The Simpsonsis rightly considered a high watermark in television history, but the show’s decline in quality and viewing figures over the past 25 years has arguably detracted from the legacy of its earlier successes. Most critics and fans alike consider the show to have peaked during its first 10 seasons, with seasons 2 to 8 ofThe Simpsonsgenerally considered to be the show’s golden age. Funnily enough, an episode from the show’s 11th season actually seems to concur with this view, while predicting the show’s inexorable decline over the past two decades.
The finale of the show’s 11th season, “Behind the Laughter”, would have been aperfect ending toThe Simpsons. It could have finished the show on a high with its legendary reputation still intact, via a characteristic stroke of genius. The episode is a pitch-perfect satire of the shock-doc TV subgenre popularized at the turn of the millennium. More importantly, though, “Behind the Laughter” is a meta admission byThe Simpsonsthat its best episodeswere already behind it. Yet the show has, in some ways, continued to limp downhill into precisely the state that the episode predicted.
The Simpsons Episode “Behind The Laughter” Is About The Decline Of The Show
“Behind The Laughter” Satirizes The Downhill Trajectory Of The Show
Season 11’s“Behind the Laughter” is arguably the greatest example ofThe Simpsonslaughing at itself. The episode is a self-effacing send-up of the show’s own history in the form of a pop-culture mockumentary, lampooning everything fromBart Simpson’s worst crimesto the flogging ofSimpsonsmerchandise on the mass market.
The concept of “Behind the Laughter” was itself a landmark moment of TV, as the episode aired a full year before the seminal mockumentaryThe Officefirst appeared in the UK. But the most significant aspect of the episode was its direct admission thatThe Simpsonswas declining, under the guise of meta exposé.
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Throughout its 22 minutes,the lines between comic fiction and tragic reality are constantly blurred, as “Behind the Laughter” touches on factors inThe Simpsons’ decline that really came to pass, either before or after the episode first aired. Pre-existing rifts and walkouts in the production and writing team are represented by a fallout between Simpsons family members. Meanwhile, jokes about the show’s lavish spending and unrealistic demands by cast members ring especially funny, given thatThe Simpsonsunderstandably features some ofTV’s highest-paid actorsin its voice cast.
Ironically, after spending almost its entire runtime skewering whatThe Simpsonswas becoming, “Behind the Laughter” concludes with a Hollywood-style happy ending, as celebrity shock-documentaries tend to. “The future looks brighter than ever for this Northern Kentucky family,” the episode’s narrator Jim Forbes, ofBehind the Musicfame, tells us. In reality,this optimistic take foreshadows the show’s stubborn determination to soldier ondespite dramatic falls in standards and ratings, by spinning a positive out of its record-breaking run for a TV sitcom.
“Behind The Laughter” Highlights The Show’s Main Problems Since Its Golden Age Ended
Plot Gimmicks And Guest Spots Are The Hallmarks Of Latter-Day Simpsons Episodes
Apparently,Simpsonswriters were acutely aware of their show’s failings since the end of its golden age, since “Behind the Laughter” features some of the most astutely perceptive commentary ever written about the decline ofThe Simpsons. “Episodes increasingly resorted to gimmicky premises and nonsensical plots,” it explains. It specifically highlights an actual plotline as an example of this problem, from season 9’scontroversialSimpsonsepisode “The Principal and the Pauper”. This episode is often viewed as the watershed moment that began the show’s descent into a caricature of its former greatness.
“Behind the Laughter” is again on point when it tells us, “Trendy guest stars were shamelessly trotted out to grab ratings.” This symptom of the show’s decline has only become more prominent in the years since the episode aired, to the extent that it’s arguably one of the defining features ofThe Simpsonstoday.
An especially bad example of this phenomenon is rightly highly in “Behind the Laughter”, as we see a clip of Gary Coleman’s bizarre cameo in theSimpsonsepisode “Grift of the Magi”. Coleman is crowbarred nonsensically into the episode’s plot for no other reason than to say his catchphrase, an approach that’s formed the blueprint of celebrity appearances inThe Simpsonsever since. The contrast with guest stars like Dustin Hoffman and Beverly D’Angelo playing cleverly written characters in golden-age episodes couldn’t be starker.
A Graphic In The Episode Predicted The Simpsons’ Ratings Collapse
The Trajectory Of This Graph Is Astonishingly Close To Reality
The starkest reflection ofThe Simpsons’ declinein “Behind the Laughter” is more straightforward than shrewd critical observations. It’s a graphic that depicts the show’s ratings falling off a cliff, to the sound of “angry yawns” from the audience. Unfortunately, since the episode aired this collapse in ratings is exactly what’s come to pass, as a 2021 graph based on Nielsen data demonstrates (viaSherwood).
In fact,season 11 marked the first genuinely catastrophic drop in US TV ratings inSimpsonshistory, from around 14 million viewers the previous season to a low of 8.8 million. Even though “Behind the Laughter” was the final episode of season 11, it’s unlikely the writers were aware of the extent of this ratings decline when they were working on it. Still, they correctly predicted what was coming.
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After a brief recovery in ratings up to season 14,The Simpsonshas been losing viewers at roughly the same rate for the past 22 years. It’s still seen as one of the flagship shows on Fox, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. For some, Homer Simpson’s final line in “Behind the Laughter” should have been his last words in the show’s monumental run. “This’ll be the last season,” he tells a fictional member of the show’s production team. This prediction was perhaps the episode’s most telling of all, yet it’s the only one it got wrong.
