Confession

On Monday night around six, just as I was finishing last-minute dinner preparations so that my roommates and I could eat, my brother called me.

"You have to turn on The Simpsons," he said.

I glanced at my roommates, who were sitting in the living room, patiently flipping through magazines and textbooks while they waited for my vegetables to finish cooking. We have never watched t.v. during dinnertime. In fact, we rarely turn on our television at all, except to watch movies. "Um, I don't know how my roommates would feel about that," I replied.

"It's the Boy Band Episode," he explained. "Just tell them you have to watch it."

Ah, the Boy Band Episode. Now I understood the urgency. My brother hardly misses a night of Simpsons reruns. The Boy Band Episode is one of his favorites, and therefore one that has frequented his conversations with me, although I myself have never seen it. This past Christmas Eve on our morning run/hill climb (a grueling run that is fast becoming tradition) I listened to him explain the entire plot, and several of the jokes. That run is a major bonding experience, and the Boy Band Episode is now forever associated with the run - I had to watch it.

Which also meant I had to explain to my roommates that I had to watch The Simpsons while we ate dinner. Fortunately they were very accomodating (although they thought it was funny that so much rode on this particular episode). To my relief, at least one of them said, "Oh, I really like The Simpsons," and none of them expressed any sort of disapproval. See, you never know how people are going to react to The Simpsons. Some people are adamantly opposed to it. Some people genuinely believe that it is the source of all that is evil in pop culture and the media. So I'm often hesitant to admit that, while I'm not a frequent Simpsons viewer, I do like the show.

I used to be opposed to it myself. I would look at my fourth-grade classmates in their "Eat My Shorts" t-shirts, and think smugly, "Our family doesn't approve of that show." And then around the time I was in junior high, my brothers started watching it nearly every day. Since the t.v. was out in the living room and hard to avoid if I wanted to be with my family, I ended up watching it by default. I would roll my eyes and shake my head and outwardly deny that I enjoyed it - until I finally realized that I did enjoy it, that for the most part it was not raunchy or crude, and that it was a surprisingly intelligent show.

I still sometimes balk at the idea of admitting that I like The Simpsons, because I am very picky about what I watch (if I watch anything at all) and I don't hesitate to say that there is very little on t.v. that is worth watching. People know this about me, and so they don't expect me to enjoy a show like The Simpsons.

But one thing I've come to realize is that, for all the bad rap the show gets for it's portrayal of a dysfunctional family with a poor role-model of a father at its head, The Simpsons is amazingly pro-family. I would venture to say that it's more pro-family than almost any other show out there, and certainly more than any other widely-viewed long-running sitcom. The members of that dysfunctional family face temptations, get in arguments, make mistakes, and do things wrong - just like everyone. But in the end, they are always intensely loyal to one another, and Marge and Homer work hard against their own human limitations in order to hold their family together. The characters may be grossly imperfect, but they are still a nuclear family, and an amazingly strong one. I can think of very few television shows that provide such a consistent model of what a family can be even when it's constituent members are far from perfect.

So there. I've confessed. I like watching The Simpsons...and that is why I no longer feel the need to hide the fact.

Well, okay - that and the fact that it's pretty darn funny.