The Prime of Miss Elizabeth Hoover

Yesterday, as I was working on my post for this blog, I found myself thinking about the first time that I ever heard of Lyme disease, which, naturally, was on The Simpsons. In the episode “Lisa’s Substitute,” which first aired on April 25, 1991, Lisa’s teacher, Miss Hoover, tells the class: “Children, I won’t be staying long. I just came from the doctor, and I have Lyme disease.” As Principal Skinner cheerfully explains: “Lyme disease is spread by small parasites called ‘ticks.’ When a diseased tick attaches itself to you, it begins sucking your blood. Malignant spirochetes infect your bloodstream, eventually spreading to your spinal fluid and on into the brain.” At the end of the second act, however, Miss Hoover unexpectedly returns, and I’ve never forgotten her explanation for her sudden recovery:

Miss Hoover: You see, class, my Lyme disease turned out to be psychosomatic.
Ralph: Does that mean you’re crazy?
Janie: It means she was faking it.
Miss Hoover: No, actually, it was a little of both. Sometimes, when a disease is in all the magazines and on all the news shows, it’s only natural that you think you have it.

And while it might seem excessive to criticize a television episode that first aired over a quarter of a century ago, it’s hard to read these lines after Porochista Khakpour’s memoir Sick without wishing that this particular joke didn’t exist.

In its chronic form, Lyme disease remains controversial, but like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, it’s an important element in the long, complicated history of women having trouble finding doctors who will take their pain seriously. As Lidija Haas writes in The New Yorker:

There’s a class of illnesses—multi-symptomatic, chronic, hard to diagnose—that remain associated with suffering women and disbelieving experts. Lyme disease, symptoms of which can afflict patients years after the initial tick bite, appears to be one…[The musician Kathleen Hanna] describes an experience common to many sufferers from chronic illness—that of being dismissed as an unreliable witness to what is happening inside her. Since no single medical condition, a doctor once told her, could plausibly affect so many different systems—neurological, respiratory, gastrointestinal—she must be having a panic attack…As in so many other areas of American life, women of color often endure the most extreme versions of this problem.

It goes without saying that when “Lisa’s Substitute” was written, there weren’t any women on the writing staff of The Simpsons, although even if there were, it might not have made a difference. In her recent memoir Just the Funny Parts, Nell Scovell, who worked as a freelance television writer in the early nineties, memorably describes the feeling of walking into the “all-male” Simpsons writing room, which was “welcoming, but also intimidating.” It’s hard to imagine these writers, so many of them undeniably brilliant, thinking twice about making a joke like this—and it’s frankly hard to see them rejecting it now, when it might only lead to attacks from people who, in Matt Groening’s words, “love to pretend they’re offended.”

I’m not saying that there are any subjects that should be excluded from comedic consideration, or that The Simpsons can’t joke about Lyme disease. But as I look back at the classic years of my favorite television show of all time, I’m starting to see a pattern that troubles me, and it goes far beyond Apu. I’m tempted to call it “punching down,” but it’s worse. It’s a tendency to pick what seem at the time like safe targets, and to focus with uncanny precision on comic gray areas that allow for certain forms of transgression. I know that I quoted this statement just a couple of months ago, but I can’t resist repeating what producer Bill Oakley says of Greg Daniels’s pitch about an episode on racism in Springfield:

Do you remember this? Something about Homer and Dr. Hibbert? Well, you pitched it several times and I think we were just…It was some exploration of the concept of race in Springfield, and we just said, you know, we don’t think this is the forum. The Simpsons can’t be the right forum to deal with racism.

