Tag Archives: Ned Flanders

The death of Maude Flanders on The Simpsons was a decision born of commerce, not of storytelling. A pay dispute between Fox and Maggie Roswell, who voiced Maude for the show’s first decade on the air, is the reason the series killed off Ned’s wife. And it shows.

As I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, her death veers somewhere between “cartoon gag” and “afterthought.” In fairness, Maude was never one of the show’s most prominent or interesting characters. While one could fault the writers’ room for not fleshing her out more, particularly on a series where well-developed female characters are vastly outnumbered by their guy counterparts, the fact is that by the show’s eleventh year, all we really knew about Maude is that she was religious, provincial, and a bit of a stick in the mud.

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