It’s late but last night I was dog tired after the day I had at work and the evening before. I thought about skipping the milestone yet there was some lameass piece in Salon about the anniversary from an alleged expert. He may be correct in his obvious assessment of Fox keeping the show around until its unprofitable…which is how every TV show is done. However, I doubt he actually knows what goes on in writing rooms and I’m not going to waste anymore electrons on it.
The key thing is that on December 17, 1989 I remember going to my girlfriend’s apartment to watch it air for the first time (Fox repeated it before Christmas Day) because Carrie’s place had better reception. OK, she had a larger TV too. For a couple years, The Simpsons were just these one-minute cartoons on The Tracy Ullman Show, usually before or after the commercial breaks. I had seen a few. Most were pretty funny. Certainly more entertaining the main show’s sketches yet I wasn’t a big TV watcher on Sunday evenings in college, I was more pre-occupied with last-minute homework, working my part-time job or another distraction. Scratch that! Paul and I did make the effort to see Married…with Children before giving his black-and-white portable a rest until it was time for reruns of Taxi, Rockford Files or Bob Newhart.
There was some hype building up to this Christmas special. For many years, the major networks hadn’t really been making any specials of interest. Nothing on par with Rankin-Bass’s Rudolph or the Charlie Brown cartoon. The (Western) world was ready for something different. Fox being a struggling network contributed too. I remember seeing the commercial in Jose and Phil’s room a couple weeks earlier. Bart singing the parody lyrics to “Jingle Bells” signaled to me this may be on par with the shorts I’d seen at the animation festivals. Jose was amazed that Phil knew the rest of the lyrics to the joke. Phil and I explained how it’s something all stateside kids learn on the playground in grade school; obviously Puerto Rico got excluded.
So at Carrie’s place, we watched, got a few chuckles and I thought it delivered. Unlike other specials or sitcoms, The Simpsons didn’t get a miracle, epiphany or implausible happy ending; they adopted a dog and made do with what they had. Probably the conclusion you’d expect from Roseanne or Married…with Children. The more exciting part was the announcement of the cartoon characters having their own half-hour show starting next January. Maybe that was shown after the second airing which we also made the effort to watch.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, everybody knows what happened next.
However, if you watch the DVDs of the first season and catch the bonus material, namely the original pilot, you learn it wasn’t the plan laid out by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening and Sam Simon. The Simpsons was slated to make its debut in the Fall of 1989 with the episode “Some Enchanted Evening” but the animation was terrible. (You can see it for yourself too. It’s painful to sit through.) Thankfully Brooks had enough clout to convince Fox to let the animators iron out the kinks and reschedule the show. Then again, what choice did Rupert Murdoch have? American Idol was a decade away from polluting the airwaves.