He was probably right. But when you look at the few racially charged jokes that the show actually made, the characters involved weren’t black, but quite specifically “brown,” or members of groups that occupy a liminal space in our cultural understanding of race: Apu, Akira, Bumblebee Man. (I know that Akira was technically whiter than anybody else, but you get my drift.) By contrast, the show was very cautious when it came to its black characters. Apart from Dr. Hibbert, who was derived from Bill Cosby, the show’s only recurring black faces were Carl and Officer Lou, the latter of whom is so unmemorable that I had to look him up to make sure that he wasn’t Officer Eddie. And both Carl and Lou were given effectively the same voice by Hank Azaria, the defining feature of which was that it was nondescript as humanly possible.

I’m not necessarily criticizing the show’s treatment of race, but the unconscious conservatism that carefully avoided potentially controversial areas while lavishing attention on targets that seemed unobjectionable. It’s hard to imagine a version of the show that would have dared to employ such stereotypes, even ironically, on Carl, Lou, or even Judge Snyder, who was so racially undefined that he was occasionally colored as white. (The show’s most transgressive black figures, Drederick Tatum and Lucius Sweet, were so transparently modeled on real people that they barely even qualified as characters. As Homer once said: “You know Lucius Sweet? He’s one of the biggest names in boxing! He’s exactly as rich and as famous as Don King, and he looks just like him, too!” And I’m not even going to talk about “Bleeding Gums” Murphy.) That joke about Miss Hoover is starting to feel much the same way, and if it took two decades for my own sensibilities to catch up with that fact, it’s for the same reasons that we’re finally taking a harder look at Apu. And if I speak as a fan, it isn’t to qualify these thoughts, but to get at the heart of why I feel obliged to write about them at all. We’re all shaped by popular culture, and I can honestly say of The Simpsons, as Jack Kerouac writes in On the Road: “All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.” The show’s later seasons are reflexively dismissed as lazy, derivative, and reliant on easy jokes, but we still venerate its golden years. Yet if The Simpsons has gradually degraded under the watch of many of its original writers and producers, this implies that we’re only seeing the logical culmination—or eruption—of something that was there all along, afflicting its viewers years after the original bite. We all believed that The Simpsons, in its prime, was making us smarter. But what if it was just psychosomatic?

Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart?

Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart?
Now here’s the tricky part…

—“Homer and Apu”

On October 8, 1995, The Simpsons aired the episode “Bart Sells His Soul,” which still hasn’t stopped rattling around in my brain. (A few days ago, my daughter asked: “Daddy, what’s the soul?” I may have responded with some variation on Lisa’s words: “Whether or not the soul is physically real, it’s the symbol of everything fine inside us.” On a more typical morning, though, I’m likely to mutter to myself: “Remember Alf? He’s back—in pog form!”) It’s one of the show’s finest installments, but it came close to being about something else entirely. On the commentary track for the episode, the producer Bill Oakley recalls:

There’s a few long-lived ideas that never made it. One of which is David Cohen’s “Homer the Narcoleptic,” which we’ve mentioned on other tracks. The other one was [Greg Daniels’s] one about racism in Springfield. Do you remember this? Something about Homer and Dr. Hibbert? Well, you pitched it several times and I think we were just…It was some exploration of the concept of race in Springfield, and we just said, you know, we don’t think this is the forum. The Simpsons can’t be the right forum to deal with racism.

Daniels—who went on to create Parks and Recreation and the American version of The Office—went with the pitch for “Bart Sells His Soul” instead, and the other premise evidently disappeared forever, including from his own memory. When Oakley brings it up, Daniels only asks: “What was it?”

Two decades later, The Simpsons has yet to deal with race in any satisfying way, even when the issue seems unavoidable. Last year, the comedian Hari Kondabolu released the documentary The Problem With Apu, which explores the complicated legacy of one of the show’s most prominent supporting characters. On Sunday, the show finally saw fit to respond to these concerns directly, and the results weren’t what anyone—apart perhaps from longtime showrunner Al Jean—might have wanted. As Sopan Deb of the New York Times describes it:

The episode, titled “No Good Read Goes Unpunished,” featured a scene with Marge Simpson sitting in bed with her daughter Lisa, reading a book called “The Princess in the Garden,” and attempting to make it inoffensive for 2018. At one point, Lisa turns to directly address the TV audience and says, “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?” The shot then pans to a framed picture of Apu at the bedside with the line, “Don’t have a cow!” inscribed on it. Marge responds: “Some things will be dealt with at a later date.” Followed by Lisa saying, “If at all.”

