At heart, The Simpsons has always been part media satire. Usually the show would point its satirical lens at television as its medium of choice. The series, simply by existing, took the stuffing out of more typical sitcoms where families were nicer (not to mention richer), and most problems could be solved in an easy and heart-warming fashion. But as I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, the show reserved just as much comic ire for the tired antics of Krusty the Clown, the ultraviolence of Itchy & Scratchy and, of course, the sensationalizing dispatches from Channel 6 news anchor, Kent Brockman.
So it’s natural that The Simpsons would eventually take aim at the broader media landscape, questioning who might take the reins of our sources of information and decide what kind of self-serving spin to add. It’s just as natural for the show to explore the counterreaction to that — the lone voices in the wilderness forging a real connection and trying to be heard above the din. And it’s the peak of both approaches to personify the former in the guise of Mr. Burns and the latter as li’l Lisa Simpson.
That’s the deftest choice “Fraudcast News” makes. In contrast to other season 15 outings, this episode is not a mere aimless, formless ball of stray thoughts, loosely assembled around a theme. Instead, it wraps a pointed and amusing media critique around a rivalry between the town’s villainous tycoon and its eight-year-old agitator.
That decision pulls the central conflict of the episode — the push and pull between increasingly concentrated media outlets and independent voices — down from the abstract and into the realm of well-established and well-motivated characters. “Fraudcast News” takes a while to get going, wasting lots of time on an unfunny, wheel-spinning first act centered around a local landmark that crumbles to the ground. But it uses that event as the catalyst for two very different reactions from two very different people.
Those two people are Mr. Burns and "Beefcake Charlie."
For Lisa, the loss prompts her to rework her commemorative poem for the famed “Geezer Rock” into an in memoriam, one that speaks to the citizens of Springfield and reveals that the people of her hometown cares about what she has to say. For Burns, who’s presumed dead in the rockslide, it gives him a Scrooge-like chance to see how he’ll be remembered. Surprise — not terribly fondly!
But rather than take the Christmas Carol route and use this wakeup call as a chance to reform, Burns decides he simply needs better publicity. He starts buying up every media outlet in town to put a Monty-friendly spin on each news-bite, shore up his image, and “change this town’s accurate impression” of him.
At the same time, Lisa expands the one-time publication of her tribute to the town’s vaunted rock formation into a student-staffed newspaper dubbed “The Red Dress Press.” From there, a Burns-biased Itchy & Scratchy cartoon and a Lisa-penned op-ed decrying the old billionaire’s poisonous grasp on the town, the episode puts the two of them in direct conflict.
It’s smart writing. The satirical edge to all of this isn’t especially sharp or deep, but it builds up the two main characters’ opposing reactions to the same event, develops the choices they make in the aftermath, and features the two of them clashing on the issues of practicality and principle that emerge naturally from the divergent paths each takes. The wind-up takes too long, but once Lisa and Mr. Burns are on their way, their journeys and eventual battles develop nicely.
Probably still a little too classy for the New York Post.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the episode’s humor works best when it’s playing off their conflicting missions and escalating skirmishes. Lisa in the guise of an old school editor is a fun role for her, and the show makes hay out of the eccentricities of both the newspaper business in general and the absurdity of young children diving into it (especially the running gags involving Ralph).
Likewise, the avalanche of Burns-friendly media is a hoot, particularly the slanted Itchy & Scratchy short which turns the cat-and-mouse cartoon into a rib-tickling bit of nuclear power propaganda. Mr. Burns and Lisa lobbing bombs at one another (including, apparently, lowering the eight-year-old’s credit rating) brings the laughs, and bits like Lisa decrying her adversary as a “self-aggrandizing stinky pants” feel true to both her highfalutin nature and little kid bona fides.
Frankly, “Fraudcast News” is a good episode for Burns-focused humor all-around, faintly recalling his strike-busting efforts from “Last Exit to Springfield”. The gags in the first act suffer from some over-cartooniness, like his brain falling out of his ear or him using a prehensile tongue or him shriveling into a little piece of jerky after spitting out his coffee. But by the time the episode kicks into gear, there’s some of Mr. Burns’s great turns of phrase (“knock-kneed home-renters”), his abject weakness (being bested by an ant), his self-justifications (“I can’t be held responsible for what my goons were ordered to do!”), and the fun doses of absurdity like him having an oxygen-starved “League of Evil” on standby.
It’s a boon to the laugh quotient of this episode. Despite some early stumbles, “Fraudcast News” is chock full of humor in the style of the show’s classic era. When the episode juxtaposes Itchy’s declaration of “God Bless America” with a disclaimer that “This cartoon was made in Korea,” or Milhouse confesses that his dispatch from Baghdad was all made up…because he was actually in Basra, it’s the kind of comic flip and swerve that the series is known for. In the same vein, there’s such amusing, well-observed fun to Lisa and Burns having to awkwardly hang out and make small talk with one another while she waits to be picked up, culminating in Burns’s most uproarious line of the hour — “My god, are you always on?”
If moon projections were horses, poindexters would ride.
Unfortunately, it’s a pretty awful episode for Homer, who’s usually a delight as a comic side character when spared having to carry the narrative weight of an episode. Instead, here he apparently has the physical wherewithal to free climb a rock face, the pointless annoyance to use up the Simpsons’ remaining batteries to blast a Spice Girls song, and the bewildering stupidity to swallow a bunch of drugs offered by Mr. Burns simply because “it’s [his] custom.” For most of “Fraudcast News”, Homer is a comic and dramatic liability, who threatens to drag the whole episode down.
