... Because He Made So Many Of Them

At the start of a new television season, rough and rowdy Fox TV has irrevocably ended The Big Three monopoly on America's airwaves. The new network -- home of Married With Children, Beverly Hills 90210, A Current Affair, In Living Color, and other controversial fare -- has built its success on a daring, semi-naughty, and superficially rebellious image. As comedian Dennis Miller recently quipped, "Fox is the network whose parents are out of town."

But Fox also has emerged from its infancy, for good and ill, as the most interesting and innovative force in American broadcasting. Meanwhile Fox's most important production, The Simpsons, begins a new season as the most discussed, analyzed, and merchandised program in recent TV history. Not to mention the first animated show for adults to hit the really, really big time since the ancient Flintstones.

Both the commercial-cultural phenomenon of Fox's let-it-all-hang-out entertainment ethos and the artistic-commercial success of The Simpsons draw us back to a favorite mass-media motto from a simpler time: "God must have loved the common people ... because he made so many of them." That slogan is identified in most minds with the venerable New York Daily News, which always prided itself on being the paper for the people that The New York Times looked down upon. It's the kind of paper that has lots of big pictures, short articles, punchy prose, and even punchier headlines. It carries lots of sports and crime news, and its tabloid format is easy to read on the bus or subway. It appeals demagogically to the (pre-inclusiveness) "common man" while propagating a message of cultural reaction and racial fear in the divide-and-conquer service of corporate wealth.

Rupert Murdoch understands this kind of gut-level pop-exploitation. The daily tabloids may be a dying breed in America, but they thrive in Australia and England, and that's where Murdoch (an Aussie at birth) made his zillions. A few years back Murdoch, seeing (if not reading) the handwriting on the wall for print media, started moving into U.S. television. He even became one of us (a U.S. citizen) in order to circumvent our quaint legal inhibitions against foreign domination of the airwaves. In the end Murdoch became the driving force, and main Mr. Moneybags, behind the founding of the Fox TV network which, like Murdoch's print entities, always aims for the lowest common demographic.

IT'S BEEN ALMOST TWO years now since the Fox TV network, cobbled together from a scattering of previously unaffiliated UHF outlets, debuted with a bare-bones, weekends-only programming lineup. Almost immediately the network hit paydirt with the low-class and low-rent bickering Bundys on Married With Children, and now Fox is an established and undeniable force in U.S. broadcasting.

The lack of an encumbering and pretentious news department is all that keeps Fox from full parity with The Big Three. And, trust me, the day of harmonic convergence is coming when you won't be able to tell the difference between The CBS Evening News and Fox's A Current Affair.

Of course there is a reason why the Fox network has aimed its demographic sights at the (bi-racial) blue collar end of the spectrum. Throughout the 1980s the three major networks responded to the VCR and cable challenge by shifting to a narrowcasting strategy which ceded some mass audience appeal in return for delivering to advertisers those most coveted high-income, high-class, high-consuming viewers. Hence the rash of "quality" programming for and about baby-boomish yuppies (St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, thirtysomething, etc.) and/or their nostalgic obsessions (see especially The Wonder Years and China Beach). In a country where the typical gross income for a family of four is in the $30,000 range (with two paychecks), it sometimes seemed that almost all of the main characters on TV shows were pulling down more than double or triple that ... per capita.

Someone at Fox surveyed this scene and saw an opening at the bottom of the economic barrel. Soon the Bundys were born and all those network doctors-lawyers-adwriters-etc. started to quake in their natural fibers and European shoes. Married With Children was, and is, I think, an irritating, demeaning, and unfunny exercise. But the Bundys do have an audience, and a big one, because in their own twisted way, they strike a note of reality.

Real families are not like those on Leave It to Beaver or Donna Reed. They are not like the Huxtables. Real families have resentments and irritations. Most people aren't trained in dealing with that side of real life, so the bumps and bruises frequently boil over into the domestic equivalent of guerrilla warfare (snipe and retreat, snipe and retreat).

Also, real families worry about money, all the time. There is an enormous tension in the household about money that no one can change; it affects everything else. The Bundys presented a crude caricature of this seamy underside of family life, and the shock of recognition bounced the Nielson ratings meter.

BUT IT WAS WITH Fox's other American family epic, spawned in the wake of the Bundys, that art, demographics, human tragedy, young rebellion, and uplifting populism met, kissed, and made magic (and money). I'm talking of course about The Simpsons, which is, bar none, no doubt, the best show on American television since Max Headroom was, briefly, the best show ever on American television.

