The news that The Simpsons season 34 will feature an episode explaining the show’s penchant for predicting the future could either be worrying or promising, depending on the rest of the season’s outings. The Simpsons has a fraught relationship with meta humor. The once-acclaimed sitcom was, in its so-called Golden Age, one of the shows that brought self-referential humor into mainstream sitcoms.
Some of the later series that Family Guy often featured brutally cynical, bleak subversion of sitcom norms. However, The Simpsons alone managed to balance meta-jokes that mocked the conventions and cliches of family television while also retaining a sweet, sentimental streak at the same time.
Classic Simpsons episodes like “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming” (season 7 episode 9) mocked network television’s trite, over-familiar storytelling style, but even this anarchic outing was preceded by the sincere, tender fan favorite “Mother Simpson” (season 7 episode 8), the debut of Homer’s mother Mona. At its best, The Simpsons has always trafficked in both sincerity and irony simultaneously. This balance means it could potentially be worrying to hear producer Matt Selman say that The Simpsons season 34 will feature an episode that explains the show’s apparent knack for predicting the future. Since this would require The Simpsons to acknowledge the show’s status as a fictional cartoon, the episode’s premise could easily become too self-referential and lose any emotional resonance as a result. This is an issue that The Simpsons season 33 took some pains to avoid (for the most part), meaning this zany episode could represent a step back for the series.
How The Simpsons Season 34 Will Explain The Show’s Predictions
The news that The Simpsons season 34 features two Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials for the first time in the show’s history makes it clear that the long-running series has no fear of narrative experimentation. As such, Selman’s promises of a self-referential meta episode that explains how The Simpsons predicts the future shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. The specifics of how this revelation will work, however, remain a mystery. Per Selman: “we have another crazy conceptual episode that explains how The Simpsons know the future. It’s a conceptual episode with lots of crazy stuff in it, but it does an explanation of how The Simpsons can predict the future.”
Why The Simpsons Shouldn’t Explain The Show’s Future Predictions
The Simpsons has annoyed fans by retconning the show’s past before, and meta humor is not always the strong suit of the series (as even early experiments like the divisive “The Principal and the Pauper” proved). As such, an episode that directly addresses a media phenomenon that surrounds The Simpsons in real life could end up feeling solipsistic. It is easy for a cartoon about a dysfunctional family to end up losing its emotional impact and relatability when the characters are discussing their own status as a pop culture institution and addressing an online rumor (about The Simpsons being able to predict the future) that technically shouldn’t exist within their reality.
Could The Simpsons Pull Off This Episode?
That said, some of the funniest episodes of The Simpsons took the risky strategy of directly addressing the show’s real-life existence. While season 13 provided some of the most hated Simpsons stories, the preceding season 12 finale “Behind the Laughter” made up for three seasons of disappointing critics with a critically acclaimed classic episode wherein the Simpsons themselves were portrayed as burnt-out, overworked sitcom actors who lost their ion for the project. Similarly, “Bart Gets Famous” (season 5 episode 12) was a poignant satire of fame and its high price at a time when Bart was a global cultural icon thanks to his breakout popularity and the ubiquity of his novelty hit “Do the Bartman.” Similarly, “The Simpsons Spinoff Showcase” (season 8, episode 24) worried producers who thought that fans wouldn’t understand that the bad writing was intentional, only for the outing to later be seen as a classic. As such, there is reason to believe that an episode addressing the apparent ability of The Simpsons to predict the future could work.
How The Simpsons Season 34 Could Succeed
The success of The Simpsons Movie proved was that the show’s love of big, expansive, ambitious stories can’t be allowed to overshadow the titular family’s characters.
Similarly, irable efforts to tie in meta jokes about how The Simpsons predicts the future or whether the show will ever end only work if The Simpsons is also simultaneously committed to making viewers care about its characters. The Simpsons can address their status as fictional characters and can even break the fourth wall to joke about this, thanks to the unique opportunities for self-referential humor that the cartoon sitcom format offers the series. However, all of these jokes and wild concepts must be balanced out by storylines that remind viewers why they grew to care about these characters in the first place. Part of what made Bob’s Burgers successful was borrowing The Simpsons’ sweet-but-cynical approach to family sitcom storytelling, and this same approach can allow The Simpsons to tell more weird, ambitious, and surreal stories even after over thirty years on the air. However, without grounded stories that give the audience a reason to care about the characters at the center of the series, The Simpsons season 34 can’t succeed—and no amount of timely, clever, self-referential plots can change that.