Burns' Night
Mr Burns is dead. Louis Theroux puts The Simpsons in the dock
Who shot Mr Burns? That's the question that has exercised fans of Sky's cartoon-comedy, The Simpsons, for the past few months. Tonight the question will, finally and unequivocally, be laid to rest when the second half of the `Who Shot Mr Burns?' cliffhanger airs in the UK. Confidentially, I can reveal that that I know the identity of Burns' would-be assassin, having seen the episode when it was broadcast in the US two weeks ago, but I promise not to drop any hints. Oh, maybe one or two.
The good news from the US is that the ending is a satisfying one - honest, well sign-posted, a little tricksy but not too tricksy. The bonus good news is that the episode was extremely well watched. The last couple of seasons of The Simpsons haven't got the attention they deserve - not in the US, at any rate - and the cliffhanger gimmick, dreamed up by Simpsons creator Matt Groening on a whim a year or so ago, was in part a vehicle to trundle the show back into the public consciousness. As it turned out, it brought in more viewers than any Simpsons premiere in four years (though nothing close to the `Who Shot JR?' episode of Dallas which inspired it).
Four years ago The Simpsons was at the height of its popularity, scooping up Emmys hither and yon, merchandised up to its weird spiky yellow hair. Bartisms - `Don't have a cow, man!' `Underachiever and proud of it' and `Aye Caramba!' were on the lips of maladjusted youngsters the world over. Black people wore `Black Bart' t-shirts, which read: `It's a black thing. You wouldn't understand.' (I know I didn't.) While aspiring writers watched episodes in utter awe that a show so well-written, at once so light and so fiendishly clever, could be on television, let alone on a Rupert Murdoch-owned channel.
The show, if you don't know it (and you really should) is a half-hour cartoon that centres around a dysfunctional but intact family who live in an American everytown named Springfield. Most episodes focus on either Homer, the half-witted food-addicted paterfamilias who works as a safety inspector at the local nuclear power plant, or Bart, his mischievous underachieving son. Occasionally, other family members take centre stage: Marge, Homer's husky-voiced wife with her towering beehive hair-do; Lisa, a saxophone-playing prodigy; and Maggie, a toddler, whose first words were spoken by Liz Taylor.
But there is much more to The Simpsons than the Simpsons. The show is so well populated it's like a parallel universe of bug-eyed cartoons - from Apu, the mild Indian who manages the Kwik-E-Mart (`Get out!' he shouts in one episode, adding brightly: `And come again!') to the diabolical tycoon Mr Burns, who owned the town's dangerously unsafe nuclear reactor. Springfield is America in miniature, complete with a corrupt Kennedyesque mayor (Joe Quimby), an ultra-violent television show(Itchy & Scratchy), a sports team (the Springfield Isotopes), a corporate beverage (Duff beer), a rather fallible local celebrity (Krusty the Klown) and even its own weird species of alien visitors.
That Springfield is so fully realised is important because it gives the show's writers the elbow room to poke fun at anything they want. Some episodes, like the `Who Shot Mr Burns?' whodunnit, satirise other television shows. Others, real life. One of my favourites, `Radio Bart', riffs on the events of five or so years ago when a girl named Jessica fell down a well. Bart uses a radio microphone to convince townspeople that a little boy named Timmy has fallen down a well in Springfield. Townspeople rally round in support of Timmy and Sting makes an appearance as himself, singing a song titled `We're Sending Our Love Down The Well'.
Anyone who knows the show can only wonder at the confluence of talent that brought it into the world. The core characters were created by cartoonist Matt Groening, whose Life in Hell strip graces the pages of this magazine. According to legend, Groening had been approached by the director James L Brooks to develop a cartoon and doodled the Simpson family in 15 minutes while waiting to meet Brooks. Later they were joined by veteran sitcom writer Sam Simon (Taxi, Cheers) and animator David Silverman.
This much is well-known. What rarely gets a mention is the secret history of the show's writing staff, most of whom, in the early years, were plucked from a single, remarkable humour publication, called Army Man. Army Man (slogan: America's Only Magazine) was the brainchild of the comedy writer, George Meyer. It came out during a television writers' strike in 1988, little more that three sheets of plain white paper, full of jokes and folded together. Only a handful of issues appeared, but among the magazine's biggest fans was Sam Simon. When it came time to hire a writing staff for The Simpsons, Simon just went down the Army Man masthead.
In retrospect, there is an ineffable Simpsons quality to much of the humour in Army Man. Some of it is so-called `meta-humour', or jokes about jokes: `Wouldn't It Be Ironic... if one immigrant killed another immigrant with a miniature Statue of Liberty?' And some of it is just plain weird: `ANNOUNCER: The First Prize winner in out contest tonight will receive a beautiful vase. Second Prize is a not-so-beautiful vase. Third Prize is a the world's worst vase. And Forth Prize... Death By Vase.'
If Groening, Brooks, Simon and Silverman were the four prime movers behind The Simpsons, Meyer can plausibly lay claim to some kind of Fifth Beatle status. `He's probably one of the most brilliant comedy writers of all time,' says Josh Weinstein, an executive producer on the show. Many of the surreal touches and comic flourishes that define The Simpsons at its finest are his handiwork. One of Meyer's best-loved episodes is `Homer The Heretic', in which Homer gives up going to church after God visits him in a dream. It's said that Meyer is the only Simpsons writer whose scripts survive the laborious team-rewrite process virtually unmodified.
Though he's still credited as a producer, I'm told Meyer left The Simpsons last June to follow The Grateful Dead around. (At least his comic timing hasn't deserted him.) But don't believe those nay-sayers who tell you the show's past its sell-by-date. Sure, `Who Shot Mr Burns?' is a brazen gimmick, but the show itself is still all there: crisp satire on the outside, with a soft comedy centre, lightly sprinkled with those Simpsons moments we love so much. Like the bit in the cliffhanger when Mr Burns calls Homer into his office and, for no reason, pushes a button that drops a small 1000 gram weight on Homer's head. `Sounded big when I ordered it,' Mr Burns mutters.
Oh - and the whodunnit? A quick recap: Springfield Elementary strikes oil and the school goes on a spending spree and hires jazz legend Tito Puente as a music teacher as a music teacher. But the school is saddled with debt after Mr Burns illicitly siphons off its oil and then, to clinch his power monopoly, covers up the sun. Now Mr Burns has been shot, and everyone is a suspect: Homer, the power plant employee whose name Burns can never remember; Smithers, Burns' sometime flunky who has turned against his master; even Tito Puente, who lost his job after school cutbacks.
And as for that hint - maybe I dropped it, and maybe I didn't...