hall Pub, the preferred watering hole for devotees of the so-called alternative culture of the early 1990s. This was where I usually watched new episodes of The Simpsons, because it had the best music, cheapest draft and most casual overall vibe of any bar in town. It also better suited my angry-young-man attitude: it was the best place in town to find the long-haired and flannel-shirted, the dyed-haired and multiply pierced. The stereo blared Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana and slightly more exotic fare like Public Enemy and Ministry and the Butthole Surfers, and in the brief intervals of fade-out semi-silence between songs, you might catch a snippet of conversation about the latest Coen Brothers film or the merits of Charles Bukowski. It was, in short, a pretty typical little den of alternative culture, and I have no doubt there was a similar joint or three in every college town and big city in the English-speaking world.
I was a DJ at Clark for the last two and a half years of my undergraduate studies, and the view from the DJ booth gave me a pretty clear picture of the various forces of unity and division among the pub’s patrons. Pop music was the unifying attraction—students came to Clark because its DJs played stuff no other pub in town would—but it was also a divisive force. There were people there who adored the heavy riff rock coming out of Seattle, others who were fanatically devoted to the Britpop of Oasis and Blur and a dozen lesser bands, others still who only really got down to the molten industrial roar of Nine Inch Nails et al.
Even when the whole gang came together as one on the dance floor, the music often subverted its own presumption of rebellion. Case in point: “Killing in the Name,” a ferocious rant against conformity by the agitprop rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine. The song had been adopted as a kind of theme song by one of the freshman classes, so as soon as its opening riff boomed out of the pub’s speakers, the small dance floor would quickly fill with aspiring engineers. Dressed in identical gold school jackets, some sporting the remnants of punk-style mohawks that had become the official Frosh Week haircut of the engineering school, the future employees of DuPont and Procter & Gamble would leap up and down in unison, bashing into each other in the tight knot of a mosh pit. By the time the song reached its howling final chorus, fists would be raised, the entire floor rising and falling as one, every voice screaming along: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” Here were engineering students at an exclusive university, clad in a mix of countercultural fashions old and new, bouncing together with an almost military precision in an ironic homage to punk’s nihilistic anti-dance. And screaming Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.
Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain despaired when his alienated punk was used as a soundtrack for football highlights, when the front row at his concerts came to be filled with the same kind of jocks who used to beat him up in high school. Rock & roll, even at its most abrasive or ostensibly antiauthoritarian, was far too much a part of the mainstream by this point to retain the subversive power it once had, and too fragmented to speak to (or for) the entirety of the mass culture it had joined.
And into this cultural vacuum came The Simpsons.
Consider another of Clark Hall Pub’s traditions: a Friday-afternoon piss-up that was known as “Ritual.” Every Friday at noon, the pub would open its doors for six hours of debauchery, hosting engineering students tossing back a few pints to make their upcoming classes less dreary, first-year students making their first foray into serious collegiate binge drinking, and a rotating cast of regulars. One of the most popular features of Ritual was the early-afternoon rebroadcast of the previous night’s episode of The Simpsons. (Or the previous Sunday’s episode, once the show moved to Sunday nights in the fall of 1994.) Most of those in attendance had already watched the new episode earlier that week, quite possibly right there on Clark’s giant pull-down screen. They were watching this time to absorb it, to pick up the gags they’d missed and commit to memory the ones they’d delighted in the first time. Once the show went into syndication in 1994—with repeat episodes available to most North American viewers at least twice and as many as six or seven times every weekday—this absorption ritual became a much broader phenomenon.
The Simpsons was not just a show you watched but a language you spoke, a worldview you adopted. It became the primary metaphor I used in conversations with most of my close friends and colleagues. I’m not alone in this. A lengthy feature article in the Los Angeles Times in February 2003 profiled a cross-section of Americans, from high-school students to university professors, who use Simpsons references to illustrate everything from their day-to-day foibles to Nietzschean philosophy. “Aren’t you sick of the way so many people use a moment from The Simpsons as a metaphor for real life?” the writer, Bob Baker, lamented. “Isn’t it like living in a society that adopted Esperanto without letting you vote? Have we lost so many vestiges of mass culture that a TV show—a cartoon!—has to be the glue that holds postmodern society together?” Well, yes—but I’m not sick of it. Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Baker?
Because the thing is, The Simpsons isn’t Esperanto, but it is a language—a language heavily tilted towards insubordination. It’s a stealthy, subversive smart bomb sitting in the middle of prime time. Disguised as an inconsequential children’s confection—a mere cartoon—The Simpsons erupts each week in a series of spectacular satirical detonations, expressing a deeper contempt for authority than anything else on primetime and as sustained a critique of mainstream society as anything else in the pop culture of the day. Several of the show’s creators are on record—repeatedly—saying that the main goal of The Simpsons, beyond making its fans laugh, is to inculcate them with a strong distrust of authority.
