The Simpsons and their social significance.
The Simpsons is the longest running show in the history of American television. Why are The Simpsons so popular? What do Americans, in particular, find so appealing about these crudely drawn yellow people?.
The show was intended as a satire, but it took a few seasons for Matt Groening to decide exactly what he wanted to satirize. In the late Eighties, when the Simpsons first hit the screen, the atmosphere of fluffy family shows like Different Strokes was beginning to get stale; hence such parodies as Married with Children which concentrated on the dysfunctional family began to appear. The Simpsons were originally conceived as a dysfunctional family. The father is a bumbling idiot, the mother is a goody-two-shoes, the son is a rebel without a cause, and the daughter is a disgruntled intellectual. And each of the four is charismatic in his or her own way. Americans received a sort of a comic catharsis when they watched the first few seasons of The Simpsons. The situation was not untypical, and many families may have recognized an exaggerated portrait of themselves. So I am not a bumbling idiot, a head of the household might think, but I am certainly not educated enough to handle the kind of job my boss wants me to do. So, the Simpson family became America's best friends - they were similar enough to a typical American family for us to relate to them, yet different enough for us to laugh at them. The important point is that American families saw themselves as dysfunctional and could relate to the Simpsons.
The show entered its second stage during a famous "Bart falls down a well" episode. The audience was expecting a moral sermon about how it is wrong to lie similar to what they often got in the old-style fluffy family shows, but with a Simponesque twist - perhaps Homer would do something stupid about Bart's little crime. In other words, this was supposed to be a third-person experience - we would still be laughing at someone else.