The creators of season 33, The Simpsons is almost unrecognizable from the crude, surprisingly cynical series that the anarchic animated comedy was back in season 1.
The earliest episodes of The Simpsons have a distinctly darker and more mean-spirited sense of humor than later seasons and feature more grounded storylines, but this isn’t the biggest change that the series went through. According to the creators of The Simpsons, the titular family’s ne’er-do-well son Bart was originally intended to be the show's protagonist. However, the story goes that the bumbling but well-intentioned family patriarch Homer proved so popular with audiences that the series was re-envisioned with him as the lead to allow for more ambitious stories.
Homer is undoubtedly one of the most popular characters on the show, with some will end with his death, as it is secretly his story that the long-running sitcom has been telling all along. However, while Simpsons season 5 showrunner Dave Mirkin has spoken about Bart being the intended protagonist of the series and this giving way to Homer taking over from seasons 3 and 4 onwards, that hasn’t always proven true. The claim that Homer’s plots are bigger in scope and broader in ambition is arguably the case, but The Simpsons continued to tell more modest, intimate, and hilariously successful stories centered around Bart throughout the show’s most critically acclaimed era.
Why Bart Was The Original Focus of The Simpsons
Originally, the humor featured in The Simpsons skewed closer to series co-creator Matt Groening’s successful cult comic Life In Hell, which frequently left its young hero at odds with the world around him. As Homer’s sweetest Simpsons moment proved, the family's father was already resigned to the harsh realities of adulthood by the time The Simpsons began, whereas a bemused child’s reaction to the ironies of modern life allowed Groening and company to point out how little the world made sense from a fresh perspective. This provided a focus for the sitcom and kept things from getting too dark, since like later hit Malcolm In the Middle or the cult comic Calvin and Hobbes, The Simpsons was ultimately told through the eyes of a child.
In more practical , the creators of The Simpsons also likely centered a child protagonist early on as they still wanted the show to have crossover appeal for kid viewers. In the early ‘90s, a prime-time animated sitcom written for adult viewers was a risky gamble. While such shows are now a staple of network comedy, this is only because the success of The Simpsons paved the way and, as a few early Bart-centric outings prove like "Bart the General" (season 1, episode 5) and "Bart Gets An "F"" (season 2, episode 1) prove, early on the series was still interested in telling smaller, more child-centric stories to maintain a younger fanbase.
When The Simpsons Shifted Focus To Homer
The reasoning behind the change was outlined by Mirkin, who said Homer being the center of The Simpsons universe meant the show’s plots could be “more emotional and bigger in scope.” While realism was never a major concern for The Simpsons writers, Mirkin argued that Bart could only have “so much emotional depth at a certain age.” On this point, he was backed up by co-creator Groening who added that, in storytelling , the writers wanted Bart to do anything short of what would see him tried as an adult in court. In contrast, Homer’s choices were able to have much more “drastic consequences.” The Simpsons’ acclaimed “You Only Move Twice” (season 8, episode 2) alone proves that this strategy made sense, as the Golden Age classic wouldn’t work without Homer moving the family to a different town for his new job, a choice that is simply too big for a child-like Bart to make.
Some of The Simpsons Best Episodes Are Kid-Centered
However, Bart's stories did end up having drastic consequences in some storylines, serving as a counterpoint to both Mirkin and Groening’s claims. One of The Simpsons' most beloved episodes centers on a story wherein Bart’s actions lead the Simpson family to be relocated to another town, and the resulting adventure is as acclaimed as “You Only Live Twice.” This outing, the Scorsese-spoofing “Cape Feare” (season 5, episode 2), is far from the exception that proves the rule, too. From “Lemon of Troy” (season 6, episode 24) to “Das Bus,” (season 9, episode 14) to “Bart Vs Australia,” (season 6, episode 16) to “Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken,” (season 10, episode 11) to “Bart Sells His Soul,” (season 7, episode 4) some of the strongest Simpsons outings center their plots on Bart and Lisa’s adventures. Not only that, but all of the acclaimed episodes listed above aired during the Golden Age of The Simpsons after Mirkin claims that the focus of the series shifted to Homer.
Why The Simpsons Needed To Split Its Focus
Like the later successful animated family sitcom Bob’s Burgers, the plots of The Simpsons risked being too mundane if they focused entirely on the lives of its adult characters, and too childish if they focused solely on the kids. Children’s stories tend to lack stakes (with episodes like Homer’s hallucinatory, censor-worrying vision quest being impossible to pull off with child characters), whereas stories centered entirely on the lives of adult characters run the risk of feeling no different from those of a more grounded live-action sitcom. Unlike Family Guy (whose adult characters were childish cartoons) and South Park (whose child characters face extremely adult, age-inappropriate adventures), The Simpsons needed to split its focus to give its child characters more playful and silly stories while using its adults to make sharp satirical commentary on contemporary society.
This division resulted in The Simpsons becoming a stronger series as a whole and is arguably responsible for the critical success that the show’s creators erroneously credit to focusing on Homer. While focusing on Homer does provide bigger storylines, the success of the ambitious “Das Bus" proved The Simpsons could abandon its kid heroes on a desert island, parody Lord of the Flies, and provide a large-scale adventure story while barely even involving the adult cast. The success of The Simpsons has proven inimitable for many series that borrowed from the hit (save for, arguably, the aforementioned Bob’s Burgers) precisely because of how well the show's Golden Age pulled off the tricky balancing act of prioritizing both its adult and child characters.