And largely because of its cartoon disguise, The Simpsons has been permitted a degree of freedom unparalleled in mainstream entertainment. The only real controversy it has raised centred on the idea that Bart was a bad role model for kids. The show has otherwise felt free to comment, as sharply and derisively as it likes, on every controversial issue of its time, from religion to sexual orientation to drug use, from political hypocrisy to corporate crime. Countless other live-action sitcoms—not to mention hip-hop artists and shock-rockers and video game makers—find themselves mired in scandal any time they even nudge issues The Simpsons has addressed head-on and at length.
The Simpsons has formulated mainstream culture’s most widely spoken critical vernacular, its most prominent dissenting opinion, its surest way to indicate whether the person you were speaking with was Dylanesque hip or Mr. Jones square. If, say, you are at a party, and someone blurts out one of Homer’s patented D’oh!s—well, everyone knows about D’oh! I mean, it’s in the damn dictionary. The Simpsons is not about catchphrases—it spent a whole episode mocking catchphrases. But if you were—I don’t know—talking to someone about the environmental record of the local DuPont plant, and you lapsed into a Burns-like hiss and said, “All those bald children are arousing suspicion,” and the person you were talking to started laughing—or, better yet, replied in his own Burnsian rasp, “I’ll take that statue of Justice too”—then you knew you were talking to a kindred spirit, a fellow traveller, a true Simpsonian.
The Simpsons is in some respects a more powerful cultural force than rock & roll, particularly because it crosses more boundaries (especially those of age) than rock did even in its world-shaking first phase. Admittedly, there does seem to be an age barrier roughly coincident with the invention of Saturday morning cartoons as a block of programming expressly for children in the early 1970s. If you’d hit puberty by then, you were probably never conditioned to watch cartoons regularly, and what’s more you might well have come to think of them as silly kids’ stuff, and so perhaps you haven’t been able to take The Simpsons seriously. But even that border is at least semi-porous. Fans of The Simpsons range from the former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky to the archbishop of Canterbury, from British prime minister Tony Blair to anticorporate activist Ralph Nader. It’s as big in Western Europe as it is in America, and it’s got rabid fans from Argentina to Thailand and from Australia to Russia. I’ve seen an excerpt of the show used to illustrate a point in a fortysomething mountain guide’s avalanche-safety lecture, and I’ve heard my mother repeat many times the story of my then-four-year-old nephew marching into her kitchen to tell her that he knew “that God-man in the sky” wasn’t real because Homer Simpson told him so. I’ve spent entire evenings speaking to close friends almost exclusively in Simpsons references. I can only imagine its stature among the generation of kids like my nephew who are being raised on it. All of which is to say that it’s a far easier club to join than the one described in “Ballad of a Thin Man.” The only real price of entry is a love of humour and/or of cartoons, plus (for more serious viewers) a strong sense that the world as it’s described by the mainstream—in political speeches, on the news, in ads for breakfast cereal and in the sermons of the local preacher—is fundamentally false. The show’s enormous popularity is indeed the clearest example going of just how widespread such skepticism has become.
This has always been the tricky thing about the underworld described in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” about the world delineated by the twentieth century’s landmark cultural events: many of the truly pivotal moments were shared by only a very few. We all wish we’d been at the Cavern in Liverpool in 1962, or at Woodstock in 1969, or at the Hacienda in Manchester in 1986. We wish we’d been invited to have a drink at the Algonquin Hotel in New York circa 1926 or to share a toke at a North Beach coffee house in San Francisco circa 1955. Certain Paris cafés sound like they were pure cultural heaven in the 1920s and again in the 1950s. Same goes for certain districts of London and New York in the mid-1960s and again in the mid-1970s. I would’ve loved to have seen Charlie Parker live in Montreal in 1953 or Jimi Hendrix at Monterey in 1967 or the Clash in London in 1978. Even as I embraced Nirvana’s Nevermind in late 1991, I could pick up a magazine and learn that the real explosion had happened a year earlier—or maybe three—in Seattle. I went to Kathmandu in 1999 and kind of wished I’d been there in 1968. There’s often an immediacy to pop culture that leads to instant obsolescence, a sense that most of what we’re experiencing is a second-rate retread or a watered-down version of the seminal moment we all wish we’d been a part of. And so, as consolation, we feed on the fallout of these events. We buy the album, see the movie, read the book.
