My Favorite Show

Robert Pinsky on 'The Simpsons'

Why do I like "The Simpsons" so much? Because the show is funny, brilliantly written for masterful vocal actors. But also, I think there is something about "The Simpsons" that penetrates to the nature of television itself. The most powerful television of my lifetime has been broadcast live, what the book industry would call "nonfiction": sports events, trials, assassinations, funerals, wars, missions into space. What all of these spectacles have in common is that they are unpredictable. Even a one-sided World Series game or a carefully planned state funeral might suddenly erupt into surprise, some spontaneous marvel of passion or comedy, as large as a bombing or as small as some unanticipated facial expression. Television has a unique power to bring the dynamic, potentially startling event into the viewer's private, intimate space, immediately. Perhaps television's greatest artist, Sid Ceasar, by genius and historical circumstance, had it both ways. His carefully written, disruptive comic sketches were performed live.

"The Simpsons" touches the same power by going to the other extreme. It isn't simply that these characters are not live -- they were never alive. Repeatedly, the show mocks and embraces its own genre. It even mocks disruption itself, regularly, beginning with the bit over each episode's opening credits, when Lisa, jamming funky improvisations on her cartoon baritone sax, is ejected by the music director.

The simulation of faked live events -- that's the only way to describe it -- defines many episodes. Bart as the little boy supposedly lost down a well (it's really a walkie-talkie) draws masive, stagy live coverage. The uprising at his corrupt summer camp is covered by the ultra-fatuous newsman Kent Brockman, with Rather-esque exagerrations of understatement.

In one favorite moment, after Bart leads a paramilitary attack on the school bully, he appears in a moralistic epilogue, addressing the camera directly, out of character, to say that war is not as much fun as it seems, but something terrible. As Bart makes exceptions for "the American Revolution, World War II and the 'Star Wars' trilogy," the viewer has the pleasurable feeling of having been had again. In Bart's addressing us solemnly "as himself," calling attention to the fact that every rude remark he makes has been lovingly planned by experts, I find the appeal of television: its absurdly paradoxical grounding in extremes of the actual and the synthetic.

Robert Pinsky is poet laureate of the United States.

Submitted by Jordan Eisenberg, Bruce Gomes & William Weller