So recently I decided to re-watch Season 2 of The Simpsons. At first I was watching it just because I needed something to watch after Donbros, but actually it turned out to be way more interesting than I thought it was gonna be.
It's been at least a solid decade since I last sat down and actually watched The Simpsons so, maybe for the first time in my life, I got to watch these episodes fresh without my brain just comparing it to the rest of the show. Like, usually when we talk about the first couple of seasons it's about how the show hadn't become Classic Simpsons yet, how the show was still trying to figure all that stuff out and wasn't quite there. But while there are some interesting conversations to be had, I think that kind of does Season 2 a disservice.
Season 2 isn't just "The Simpsons before it got really, really good." It is kind of a different kind of show, but when you look at the episodes on their own merit I think there's a lot to dig into. Especially from a modern perspective, because hey- Did you remember 1990 was over three decades ago?
It is kind of a really obvious thing to say, but it really did hit me how old these television episodes were when I was watching them. And I don't mean just old like old episodes of anime are old, I mean they're old in that they're depicting a version of America that's so old-fashioned it just doesn't exist anymore. Some of the episodes felt so old fashioned that even though they were talking about Regular American Things they honestly felt foreign to me at first.
This hit me right off the bat with the first episode, Bart Gets an "F". The premise of the episode is about as simple as you can get, Bart gets an F on a history test and if he doesn't do better on the next one he'll be held back. A very classic type of episode.
There was something about how just about every big plot beat of the episode was framed that just felt very different from how you'd do it now. Like, look at this scene:
The big theme is that Bart is dumb because he's a Simpson, right? And an underachiever, proud of it, etc. (As seen on the classic t-shirt) Except, wait- the way they talk about short attention span? Bart just has untreated ADHD! That's what the episode is! Except they don't treat it like that because nobody knows what ADHD is! If this happened in 2023 they'd just give Bart the prescription he needs and he'd be fine! It's a tragedy.
There's also another This Episode Was Written in 1990 story beat later in the episode, where Bart needs to delay the test so he earnest and genuinely prays to God for a miracle, (snow day) then it happens. The way we relate to religion in America has really come a long way, huh.
There's a bunch of other stuff in other episodes that feels pretty old-fashioned too, but somehow this got long just talking about Bart Gets an "F" so uhhhhhhh I'll have to save that for some other post. But, to give a sense of how old-fashioned a lot of the season is: if you listen to the writer's commentary for the season, there are a lot of times where the writers point out that something in an episode was based on something they experienced growing up in the seventies.
(Finally, also, shout out to the Talking Simpsons podcast which I'm listening to along with each episode. It's why I decided to start with Season 2. Maybe I should have put that at the top but I already wrote the post.)
