The Golden Age Was Actually A Vibrant Yellow (The Simpsons) [Introduction]

Welcome to 2026 on Frezno's Raving Rants, (a little late I know, but blame snowstorms, flu, and tragedy), where the theme is "big ambitions". So here we are, tackling a really big show in a project that will probably take me at least a quarter of the year. (I was an optimist when I wrote those words in January. Fuck.) Why would I do this to myself? Hubris, or something. Really, the seeds of blossoming nostalgia were planted back in June of 2024 when I went on that throwback trip with Street Cents, the Canadian show that helped teens spend their money wisely. I won't rehash all of that, as it's right there if you want to hear about 90's Canadiana vibes, but I will once again mention the Studio Coquette block that ruled my weekday afternoon TV watching. Because I never get tired of reminding you all that the CBC really did put a CGI French-Canadian bulldog as their after-school mascot. I found another promo for it again, and this one shows the particular oddities of that afternoon block. Street Cents and Jonovision make sense as shows targeted to Canadian tweens and teens. Road To Avonlea, a period drama with ties to Anne Of Green Gables, feels very much like the odd one out. Very weird, but we're here to talk about the reason why I showed up for this particular program block. At long last, it's time to talk about The Simpsons.

One of the many gifts of Simpsons merch I got 
during my obsessive phase was a jigsaw puzzle of this.

This represents a huge reserve of untapped nostalgia for me. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, for a good decade or so of my formative years, I was obsessed with The Simpsons. This shit absolutely stuck in my brain and would not leave, and I'm sure I was intensely obnoxious about it. The kind of dumbass who would come to school on Monday morning, excitedly going up to friends and asking "Did you see The Simpsons last night?" before quoting a particularly funny line back to them. Badly. Listen, I was like 14, you're allowed to be an obnoxious little parrot at that age. Entire lines and scenes seared themselves upon my internal landscape, and it pissed me off that I could do shit like sing the Monorail song from memory but struggle to retain knowledge for school stuff. Believe me, if I could trade, I would. So instead of an A student with hazy memories of a funny cartoon they saw one time, you get a C student with procrastination issues who has all this shit memorized and is ready to talk your ear off about the fucking Simpsons. You play the hand you're dealt, y'know? 

So that's the plan. Rewatch and talk about The Simpsons, in little segments. This one here will be covering the first two seasons of the show, but one question looms: How far am I going? If you think I'm going to sit here and watch thirty six fucking seasons of this show, you're (and I mean this affectionately) out of your goddamn mind. Thus, I have to pick a stopping point, and I have chosen it to be Season 12. There are a few reasons for this. First, it's close to honest with the period of my hyperfixation. I stopped watching modern Simpsons by around 2003 or 2004, when I departed for college. I could go with the popular flow and stop at the moment when the culture at large seems to think The Simpsons stopped being good, after Season 8. That wouldn't be honest to my nostalgia, though. I didn't shut off the TV in disgust after The Principal And The Pauper and declare The Simpsons to be Dead Forever back in 1997, so I don't get to do it here. As it stands, we end in May of 2001, which has two unique synchronicities. First, it's the last Simpsons episode before the release of the Season 1 DVD boxset I own, which has a nice symbolism to it. I stop at the moment when the show becomes history for me. Secondly, this is the last Simpsons to be released before 9/11. Now I'm not American so that tragedy doesn't hit me quite as hard, but this is more alchemy and symbolism. The Simpsons, to me, is a quintessential reflection of the 1990s. Ending it at the moment that the cultural 90's were suddenly and violently ended just feels apt. So, that's all the introductions out of the way. Let's talk about some vintage Simpsons... or rather, let's set the stage for it.

History is written by the winners, so it is worth looking at what the folks behind The Simpsons who made a bajillion dollars off of it have to say about its inception. Matt Groening was a cartoonist with a subversive counterculture comic called Life In Hell, lampooning the state of American society in the 1980s. He got approached to do some interstitial cartoon shorts for a comedy show starring Tracey Ullman, but didn't want to give up Life In Hell in case it was a flop, and so he hastily cobbled together some crude sketches of an average family and named them all after his own. I haven't seen the Ullman shorts (minus the ones shown as part of The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular, but we are getting way ahead of ourselves here), but to make a long story short, people loved these yellow doofuses and so they got the go-ahead to do a whole season of television based on their misadventures. So, then, at the tail end of the 1980s, The Simpsons got their own show and blew up culture and made lots and lots of money. There's another supposed reason for the success of The Simpsons, and that's the way in which it subverted the expectations of its genre and acted as some sort of rebellion against the sitcom culture of the 1980s. This deserves diving into a little bit, so let's.

If you believe the story here of the success of The Simpsons, the sitcoms of the 1980s were this overly sanitized and saccharine hugboxes of shows that promoted Good Old-Fashioned Family Values where everyone was squeaky clean and any problem could be solved in 22 minutes with moralizing, hugs, and just being the idealized picture of the American Nuclear Family Unit. I don't have the time or mental spoons to delve into a whole binge of 80's sitcoms like Growing Pains, Family Ties, Full House, or The Cosby Show (Yes. That monstrous man is relevant to this story, sadly.), but I can tell you that sitcoms weren't always like that. I didn't watch much myself, but my parents were lovers of All In The Family. Poorly aged as some of Archie Bunker's thoughts are, that show does feel like it was pushing the envelope of societal change and changing attitudes. (I would like to add: RIP in peace, Rob Reiner. How horrible.) The story here is that these sanitized and safe sitcoms were all products of the big three American TV networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Then, in the late 80's, the Fox network came about and appealed to a different demographic and style of comedy. The Simpsons is part of this countercultural wave, but the real first headliner is another little sitcom called Married With Children. Which I did sit down and watch an episode of, just to get the vibe.

This man was actual late 80's counterculture.

I do not care for the vibes in the modern day, frankly. It's a very cynical show where the joke is "I fucking hate my wife and children and they kind of hate me too", and the episode I watched was about bra shopping and had some rather crude and poorly-aged humor. I would not view more of this, but it helped me in formulating what I liked about early Simpsons here. Despite my not liking it, the fact of the matter is that there was a market for this kind of shit, a sitcom that wasn't like all the other sitcoms out there at the time. Married With Children did well enough for itself, certainly, but it didn't absolutely define the cultural 90's and stick around to the modern day like The Simpsons has. Part of this, of course, is that The Simpsons is animated, but there's much more to it than that. There's a secret history underneath the surface of this master narrative. Look at me. I wasn't an American in the late 80's who wanted an edgier sitcom to cut against fucking Who's The Boss or whatever, and The Simpsons still upended my internal landscape in ways I still feel to this day. There's something here, and by God it's my job to dig in and discover it. 

So. Let's talk about vintage Simpsons. What about this show sings today? What helped it set culture ablaze? What makes The Simpsons so goddamn good? Let's find out, together.