Warning: Spoilers for The Simpsons season 34, episode 9.In The Simpsons season 34, the show made fun of the fact that its future episodes are no longer able to mention what year they are set in — and there’s a good reason for that. The Simpsons has been on the air for a very long time. Despite this, characters in The Simpsons rarely die and never age, which can become a real problem for the show’s internal consistency from time to time. In one classic outing, The Simpsons season 6, episode 19, “Lisa’s Wedding,” Lisa got married in 2010 whereas in a later outing, The Simpsons season 29, episode 8, “Mr. Lisa’s Opus,” she was depicted as a one-year-old in the same year.
A problem with The Simpsons referencing Golden Age episodes of the show is the pretzel logic that these timeline jumps require. According to those two episodes of The Simpsons, Lisa was either born around 1987 or 2009, which makes it impossible to tell what generation she belongs to. Conceding that this issue is unavoidable after 35 years on the air, The Simpsons came up with a novel solution. In The Simpsons season 34, episode 9, “When Nelson Met Lisa," Lisa’s graduation speech saw her indecipherably murmur the class's year in order to get away with never acknowledging how long the show has been on the air.
Why The Simpsons Never Mentions What Year It Is
Since episodes like “Mr. Lisa’s Opus” and The Simpsons season 19, episode 11, “That 90s Show,” contradict earlier seasons of the show, new episodes tend to simply avoid mentioning the year that they are set in. The Simpsons season 34 fixed another problem that the show has faced for many years by using this approach. Never mentioning the year that an episode is set in forces the writers to rely less on topical jokes and more on timeless storylines, resulting in plots that avoid referencing trendy fads and instead focus on perennially popular themes.
This can be seen in The Simpsons season 34, episode 8, “Step Brother from the Same Planet,” and “When Nelson Met Lisa.” The latter episode focuses on Nelson and Lisa’s near-misses over the decades before finally paying off their will they or won't they romance with a happy ending, while the former outing focuses on Homer and Grampa’s strained relationship. While neither one is perfect, both episodes are guaranteed to age better than outings that spend their stories referencing memes like Pokemon Go, Baby Shark, and other briefly resonant references that soon fade from collective memory.
The Simpsons Future Episodes Make Its Time Problem Worse
While The Simpsons can usually get away with simply not mentioning when a given episode is set, this becomes a problem when episodes are set in the future. These episodes rely on playing off audience expectations of where society and culture are heading (hence the now-famously prescient jab about “President Trump” in one 2000 outing), and the fact that The Simpsons is unable to reference the period that episodes are set in limits the effectiveness of jokes about the future. That said, bad attempts at topical satire can kill otherwise solid Simpsons episodes, so the creative limitations of The Simpsons not mentioning its setting do allow the show a chance to focus on its characters over cultural commentary.
New episodes of The Simpsons air on Fox on Sundays.