But what if the seminal event was a mass broadcast, a weekly TV show, something that practically the whole world could witness unadulterated and undiminished? There’d be limits to its impact, sure—attending a concert or chatting boozily in a bohemian café are often much more visceral experiences than watching TV—but there’d also be a liberating power to it, a strength drawn from its near-universal accessibility. This, for starters, is why The Simpsons matters. It’s the big cultural tent of its time, and even if there are so many different subcultural booths underneath that it’s a stretch to say there’s a single common currency passing hands at all of them, this diminishes the show’s significance not at all. If there is a common cultural currency, it’s got Homer Simpson’s picture on it.
The importance of The Simpsons, though, stretches beyond its enormous global popularity. In addition to being the touchstone of its age, the show is also its foremost pop chronicle. There are few trends or issues or world events since the show’s debut that have not been worked into the sprawling tapestry of The Simpsons. The show provides a lens of unprecedented scope through which to view the shifting cultural landscape of the last twenty years. In the pages that follow, I’ll examine both how the show defined the pop culture of its time and especially how it documented it. And if the show’s documentary role sometimes dominates the discussion, this is because it is the more tangible function. It’s difficult to say with any conviction, for example, how many people in the world identify with Homer, have worked his D’oh! into their own lexicon, are in some way explained by their habit of watching his antics on TV.
What’s far more certain is that Homer and the rest of the Simpsons—and the dozens of other characters who inhabit their hometown of Springfield, USA, and the adventures they all have there—have created a detailed satirical reflection of the world we live in.
To understand the nature of mainstream America, its hopes and dreams and insatiable appetites, look to Homer Simpson (Chapter Two). For an explanation of how the style and ethos of punk rock became a massive mainstream phenomenon in Western culture in the 1990s, watch Bart closely (Chapter Three). For a picture of the re-emergence of progressive activism in the West over the same period, study Lisa (Chapter Five). Marge, meanwhile, can help explain what happens to a society whose traditional authorities have lost their credibility and whose religious institutions have lost much of their resonance (Chapter Six). The diabolical Mr. Burns shows us why those authorities are no longer trusted in the first place (Chapter Four). The Simpsons’ travels across America and around the world offer a vivid illustration of the way the United States acts in world affairs, and the way the rest of the world responds to America—and The Simpsons (Chapter Eight). And their adventures in cyberspace, both on the show and on the internet itself, document the birth and evolution of a powerful new medium of communication (Chapter Seven). The show’s celebrity visitors—and its own place in the showbiz world—chart the massive and fast-growing influence of the culture of celebrity on society at large (Chapter Nine). And the show’s extraordinary penchant (and talent) for self-reference, pop-cultural allusion and media criticism offers an elaborate picture of postmodernism, in all its glory and its shame, and of the hypermediated society that created it (Chapter Ten).
But before we get to all that, a caveat: this is, in the end, my version of The Simpsons. The show’s canvas is far too broad, and the culture it reflects far too diverse and fragmented, for me or anyone else to be able to offer a completely comprehensive or definitive analysis. Instead, I offer an account of The Simpsons and its time that is idiosyncratic and sometimes quite personal. I discuss details about the show that I’ve found compelling and those fragments of Western culture where I’ve noticed a connection with the show, an intersection or resonance with its themes and characters.
And now, like it says on the Krusty the Clown posters at Springfield Elementary School, “Give a hoot … Read a book!” This one, I mean.
1 A Brief Note on Production Codes: Every episode of The Simpsons is assigned a production code and a title. In this case, the production code is 9F02, the title “Lisa the Beauty Queen.” The production code indicates the batch in which it was produced (9F here) and the position in that batch (02). Alas, the codes don’t really say anything clearly. Season 1 was 7G, Season 2 was 7F, next came 8F and 9F, then back to 1F and on up to 5F, at which point the sequence changed to AABF, BABF, CABF, etc. As well, the codes indicate episodes that were produced in the same season, even if they aired in separate ones. From Season 2 onward, the show has generally been produced in batches of twenty-two to twenty-five episodes, but a couple of episodes from each batch have usually not been broadcast until the following season. The first two episodes broadcast in Season 4, for example, were from the 8F batch, while the remaining twenty were from 9F (and two further 9F episodes aired in Season 5). And—yet more confusion—the final two numbers refer to the order in which the episodes were produced, not the order of broadcast. Episode 9F17, for example, was aired a week before 9F16.
All of that said, I will generally use both production code and title on first citation and the production code only as shorthand reference. This is partly a tip of the cap to hardcore fans, who have long used production codes as a kind of insider’s shorthand, and partly a question of simple practicality. Trucking out, for example, Episode 3F19’s full official title—“Raging Abe Simpson and his Grumbling Grandson in ‘The Curse of the Flying Hellfish’”—every time I refer to it would quickly grow tiresome, as would a clumsy phrase such as “The One Where Homer’s Dad Tries to Recover the Art His Old Army Unit Stole from the Nazis.”