Because it is on Fox, and because it was grouped with Married With Children in discussions of the demystification of family life, a lot of non-viewers have assumed that The Simpsons share the Bundy's crudity, except even more so because they are, after all, cartoons. Others have not yet figured out -- again because of the animated format -- that The Simpsons is, for all its irresistible appeal to the young and restless, not a children's show.

The Simpsons is an adult show. Not adult in the trite sense of sexual innuendo, but in the wholly unexpected sense of grasping the complexity and ambiguity of human life. And while the show certainly works at the lowest common comedy denominator, it also is frequently layered with cultural references that significantly enlarge the context of the humor.

For instance, one episode I caught recently in re-runs featured a shot-for-shot animated recreation of the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and a montage of children at play lifted from the Dutch Renaissance chapter of an art history book. That montage also featured an image of boys painting a fence lifted from Tom Sawyer. And, of course, the name of the Simpsons' hometown, Springfield, signifies much to us oldsters. That was the name of the town in Father Knows Best, and the Simpsons can be read as a portrait of life across the tracks from the Andersons in the twilight of the American century.

The show is also "adult" in that it is mostly about adults. A British pop-culture writer, exposed only to the merchandising and media hype around the show, reported his shock when he finally got a chance to watch because he discovered much to his amazement that Homer (the dad) not Bart (the son) is the chief protagonist. The stories often revolve around Homer's dead-end job at the local nuclear power plant. And, in fact, while Marge (the mom) and Lisa (the elder daughter), were pushing each other into deeper relational waters by last season's end, it is the buddy-adversary relationship between Bart and Homer that is the show's emotional core.

This is not too surprising when you realize that the show's creator, cartoonist-writer Matt Groening, is himself a new father. He came from a real-life family with a father named Homer, a mother named Margaret, and two sisters named Maggie and Lisa (his own name, Matt = Brat = Bart), as well as an older brother and sister, Mark and Patty.

BUT FOR ALL THE FATHER-and-son stuff, The Simpsons is less male-dominated than most TV. Lisa, a budding intellectual and jazz saxophonist (with an "Abolish Apartheid" poster in her room), defies social (and family) expectations with her over-achieving independence even more than Bart does with his louder, but more typical, rebellions.

And, in one of the best episodes yet, when a picture of Homer and a bachelor-party stripper comes to Marge's attention, she forces him, son in hand, to track down the woman and apologize for participating in her exploitation. The episode ends with Homer delivering a feminist speech from the stage of a burlesque joint that has all of the male customers slinking guiltily out the door.

The Simpsons also tackles the really big, ultimate life questions. For instance, once a shady guy came along and offered to bootleg Homer on to cable television for $20. Homer said yes, and the rest of the show was a moral comedy of errors as little sins led to big ones, with Lisa leading a Gandhian resistance campaign to rid the home of corruption.

Then there was the time Homer thought he'd eaten poison sushi and had only 24 hours to live. This meditation on mortality ended with Homer in his easy chair, after making peace with father, family, and friends, listening to radio talkmeister Larry King reading the King James Bible on a talking book cassette. When Homer woke up, much to his surprise, he was renewed and determined to live life to its absolute fullest. So he spent the weekend watching pro bowling on television.

That episode's long, long closing take of Homer, back from the dead, on his own lumpy sofa, sucking pork rinds and watching the pins fall, summed up what makes The Simpsons a great show. Homer was not being ridiculed for finding no higher calling in life than bowling. Instead we were being dared to find fault with the few and small genuine satisfactions allowed to a man trying to make the best of the only world he, or any of us, has.

The dirty secret at the heart of The Simpsons as art is that the show's family-member characters, despite everything, deeply love each other and the life they share. The other part of the secret is that the show's creation is motivated by a genuine and non-condescending love of the common people. Well, that and merchandising.

Woody Guthrie uttered the pop populist credo when he said that he didn't want to sing any songs that made people feel useless and small. Simpsons' auteur Matt Groening echoed Guthrie when he said, "So much in our culture is designed to make you feel envious; the Simpsons don't do that."

By the way, the Simpsons are also one of the very few TV families to go to church every week, even consulting their minister in times of crisis. The religion they get there is a pretty lame K-Mart evangelicalism, but it does express the characters' striving, amid chaos and drift, for a moral anchor and a larger sense of life's meaning.

The fact is that the old saying is true; God does love the common people. And The Simpsons, in its own quirky way, reflects that religious truth back to us, if we only have the eyes to see.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.