GIVE THEM MOON AND CLOUDLESS SKIES [479]

from "The Simpsons" episode "Barthood", a parody of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

It isn’t unusual to want Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson to grow up OK when you have been watching them on television for most of your own life. You hope that our real world, both reflected and created by the show, will ultimately be as kind to them as you want it to be for ourselves.

With “The Simpsons” having now run for an astonishing thirty-five years, three years away from eclipsing “Last of the Summer Wine” to become the world’s longest-running sitcom, its status quo means that, while I was younger than Lisa when I first saw the show, I am now older than both her parents. We have grown up with these characters, but they can only grow through lessons learned, fleshing out their backstory.

I fell out of watching “The Simpsons” for some time, returning upon subscribing to Disney+ to find a show that, while not having folded over itself by pandering to its audience’s nostalgia, has become playful with its own history: it began its thirty-sixth season with a “series finale” that stopped questions on how the show would eventually end, having previously broadcast a fake clip show of leaked episodes purportedly too outlandish even for later-period “The Simpsons”, and a “Treehouse of Horror” story created a “Westworld”-like theme park of the moments adopted as internet memes.

The 2022 episode “When Nelson Met Lisa” was when I realised that my favourite episodes of “The Simpsons” depict an imagined future for its characters, seeing what their experiences have made them, regardless of it being a parody of “When Harry Met Sally”. Lisa has been shown to have a crush on Nelson Muntz before, but a series of scenes across the years builds this into a mature, happy and hopeful ending, one you hope will be canonised.

By necessity, the future depicted in “The Simpsons” can’t be set in stone, because that could get in the way of a good story, but there have been elements built up on each other, then knocked down and rebuilt: Bart could become a deadbeat divorced dad, living in a Springfield Elementary converted to makeshift apartments; Lisa is successful, but marries Milhouse; and Maggie, the eternal silent wildcard, becomes the biggest noise in pop music, and the most constant depiction of her future. Thankfully, Bart and Lisa’s future has been depicted more hopefully, with Bart becoming a BMX stunt champion, artist and a repair shop owner, while Lisa will attend Harvard and have the world as her oyster. 

Then again, Bart could also become a Supreme Court judge after missing “The Itchy & Scratchy Movie”, and Lisa could become President of the United States, having inherited “quite a budget crunch from President Trump”, although the episode “Bart to the Future”, broadcast in 2000, would not have known which Trump presidency it would be. 

Predicting the future can be futile, despite the number of times situations and jokes in “The Simpsons” replayed themselves in real life, from predicting the discovery of the Higgs boson to Disney buying 20^thCentury Fox, but imagining the future should be encouraged, except for preparing for when “The Simpsons” eventually ends – I don’t think anyone is truly prepared for that. Perhaps it could then be rebooted with an older Bart, Lisa and Maggie – it happened with "The Flintstones" and “The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show”.