Kondabolu responded on Twitter: “This is sad.” And it was. As Linda Holmes of NPR aptly notes: “Apu is not appearing in a fifty-year-old book by a now-dead author. Apu is a going concern. Someone draws him, over and over again.” And the fact the show decided to put these words into the mouth of Lisa Simpson, whose importance to viewers everywhere was recently underlined, makes it doubly disappointing.

But there’s one obvious change that The Simpsons could make, and while it wouldn’t be perfect, it would be a step in the right direction. If the role of Apu were recast with an actor of South Asian descent, it might not be enough in itself, but I honestly can’t see a downside. Hank Azaria would still be allowed to voice dozens of characters. Even if Apu sounded slightly different than before, this wouldn’t be unprecedented—Homer’s voice changed dramatically after the first season, and Julie Kavner’s work as Marge is noticeably more gravelly than it used to be. Most viewers who are still watching probably wouldn’t even notice, and the purists who might object undoubtedly left a long time ago. It would allow the show to feel newsworthy again, and not just on account of another gimmick. And even if we take this argument to its logical conclusion and ask that Carl, Officer Lou, Akira, Bumblebee Man, and all the rest be voiced by actors of the appropriate background, well, why not? (The show’s other most prominent minority character, Dr. Hibbert, seems to be on his way out for other reasons, and he evidently hasn’t appeared in almost two years.) For a series that has systematically undermined its own legacy in every conceivable way out of little more than boredom, it seems shortsighted to cling to the idea that Azaria is the only possible Apu. And even if it leaves many issues unresolved on the writing level, it also seems like a necessary precondition for change. At this late date, there isn’t much left to lose.

Of course, if The Simpsons were serious about this kind of effort, we wouldn’t be talking about its most recent episode at all. And the discussion is rightly complicated by the fact that Apu—like everything else from the show’s golden age—was swept up in the greatness of those five or six incomparable seasons. Before that unsuccessful pitch on race in Springfield, Greg Daniels was credited for “Homer and Apu,” which deserves to be ranked among the show’s twenty best episodes, and the week after “Bart Sells His Soul,” we got “Lisa the Vegetarian,” which gave Apu perhaps his finest moment, as he ushered Lisa to the rooftop garden to meet Paul and Linda McCartney. But the fact that Apu was a compelling character shouldn’t argue against further change, but in its favor. And what saddens me the most about the show’s response is that it undermines what The Simpsons, at its best, was supposed to be. It was the cartoon that dared to be richer and more complex than any other series on the air; it had the smartest writers in the world and a network that would leave them alone; it was just plain right about everything; and it gave us a metaphorical language for every conceivable situation. The Simpsons wasn’t just a sitcom, but a vocabulary, and it taught me how to think—or it shaped the way that I do think so deeply that there’s no real distinction to be made. As a work of art, it has quietly fallen short in ways both small and large for over fifteen years, but I was able to overlook it because I was no longer paying attention. It had done what it had to do, and I would be forever grateful. But this week, when the show was given the chance to rise again to everything that was fine inside of it, it faltered. Which only tells me that it lost its soul a long time ago.