But then, despite unwittingly (or at least idiotically) giving Burns the fodder to embarrass Lisa into submission, Homer joins the resistance, and it almost redeems his terrible antics over the bulk of the episode. It’s heartening to see who chooses to stick with Lisa despite her evil adversary’s threats and intimidation. Skinner gives his star pupil access to an old mimeograph machine when Burns cuts power to the Simpsons’ home. Bart sticks around as a political cartoonist regardless of Monty’s threats. And even though Homer provides grist for the old tycoon’s efforts to paint Lisa as a Milhouse-loving wacko, he also stands up for her when she needs it most.
The cinch of “Fraudcast News” comes when Homer, for all his boorishness and idiocy, makes up for his gaffe by following his daughter’s example. He uses his voice to print a publication of his own, one that does for Lisa what she did for Geezer Rock — turn the subject of his piece into an inspiration for the whole town.
Lisa’s labors this whole time were all an effort to connect with people, to share her voice and champion the things she believes. In the end, her dad ensures that’s still possible, instilling a respect for and joy in self-expression that’s too multifaceted and idiot-proof for even Mr. Burns to stop. Taken at a pure story level, it’s a sweet finish for the episode, where the Simpsons triumph over their foes thanks to the love of a father for his daughter and the spirit of a free and independent press that’s reached the whole town.
I, for one, am deeply interested in what Disco Stu has to say.
But it doesn’t take a deep analytical lens to see the allegory The Simpsons’s writers are drawing here. It’s not much of a stretch to read Mr. Burns as a stand-in for the name-dropped Rupert Murdoch, who owned a bevy of media outlets (including Fox News and 20th Century Fox, the studio that produced The Simpsons) and whose empire was arguably at its zenith in 2004.
It’s also not hard to read Lisa’s upstart “Red Dress Press” and the other Sprinfieldianites’ newsletters as a metaphor for the rise of “Web 2.0” on the Internet and, with it, the groundswell of news and opinions that were starting to become democratized and diffuse to unprecedented levels around the same time.
As it did in its best days, The Simpsons sees the good and the bad in that, cheering on the defeat of Burns and his real life equivalents, but also pointing out the boundless inanity of “a thousand freaks Xeroxing their worthless opinions” (which, of course, includes humble blog-based T.V. critics, no matter which nerds they might make cry).
And yet, as is often the case with this series, there’s something unnervingly prescient about that ending. Burns’s media empire isn’t thwarted; it just suddenly has to share space with an unexpected tsunami of home-grown, loosely-sourced journalistic bric-a-brac. In the present, news-focused mergers and acquisitions have only accelerated, as the rise of online news distribution has made it harder and harder for outlets to get by otherwise. But at the same time, more and more of our news is effectively decentralized, consumed via social media or push notifications or, god help us all, memes.
And who can resist given how far appling technology has progressed in just a few short years?
It is, oddly enough, the future the ending of “Fraudcast News” foretold, albeit without really acknowledging the unfortunate consequences of the web-reinforced bubbles that make discerning and disseminating facts so much trickier than simply stopping one billionaire’s self-publicity spree. (In fact, it’s the freely-given billionaire publicity sprees that ought to give us pause.) In many ways, this episode feels prescient, but in others, it feels hopelessly quaint, briefly highlighting a potential issue years before it would mutate and metastasize beyond anything a comedy writer in 2004 could imagine.
Still, taken at the most basic level, “Fraudcast News” is about seeking and speaking the truth. That message is layered with the sort of gags and satire that The Simpsons is known for, managing to remain potent in the present day. It hinges on one simple oaf’s appreciation for his daughter’s ideals and the people who join him in his admiration and her example, no matter what moneyed forces stand against them. The media landscape of 2020 is a thousand miles away from the one of 2004, but even, and perhaps especially, with the state of the world today, it’s still worth wanting to be just like Lisa when you grow up.
Odds and Ends
– There’s some fun facial expression-based humor in this one, from Geezer Rock’s look of distress before it crumbles to the mother mole’s angry frown when Burns goes in for some milk.
– I’m a sucker for silly wordplay gags, and “Stop your wailin’, Waylon” fits the bill.
– Lisa’s poem paying homage to Geezer Rock is the right mix of sweet and sad, grazing profundity just enough to be moving while remaining simple enough to pass as the work of a precocious eight-year-old.
– From now on, I will refer to all of my T.V. reviews as critiques of the “jumping box” and/or “picto-cube.”
– The cartoon vulture version of Burns is a delightful likeness for the malevolent old codger.
– I’m a hypocrite, because as much as I groused about the cartoony gags early in the episode, I couldn’t help but laugh at the dancing ponies who hiss like snakes.
– One of the small touches I like here is that even when Bart’s drawing his old school political cartoon to strike back at Burns, he includes another drawing of “Principal Skinrash.”
– Likewise, I appreciate that within Barney’s little newspaper bag, he’s also carrying a bottle of his favorite brew.
– The bevy of individually-run newspapers at the end tickled my funny bone. Lenny’s “exposé” on Carl was a big laugh, and Hank Azaria’s delivery of “Well, blow me down. I’m a Selma!” had me in stitches.
– Presumably Squeaky Voiced Teen made the same distraught leap each of the many more times Futurama was revived and canceled again over the years. There’s still time for another revival, kiddo.
