Situation comedy (SITCOM) is one of the staples of mature broadcast television. Initially broadcasted as radio shows with great success, they transitioned to TV to later become one of the most important attractors of audience.
The rise in popularity of the SITCOM has coincided with the rise of television shows base on the working class family, a tradition begun in the 1950s with The Honeymooners and continued with great success in the 1990’s with popular shows like Married…With children and Rossane.
What set these sitcoms apart from their predecessors is that they integrate contemporary real world problems into their stories, thereby working against the tradition of tight families portraying a more dysfunctional relation between its members.
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The show was a ground-braking cartoon series who worked as a form of postmodern pastiche, with clever jokes, sophisticated satire, and numerous references of the cultural terrain: film, television, literature, science fiction, other comics, etc.
The Simpsons works against the tradition of the family sitcom by deconstructing the myth of the happy family undermining its conventions, decenters its authority and subverting concepts such as the “moral” of the story and happy ending.
In making The Simpsons FOX aimed to appeal a wider audience between the ages of eighteen to fifty, middle to upper middle-class television audience.
With a successful marketing campaign appealing to the young audience, in the same time it was also a show for the adults, playing upon they’re sense of nostalgia for shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, tapping into a desire for lost youth, the childlike enjoyment of watching cartoons.
Like other shows based on the working class it allows identification with the characters, thus all members of the audience can identify with the characters on some level:
-Homer, the provider, struggling to make ends
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Above all the sitcom is a corporate product, a mass consumption commodity of the corporate culture that has come to dominate American society. Sitcoms appeals to the largest buying audience – teenagers and working adults with disposable incomes.
The Simpsons with its multi-generational appeal by capitalizing upon its image is able to sell incredible amounts of merchandise both for it’s advertasers and it’s own. The sitcom also skyrocketed to fame on the commodification of language using reproducible catchphrases which were soled to the public en-masse.About 500 companies around the world are officially licensed to put “Simpsons” faces on everything from T-shirts, stickers, mugs, action figures to cereal boxes.
The show also has an abundance of media presence such as books, comic books, a magazine, video games and musical releases.
Although The Simpsons is critical of the myth of the happy family, it nevertheless utilizes some of its conceits in order to strengthen its position as a viable family sitcom, leaving what is real and valuable about the myth