The sandbox in the Park

If there’s an overarching critical narrative about Parks and Recreation, which aired its final episode last night, it’s that the show gradually evolved into something great after starting off as a mediocre clone of The Office. That’s true in itself: the jump in quality between the first and second seasons—as Leslie Knope transformed from a clueless bureaucrat to a hypercompetent idealist constantly done in by her own enthusiasm—is one of the most striking in television history. (Its later evolution, from a show about constant frustration into one in which all its characters’ dreams came true, is interesting as well, and probably has something to do with the nature of cringe comedy, which becomes unbearable over time without a larger positive arc to sustain it.) Yet it didn’t happen by accident. If luck, as Branch Rickey said, is the residue of design, it’s important to note how consciously the show’s creators built the possibility of change into the show’s premise. Reading the excellent oral history of the series recently published on Uproxx, I was most taken by the following tidbit, in which Greg Daniels explains how they decided to set the show in Indiana:

We had gone through every state and weighed its stereotype. We ended up with Indiana being it’s a Midwestern state that people don’t hear about much. Didn’t have a lot of stereotypes attached to it, we thought, nationally.

Which, when you think about it, is an extraordinary choice, since it’s the reverse of the approach that most sitcoms would take. When you’re trying to distill a concept into a single sentence for the benefit of viewers or marketing executives, it’s natural to want to choose a location that carries its own train of associations. The second you hear a title like NCIS: New Orleans, you know more or less everything about it. Parks and Rec did the opposite, picking a locale that it could treat as a blank slate or sandbox, to be populated by characters from its own imagination. Pawnee, Indiana is as persuasive a fictional town as anywhere short of Springfield, and this wouldn’t have been possible if they’d set the show in a place we already thought we knew. That kind of deliberate vagueness extended to the premise itself: it began its life as a proposal from the network for an Office spinoff starring Rashida Jones, evolved into a pitch for a mockumentary version of The West Wing, and even briefly considered taking the same approach to a family show, as Modern Family did later. And once they hit on the idea of making a series about local government, it still left them with a wide range of possible tones and stories. As John Ford—who might well be the only filmmaker Ron Swanson would like—said: “A situation must never limit a director. It must never be more than a point of departure.”

I’ve spoken a lot here before about the mystery of television, in which its basic assumptions are constantly being worked out in plain sight, and how little even a show’s creators can understand when they shoot the pilot. There’s a huge temptation to pitch a series with a big, obvious hook, but really, the best shows are initially a little vague about what they’re going to be about. This may be why shows named for locations or environments (The Office, Community, Cheers) often hold more potential than ones named after characters (Two and a Half Men). It’s an approach that only works if the creators assume, correctly or not, that they’ll be given a run of sufficient length to permit them to tease out each element’s potential. Given the merciless realities of television, this may be a form of irrational optimism, but it’s also essential: you’ve got to believe that you’ll run for six seasons and a movie, even if the odds are you won’t. A show that relentlessly focuses on its short game, like Glee, can find itself stranded when it’s given more than a couple of seasons. And while most shows that hope for a long run end up frustrated, when all the pieces come together, as they did here, it can be enormously satisfying. There’s a reason why last night’s finale ranks among the best I’ve ever seen: it’s the culmination of six years of material that the show was allowed to figure out over time.

And if Parks and Recreation stands apart in the amount of affection it managed to generate toward all its characters, it’s because we got to know them as the writers did, rather than being told who they were in a bullet point or two. Jerry and Donna started as background players who were left deliberately undefined, on the assumption that something good would come out of it if everyone waited for long enough. (As Mike Shur says: “Let’s pick these two people and we’ll put them in this office. They seem funny and we’ll get to it later.”) And such developments often arose from solitary moments of inspiration, out of the dozens of throwaway gags in every episode, that happened to ignite something in the writer’s room. Jerry’s role as the hapless office foil emerged from a single joke in the second season, when Mark accidentally informs him that he was adopted; Andy and April’s romance came out of a random pairing in the episode “Hunting Trip.” Like all great ensembles, it was able to experiment with different combinations of characters, and if one of them clicked, it survived, even as the failed drafts—like the attempt to match up Tom and Ann—live on in the reruns. The finale was an extended exercise in wish fulfillment, even for a show that often seemed determined to make its characters as happy as possible. But it was a worthy conclusion to a great sitcom that was made, like a life, one moment at a time.