There’s a cottage industry devoted to trying to explain how and why The Simpsons fell from greatness. Every year or so, there’s a new YouTube video, or multi-part essay, or investigative deep dive that claims to have the answer for what made the show plummet from its perch as a pure television achievement to a series that became nigh-unrecognizable, both to casual audiences and the show’s biggest fans.
But as I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, the truth is that there isn’t one answer to that question, let alone an easy answer. Everything from an exodus of talent, to a shift in the approach used to make the show, to the inevitable cracks that emerge in long-running series, contribute to the “why” part of it. And elements as varied as differences in the storytelling, technological changes in the animation, shifts in the characters’ personalities, and changing trends and norms in T.V. humor contribute to the “how” of it.
Nobody in their right mind would claim that the show maintained the same high level of quality throughout its run. But at the same time, nobody can honestly identify a sole cause for the decline, some singular change in the soul of the show, that transformed it from the best series on television to something far far less than that.
Still, it’s tempting to watch an episode like “Thirty Minutes of Tokyo” (a.k.a. the one where the Simpsons go to Japan) — an episode that’s perfectly fine but not quite up to the level of prior outings — and point to the tangible details that annoy or underwhelm and declare “that’s why the show isn’t what it used to be.” And “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” has no shortage of those details.
Homer's just lucky they had a kimono in his size.
The episode is less a clear, propulsive story than an excuse to string together a bunch of gags about scrimping and Japanese culture. Its plot doesn’t truly kick into gear until the second act. Homer is, for the most part, a provincial and thoughtless jerk throughout. The episode’s comic observations about Japan are surface-level at best, and don’t genuinely engage with the country or culture enough to generate piercing humor. And it includes loads of cartoony gags that push the show past the point of reality, pop cultural cameos with little reason or motivation, and the sort of wild end sequence that had become par for the course by Season 10.
By any measure, you could point to these factors, and not only declare “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” a failure, but hold it up as an exemplar of what was rotten in whatever state Springfield’s in at the close of the show’s 10th season.
The truth, though, is that “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” isn’t bad. It’s a pretty shallow episode, one that doesn’t have much going for it beyond the international setting. But it’s a “gag-fest” — an episode where the story just exists enough for the writers to stitch together a series of jokes and comic setpieces and let it ride. And most of them are pretty good! There’s a lot of laughs in this episode — more chuckles than guffaws — but laughs nonetheless.
And yet the experience, while pleasant, still leaves you a bit empty. So what happened? What’s different between here and the show’s peak?
Maybe the place to look is “Bart vs. Australia”, the hilarious, classic Season 6 episode where the family journeys to the southern hemisphere and gets into all-manner of boot-related hijinks down under. It’s a close analogue in the “The Simpsons Are Going to _____” category of episodes, and thus the best yardstick by which to measure its far east counterpart, to try to figure out why it succeeds where others fail.
Because “Bart vs. Australia” does 90% of what “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” does, and yet comes out much much better for it.
Both episodes have toilets driving a surprising amount of the plot.
My natural complaint about “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” is that its plot is all over the place. The first act is jumble of riffs on the then-nascent internet and extreme saving techniques, long before Simpsons actually make it to Japan in the second act. Once they arrive, their adventures are pretty aimless, with the episode jumping from one disconnected gag about Japanese culture to another, with the vague throughline that Homer in particular is being wasteful with their remaining dough. And then in the third act, the family has try to earn enough money to get home to Springfield which, naturally, leads them to become contestants on a zany game show.
None of this is great, exactly. The episode feels like it’s spinning its wheels in the early going; there’s not much momentum to the episode in its saggy middle, and the last act quickly verges on the wacky and unbelievable.
But it’s hard not to see echoes of the same type of storytelling in “Bart vs. Australia.” That episode spends most of the first act on a series of gags that spin out from a debate over which direction water flows in toilets ‘round the world. Its middle act has more focus than the Japan episode, but it still takes plenty of time out to have the family experience Aussie culture just for the hell of it. And the last act of the episode comes down to Bart mooning the Prime Minister of Australia, who’s trying to preserve international relations by kicking him in the butt, and starting a riot as the Aussie citizens storm the American embassy and the Simpsons escape by helicopter. It’s not exactly down-to-earth or organically progressing narrative.
That’s my big problem in trying to criticize the show in its tenth season. For every flaw I want to exhume from the corpse of “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo”, there’s some similar bit I enjoyed or at least appreciated in “Bart vs. Australia.” There’s not a clear line of demarcation between them.
When they brought this show over to America, they renamed it "Family Feud."
