Lisa: “Dad, you don’t have to outdo Mr. Flanders. Just remember the spirit of the season.”
Homer: “Is it despair?”
In a way, yes. Sure, it’s a cynical appraisal of this, the season of giving, but just about everyone has experienced that mysterious pang—despair, alienation, the feeling that something is missing—as the holiday season descends like a gingerbread fog. Critics have decried The Simpsons for being cynical from the beginning, when the show debuted with a Christmas special on Dec. 17, 1989—22 years ago tomorrow. Hand-wringing, “won’t someone think of the children?!” types used that time’s obsession with “family values” to decry a vulgar animated family that was ruining the future with its “Underachiever And Proud Of It” T-shirts.
The Simpsons premiere—“The Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire”—found the family struggling, as so many do, with the costs of the Christmas season. Mr. Burns discontinues bonuses at the plant, and Marge has to use the Christmas fund to get Bart’s tattoo removed. Homer doesn’t tell Marge about the bonus, then takes a second job as a mall Santa for extra money—when that doesn’t pan out, he bets it all on a dog named Santa’s Little Helper at the track. DESPAIR! CYNICISM!
When “’Tis The Fifteenth Season” aired on Dec. 14, 2003, controversy had long since moved on from The Simpsons. What had once threatened our children’s future was now a beloved institution and one of the sharpest, most successful television shows in history. Something worse had replaced the hand-wringers, though: (former) fans endlessly debating exactly when the show stopped being good and dismissing as heresy any suggestion that it still had life. The debate continues now, with some of the episodes from this era of The Simpsons now earning the respect they didn’t have then, as John Ortved noted in his deeply flawed but interesting book.
“’Tis The Fifteenth Season” stands out in the 15th season, which had a better hit-to-miss ratio than many of the seasons that followed. By that point, Christmas episodes were a part of the show—not to the same degree as the annual “Treehouse Of Horror” ones, but enough that the normally merchandising-averse Fox had released two dubious DVD collections of Christmas episodes. (“Mr. Plow,” “Homer Vs. Dignity,” and “Dude, Where’s My Ranch?” have tenuous connections to the holiday.)
“’Tis The Fifteenth Season” closes the second collection, and it may be the most Christmas-themed of the lot. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol began the tradition of “learning the true meaning of Christmas” as the go-to theme for holiday-entertainment uplift, which pop culture has repurposed and repackaged countless times in the nearly 170 years since Dickens wrote his novella about a miser’s path to redemption. Or, as Bart puts it, “TV writers have been milking that goat for years.” (Then he flips on the TV to show, in one of many standout animated sequences from this episode, Urkel as Scrooge on Family Matters and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise seeing their holiday futures on Star Trek.)
The Simpsons has always excelled at transcending clichés while simultaneously getting a little mileage out of them, and “’Tis The Fifteenth Season” uses A Christmas Carol cleverly to propel Homer along his own redemptive arc, while borrowing a bit from How The Grinch Stole Christmas! too.
We’ve always known Homer to be a selfish, though big-hearted, jackass, and this episode shows him at his basest: For the plant’s Secret Santa, Carl buys him a DVD player and season one of Magnum P.I. (featuring commentary from John Hillerman, “Apparently working in Hawaii was a pleasure”), but Homer forgets to buy a present for Lenny, lamely passing off a packet of Certs stolen from a vending machine. “May the spirit of retsin be with you all year long. God bless God, amen.”
Worse: When he comes into an unexpected largesse (Mr. Burns gives Homer a baseball card for Bart—a Joe DiMaggio rookie, “It seems they’ve started letting ethnics into the big leagues”), Homer disregards his avowed plan to spend the money on family and a tree so giant “its absence from the forest will cause mudslides and flooding” for the world’s most preposterous gift for himself: a talking astrolabe. (Well, it does come with a notepad and pen that works upside down, which is good since, Homer notes, “I’m upside down so much.”) Even before he dropped $500 on it, he’d only bought two gifts: key chains for Marge and Bart.