The Simpsons and our long 1990s hangover

For most of my life, when asked what my favorite TV show is, I have said The Simpsons, and if asked what my favorite episode is, I have said "Marge Vs. the Monorail."

My choice has no great reasoning behind it. At its height, The Simpsons delighted me more than any other show ever has, and the show's worst episodes never tarnished the memories of its best for me. And there were a lot of "best" episodes. A few entire seasons offered 20-plus episodes where I wouldn't blink if you named any of them your all-time favorite. I have always picked "Marge Vs. the Monorail" because it makes me laugh the hardest and it has a strong story to string those jokes along. Also, I owned a VHS tape with it and "A Streetcar Named Marge" that I watched over and over and over, so I know it backwards and forwards. Again, there's no great reasoning here.

I am just old enough to have been aware of The Simpsons' debut in late 1989 but not old enough to have remembered the show more than the fact that I couldn't watch it. As a child, I followed rules to a fault, so when my parents informed me that, under no circumstances, would The Simpsons be watched in our house, I decided it must be evil and avoided it even when over at friends' homes. (It helped that the farm I grew up on didn't get access to Fox until the mid-1990s, when the network landed rights to broadcast NFC football games.)

I don't know that my parents ever actually watched an episode of The Simpsons until the show entered syndication and I became obsessed with it. (By then, I was a teenager and less inclined to take their dictums seriously.) But they didn't need to watch it to have a reason to distrust it. For one thing, the aesthetics of the show nodded toward the indie comics roots of Matt Groening; for another, the show's demeanor deliberately thumbed its nose at the sacred family sitcom cows of the 1980s. More than anything, though, the show's general lampooning of authority figures marked it as suspect to the people who raised me, as well as a significant number of other people and schools (and presidents!). It seems weird, now that The Simpsons permeates our pop cultural atmosphere, but it really was treated as a dangerous text that could corrupt young minds for a while, before it was replaced by different dangerous texts that could corrupt young minds.

In rewatching "Marge Vs. the Monorail" in 2024, however, I was struck by how gleefully classic Simpsons believes in essentially nothing greater than ephemeral connections between human beings. It has a kneejerk, obligatory appreciation for the nuclear family unit, but you always get the sense the series is saying family is important with its fingers crossed behind its back. In "Monorail" and The Simpsons more broadly, every single institution is corrupt, people mostly come together to destroy things, and the ideal position from which to view everything is one of ironic detachment. Why be part of the rabble when you could sprinkle witty bon mots down on the heads of the citizenry from above?

What's interesting about "Monorail" is the degree to which the show's writers don't let themselves off the hook. (Conan O'Brien is credited with the script, but every script of the show saw contributions from lots more writers than were credited.) In general, Simpsons writers used the character of long-suffering, hyper-intelligent Lisa to underline points they didn't want the audience to miss. She is a classic TV writer proxy character: wise beyond her years but functionally powerless within the show's universe. Yet in "Monorail," after a brief flirtation with questioning Springfield's need for a public transportation system (more on this in a second), Lisa is won over by flattery. Monorail huckster Lyle Lanley winks and tells her she's the smartest one in the room, and... that's all it takes to get her on his side.

I don't think I realized how important that tiny scene with Lisa is to the episode's success until this most recent rewatch. Lisa's question is a good one, but she's so easily sidetracked by somebody noticing exactly what she wants to hear and telling her that. Finding those weak points is, of course, a key part of being good at sales, and like Harold Hill before him, Lyle Lanley is nothing if not a good salesman. Without Lisa as the voice of reason, Springfield feels slightly more chaotic than usual, which proves a good emotional grounding for the episode.

Thus, the role of the episode's good sense and conscience falls to Marge. Often when The Simpsons wants to do an episode about Marge standing up against the system, it paints her as a woman possessed of much common sense who just wants to do right by her family – a classic sitcom mom, in other words. Often, however, the show will depict this natural desire of hers going too far, most famously in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge." The natural state of The Simpsons is anarchy, and Marge is the one major character whose core being pushes back against that anarchy. In "Monorail," her stick-in-the-mud-ness saves the day.

Classic Simpsons has a somewhat dim view of humanity. If it distrusts individuals (and it does), then it really distrusts people who come together to form anything larger than a family of five. In other series with this philosophical bent, that typically points to an underlying conservativism or an underlying nihilism, but The Simpsons avoids both traps. After all, the individuals and institutions it distrusts most are the very rich and the corporations they run, and its sense of character is so strong that even the most minor Springfielder can be shown to have a fully fleshed-out humanity. It is a show that thinks everything is funny because it secretly loves people so much.

However, it often lurches toward a cynicism typical of its era, one that suggests the world is pretty good as is and efforts to change it too much should be greeted with skepticism. It's telling of the show's larger worldview that Marge's proposal for how to use the $3 million Mr. Burns was forced to pay Springfield is to fix up Main Street so cars can drive on it more smoothly. The monorail is never treated as anything other than a ridiculous boondoggle, and considering the episode aired at a time when Los Angeles was early in its own attempts at building a modern rail system, it's not hard to read some of those attitudes onto the episode.

Of course, within the reality of The Simpsons, Springfield really doesn't need a monorail. Though the town's size is fairly elastic, it's hard to imagine it containing more than, say, 200,000 people, and in most episodes, it seems far smaller. Yet within the show's reality, it's also typically better to simply iterate on the things we already have, rather than imagine anything better. It is a product very much of its neoliberal era, even today.

Again, The Simpsons remains my favorite show ever made. But the easy cynicism in which it trafficked is perhaps its foremost cultural byproduct. The Simpsons wasn't without precedent – broadly speaking, its attitude toward the world would be right at home within the pages of MAD magazine – but it turned that anarchic cynicism into a cultural juggernaut, institutionalizing the belief that no institutions are to be trusted.

I do wonder how much that worldview has seeped so deeply into the groundwater of people my age and younger that it will be difficult to expunge. At least in The Simpsons, it exists within the form of a terrific TV show that understands human life is complicated and people will often surprise you. But many of the show's imitators – including wildly successful ones – took its worldview several steps further and created a sense that caring about anything is for suckers.

Now, we live in an era when caring about something is usually thought to be a necessity, and even modern Simpsons episodes feint toward this more often than not. Now that The Simpsons lives on as audiovisual wallpaper for entire generations, whatever worldview its early episodes had has surely been blunted by just how completely it has become an institution itself. After all, there was a time when Mickey Mouse was read as anarchic, and now, it's impossible to imagine him as such. It is the nature of cultural objects that become controversial to push the envelope just far enough that some other program comes along and pushes it further. Eventually, every envelope pusher becomes a little staid and rote.

"Marge Vs. the Monorail" is probably still my favorite episode of my favorite show – if only for "the ring came off my pudding can"/"take my penknife, my good man" – but there's something in it that makes me feel a pang of nostalgia, not for when it aired but for the future it believed it already inhabited, a place where everything was pretty good and everybody was just a little bit suspect but worth loving (and laughing at) anyway.

The free edition of Episodes is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).