It’s possible that no TV show, in the history of the medium, has been more on the cutting edge of calling its own fans nerds than The Simpsons. Powered by a creative team that was embracing the “too-online writer” stereotype back when that meant, like, Usenet, the long-running animated series started pegging too-picky fans early and often, doing foundational work in the “Chill out, Poindexter” sciences. We’re happy to report that the show’s modern creators have not dropped the ball in this regard, either, as series showrunner Matt Selman recently addressed one of the show’s most obvious points of fan nit-picking—a sliding timescale that now means Homer and Marge Simpson are, in many cases, younger than fans who grew up watching the series when it first started airing—with a fresh and resounding cry of ” None of it happened! It’s just a silly little show!”
Selman was talking to Entertainment Weekly, and specifically about last week’s season 37 premiere, “Thrifty Ways To Thieve Your Mother.” (Because what young and hip millennials don’t love a 50-year-old Paul Simon pun?) The episode shows the young Marge Bouvier as a teen in the distant past of the 1990s, falling in love with an obvious Dawson’s Creek parody called Keagan’s Pond—despite the fact that the show has previously depicted Marge and Homer as teenagers in both the 1970s and the 1980s. We mean, what are we, to believe this is some sort of magic sliding timescale?
Yeah, basically: “It’s a fucking paradox,” Selman says in the EW interview, laying out the obvious practicalities that fans basically have to accept by now. “The options are: we don’t do flashback shows ever and we don’t mention the past ever, which creatively handcuffs us, or we are playful and silly, which is the DNA of the show, and we have fun with whatever generation the show is airing in.” Adding that his creative process on the matter is “I don’t give an eff,” Selman—who’s been with the series since the Dawson’s Creek days himself, and has been co-showrunner, with Al Jean, since 2011—asserts that keeping the show locked to its original depiction of Homer and Marge’s childhoods “would be much worse for telling good stories.”
You can’t ignore childhood if you’re going to be a storyteller. So we’re not ignoring childhood. It would’ve been interesting as an experiment to just lock into the ’70s and have them be like, ‘Well, Lisa, when I was a kid in the ’70s…’ and then just have it all be about the ’70s, even though we live in the fucking post-apocalyptic future now.
Selman, who seems mostly amused by the whole phenomenon, invites fans to drive themselves crazy in whichever ways they like: “If it brings you pleasure as a fan to pick apart the timeline of a 40-year-old show where the characters do not age, please pick it away. Pick, pick, pick. Have fun, pick at it, go crazy, pick it away…I would also like to point out that in no way are we saying that the beloved other flashbacks didn’t happen. We’re not saying that. None of it happened! It’s just a silly little show! So I like it all. Everything happened and didn’t happen with the same level of historical veracity.”
