Tag Archives: The Simpsons Season 6

The political leanings of The Simpsons are surprisingly hard to pin down. As I discussed with Matt and Robbie on The Simpsons Show Podcast, the natural impulse is to take the series as a left-leaning show. In creator Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic strip (the primogenitor of The Simpsons) Groening wears his liberal bent on his sleeve. Springfield’s most prominent moment in the “culture wars” of the early 90s culminated in a real life kerfuffle with President George H.W. Bush, which was immortalized in “Two Bad Neighbors”. And the show in general has a propensity to take the stuffing out of anything revered or traditional.

On the other hand, Springfield has a corrupt, sleazy, largely ineffectual mayor who’s a page ripped out of the Kennedy family tome. The show has featured Bill Clinton hitting on Marge and describing himself as “a pretty lousy President.” And The Simpsons is still one of the few shows on television to depict its main characters regularly going to church and emphasizing family values, however fractured the show’s take on those values may be.

The easy answer then, and the one offered by the show’s ambassadors when questioned, is that The Simpsons is an equal opportunity source of satire, plenty willing to get its licks in on both sides of the aisle. While that’s true in a general sense, I believe the show still represents a particular political worldview, at least to the extent that a series which has had so many cooks walk through the doors of its kitchen can be said to have a single perspective.

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