When the Simpsons are in Japan, their story comes down to a playing a sadistic game show to get back home, while in Australia, it comes down to a head of state booting a ten-year-old boy through the embassy gates. It seems implausible in “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” when Homer’s able to just swipe the Flanderses’ tickets to Japan, but I didn’t blink at the Simpsons getting to Australia thanks to Bart making a series of prank phone calls. It’s hard to claim one’s fair and the other’s foul in terms of plausibility.
I can’t even point to that many variations in the humor. Jokes like Mr. Monopoly showing up at a seminar in Springfield or a strained jab at Jim Belushi feel out of place to me in the Japan episode, but bits like a deity pulling levers at the center of the Earth or an ersatz Crocodile Dundee running into Bart left me chuckling in the Australian one. The Simpsons succumbing to “Japanese Seizure Robots” feels like a shallow riff on real life events in Japan, while the onslaught of bullfrogs feels like amusing take on the real life cane toad epidemic in Australia.
The same’s true for the episodes’ characterizations and approach to their foreign environs Homer is a complete and total ass in “Tokyo”, robbing the Flanders and acting like an uncultured boor in Japan, but in “Australia” he engages in the same type of obnoxious antics, jumping back and forth along the border between Australian soil and the U.S. embassy. The Simpsons’s take on Japan is a caricatured one, with the country reduced to a series of broad stereotypes and unflattering cultural signifiers, but its take on Australia features the prime minister drinking naked in a local lake, and little boys being punished in Parliament by a leather jacket-wearing ruffian with a giant boot.
Granted, there’s something that feels different, more neighborly, about the show taking that approach to another former British colony than it does when the show tries the same tack with a country and a people who have been treated far more like “the other” in Western culture.
This is just a hair above a "foreign people's names sound funny" joke.
But at a minimum, “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” has some self-awareness about that. It not only keeps many of the jokes at Homer’s expense as the “Ugly American” stereotype, but even introduces “Americatown”, a United States-themed restaurant in Tokyo that both pokes fun at how American tourists will travel halfway across the world to still eat at Burger King, and satirizes how every nation views other cultures through a fractured lens that results in a hodgepodge of mishmashed references and misimpressions.
It’s fraught territory for sure, but the show is at least engaging, however glancingly, with that idea, and it’s guilty of the same sort of reductiveness in its boomerang-using, road warrior-filled version of Aussieland. There’s differences, sure, but it’s not so simple to distinguish what went right in one episode and what went wrong in another.
Now maybe you reject my premise. Maybe you believe that “Bart vs. Australia” isn’t a very good episode either, or that even if it’s a bit better, it fails for all the same reasons that “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” does. But it’s at least beloved by the fans and well-regarded by publications as varied as The Simpsons Show and Vanity Fair.
And yet it and “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” do so many of the same kinds of things, which makes me leery of trying to make too broad a statement, too bold or specific a declaration, about what particular kind of magic The Simpsons had in its golden years and how or why it went missing as the show entered its second decade on the air. If “Bart vs. Australia” can break all these rules, or at least bend them, and still be a laugh riot, then how fair is it to slate “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” for taking the same approach?
My new fan theory is that Godzilla was created as a result of Bart's bullfrog epidemic in Australia.
Maybe the type of greatness the show had in its golden years is ineffable. Maybe it’s just that the jokes were funnier, the characters were more engaging, the stories were crisper, without there being any broad, overarching reasons as to why. Maybe it’s just the assemblage of talent working on the show in its best years that were slowly filtering out by Season 10, who each made their important but varied contributions, in a way that can’t really be nailed down.
It’s easy to look at snapshots, to see what The Simpsons was in the finale of its 10th season and notice how different the show had become from just a few seasons before. It’s easy to make showrunner Mike Scully the scapegoat for all the show’s ills in the midst of his tenure. It’s easy to walk away from an episode like “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” feeling amused but empty and know that something was lacking from the series at this point in its run.
But it’s much harder to say with real confidence what that something is, let alone reduce it to a handful of sins, to where The Simpsons could have extended its glory years ad infinitum if it had only avoided them. It’s less the things the show did or didn’t do, and much more how it did what it did when it was at its best. That comes down to nebulous things like a sharper wit, a better story sense, a clearer grasp on the characters, that almost mystically accumulate into a greater whole that is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate, let alone boil down to a formula that can be met and matched from here to eternity.
By the time Season 10 wrapped up, The Simpsons had become a different show. It was a louder, zanier, simpler T.V. series. But the reasons why it fell from grace are legion and hard to discern. With an episode like “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo,” it becomes clear that it’s not simply matter of do’s and don’ts, but rather a myriad of little changes, small differences, tiny shifts in one direction or another, that would change the complexion of the Best Show Ever, in a way that could never be fully undone, but which also might never be able to be fully understood.
