Media

...FRANK McCONNELL...

...feedings, the one-too-many with the neighbors don't go away so fast, if you find out that you're not Rob and Laura Petrie, don't you feel cheated...

...The Simpsons" is truly funny and, like all truly funny things, profoundly sane...

...So as Homer might say watcha thinka that, hey...

...I mean, if you were raised on this, and then you get married and then you have kids, and then you find out that the bad things the bills, the 3:00 a.m...

...His son Bart, who was having dinner with the rest of the family in the restaurant where unbeknownst to them the party was also taking place, and who had just gotten his mail-order spy camera, happened into the banquet room, saw Dad cavorting with the belly dancer, snapped a shot, and began selling it around school...

...and never mind that this version of the family should remind you of the Marine lieutenant's justification for torching the village of Bien Tre: "It became necessary to destroy the city in order to save it...

...It's almost alarming: could we, as a nation of viewers, be smarter than we thought...

...can't be wrong...

...How "The Simpsons" made it to the Tube a prime-time cartoon sitcom for grownups, drawn and scripted, yet, by Matt Groening of the comic strip "Life in Hell," who is to cartooning approximately what Andy Kaufman was to standup comedy is as wonderful a mystery to me as how the Manhattan Project ever worked...

...Never mind that the moms are also usually getting the bad end of the stick in divorce settlements...

...Nineteen hundred and fifty-two was the year of "I Love Lucy" as the canonization of the Ideal Happy American Family and it was also-give or take a few months-the year of the myth's literary demolition...

...TV has become the family ritual, and in the manner of all ritual behavior has come to reflect its context in its content, becoming the ritual of and about the family...

...And the ending clinch, double-take, or final one-liner, to audience laughter and applause, with the promise that the same crazy gang will be back next week, unscathed and ready for another bout with the terror of the quotidian, is as formal a blessing on the participants in the ritual the viewers as are the words, he, Missa est...

...It's a complex interrelation of audience demand and audience supply...

...So they are caricatures, not just of us, but of us in our national delusion that the life of the sitcom family is the way things are "supposed" to be...

...Since that brilliant man, Desi Arnaz, decided in 1952 to shoot "I Love Lucy" with a three-camera setup before a live audience, the sitcom has been not only the staple cash crop of TV, but increasingly one of our crucial metaphors for the way we think we should live our lives...

...And who, after all, is closest...

...and the April 23 Newsweek also featured all five on its cover, with a longer and less clever essay...

...Holden Caulfield knew that the scenario of "Lucy" and "Father Knows Best" was a dangerous lie before there was a "Lucy" or a "Father Knows Best...

...shouldn't be wrong, because, after all, isn't this a family...

...And there is the moment when, I hope, as you watch "The Simpsons" on the Fox Network, your hand pauses carrying the Cheet-O's to your mouth, and you blink and say to yourself, "My God how brilliant...

...Naah," smiles Homer, "you must be thinkin' about Fred Flintstone...

...Don't you want to hit somebody...

...You on TV or something...

...The Mass asks you to bring something yourself so that you can take away something more all of us in our mutual woundedness and hope...

...has been ignored off the airwaves...

...Well, don't you know, one day ol'Homer is in the local Kwik-E-Mart getting some donuts, and the fellow behind the counter, who has the famous photo taped to the wall, looks at him and says, "Hey don't I know you...

...So why didn't we...

...There's a difference, of course...

...Pretty soon the picture was all over Springfield...

...MEDIA 'REAL' CARTOON CHARACTERS 'THE SIMPSONS' Not long ago, Homer Simpson got a little blitzed at a bachelor party for one of his co-workers at the Springfield nuclear power plant, and wound up dancing on the table with the inevitable bachelor-party belly dancer...

...Us back...

...But what Tolstoy doesn't tell you is that all happy families are alike because "happy family" is a null set...

...com), so that it can tell you that nothing is really wrong...

...With Children," which reduces it to an especially stupid caricature...

...I wonder how many wife- and child-beatings are traceable to wonderful as it was the old "Dick Van Dyke Show...

...The genius of "The Simpsons," for me, is that it deconstructs the myth of the happy family wisely and miraculously leaves what is real and valuable about the myth unscathed...

...The sit-come asks you only to be there and watch (quite literally a "sit...

...In this, it's unlike, say, "Roseanne" which reduces the myth to a caricature, or "Married...

...are cartoon characters, after all and Matt Groening, as a draftsman is-well, not Albrecht Diirer...

...and what he couldn't have told you is that, today, all unhappy families watch the Tube together...

...Blame it on Eisenhower, IBM, or sunspots, but the fact is we didn't...

...Stay tuned...

...Every week, in the great main-title sequence, they all race home at the end of the day from job, school, grocery, to line up and plop down on the sofa in front of-what else?-the TV...

...Even today, the sanctity of the "happy" (read: TV) family is strong enough that Life and "Donahue" canonize kids who turn in their moms to the cops for smoking dope...

...Homer, Marge, et...

...And in the same season, "Twin Peaks" has appeared and Morton Downey, Jr...

...Everything's okay, it says: the most outrageous problems can all be resolved, with wit and mutual trust, within a half-hour of teleplay...

...And in "The Simpsons," the Tube watches them back...

...I did...

...And as, week after week, they try to live as if they were the Flintstones, or the Andersons, or the Petries, and discover-don't we all?-that they're not, they humanize themselves and us to a degree the Connors of "Roseanne" or the Bundys of "Married" don't...

...What I thinka that is that TV has finally gotten the famous first sentence of Anna Karenina right: all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way...

...FRANK McCONNELLd...

...Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye has to be one of the most important American novels of this century just because it subverted the myth of the blissful nuclear family at the very time that myth was being formulated...

...It is already a campus-cult favorite, and TV Guide recently featured Homer, wife Marge, sibs Bart and Lisa and baby Maggie on the cover, with a very smart essay by Joanna Elm, "Are the Simpsons America's TV Family of the '90s...

...Nevertheless, there it is, every Sunday night, scrounging for ratings as desperately as its feckless hero, Homer, scrounges to keep the job for which he is eminently unqualified...

...Maybe "caricature" is the important word here...