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.