Matt Groening,Disenchantment
Exclusive: Matt Groening, the man behind The Simpsons, on his new series Disenchantment and the controversy around Apu
Groening has created his third animated series, a medieval romp with a drunken heroine that explores darker terrain, via tragedy, nudity... Ay, caramba! By Jonathan Dean
When Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, asks what I have enjoyed most about his all-conquering show, I tell him it is when Marge tells Homer, “Kids can be so cruel,” which Bart overhears and takes as an instruction, rather than a complaint. “We can? Thanks, Mom!” he squeals, bounding off down the hallway to torment his sister Lisa. Who soon calls, “Cut it out, Bart!” — the Tom and Jerry, sorry, Itchy and Scratchy, of siblings, at it again.
“Wow,” says Groening, quietly surprised. “I don’t even remember that.” The Simpsons is now the longest-running sitcom of all time, with 29 series and 639 episodes, so it’s little wonder he forgot my chosen gag, from Homer the Great, first aired in 1995. What other absurd accolades has this humongous, hilarious, heroic show achieved? How about 31 Emmys and Homer’s “D’oh!” becoming the global catchphrase for klutziness? And celebrities of all kinds lining up to be incarnated in cartoon form in it, or lending their voices to its characters.
Groening also created the long-running, more surreal Futurama. It was less of a hit than The Simpsons, which besotted a generation or three, but those who did go for the sci-fi animation became zealots. Futurama is as much of a cult as something with 19m viewers in America at its peak can be. The highest Simpsons figures stand at 33m.
Groening, 64, has had a charmed career. We met in Santa Monica, near to where he lives, with blue ocean down below, sun in the sky — that sort of idyll. He is big, bearded, sitting so slumped and spread out, it brings to mind Henry VIII on his throne, albeit with white hair, not red. Regal and proud, he has a lively voice and comes across as confidently as you would expect, given that he dreamt up, according to Time, the 20th century’s best television series.
What’s more, he is back, after five years out of the spotlight, with only his third show, Disenchantment. It’s a medieval cartoon romp about a drunk princess escaping an arranged marriage, helped by an elf and a demon — like Snow White written by a Monty Python fan hooked on the brothel bits of Game of Thrones. It’s Groening’s most adult work to date.
“There’s some pretty dark humour,” he says of the series, which begins with 10 episodes on Netflix later this month. “Still, I believe, throughout the show, the audience understand that there’s a heart at its centre. But if you don’t have those darker jokes, what have you got? A Disney movie. We have to have the princess drinking too much to say, you are not watching Frozen.”
One scene is about the royal court ogling the princess naked, while another has a Buddha type saying, “This is a plateau of peace,” before some brute swiftly dumps him over a cliff. The Simpsons and Futurama had fans of all ages, but, I ask, is Groening’s desire to make something specifically for grown-ups a delayed and jealous reaction to Family Guy, the sitcom that took the home setting of The Simpsons and added vulgarity? He shakes his head. “The jokes pitched in our writers’ room were as outrageous as what Family Guy did, but there’s a nihilistic, crass humour we edge away from on The Simpsons,” he explains bluntly.
His new, more mature project has the tagline “How to keep laughing in a world full of suffering and idiots”, which efficiently sums up its main thrust of resisting the frustrations of living in a close-minded society. “Yeah,” Groening says. “It’s about coping with tragedy, injustice, unfairness and grief — all of the penalties of being alive.”
Of the three main American sitcom families of the 1980s that the UK embraced too, only the Simpsons remain — largely — unsullied. First, memories of The Cosby Show were wrecked by its creator, Bill, being found guilty of sexual assault. Second, earlier this year, the return of Roseanne Barr’s Roseanne was scrapped after she tweeted something racist, to add to the standard prejudiced invective that she usually had on her feed.
“You know, I worked with Roseanne,” Groening says, after a long sigh. “She played herself on Futurama and was a delight to work with. I had dinner with her and [her then husband] Tom Arnold at Frank Zappa’s house, and it was one of the most astonishing evenings of my life. She went down a rabbit hole of right-wing conspiracy stuff, and too bad, too bad for her.”
I start another question, but he stops me short. “When I say, ‘Too bad for her,’ I mean too bad she did what she did. I feel bad that the people who worked on that show are out of work... It was [Cosby and Barr’s] personal lives, which had nothing to do with their shows, that wrecked things. I hope I have no scandal looming in my life.”
That said, it has been a tough few months for Groening. Or, to be precise, a new sensation for a man whose previous attacks came from conservatives worried about Bart’s delinquency. Now he is facing a liberal backlash. In 1992, George HW Bush effectively secured Homer and co’s rarefied position as both commercial and cool by saying he wanted American families to be “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons”. You can’t buy publicity like that. But last year the comedian Hari Kondabolu accused the show of pushing a racial stereotype for decades via its Indian-American shopkeeper character, Apu, and that is noise that is hard to quieten.
We came to the subject of Apu almost unannounced. I had asked what controversies might arise from the bawdy Disenchantment. “We have been trying to figure that out,” Groening replies mischievously. “But there are a few things that might offend.” I was preparing another question when he quickly interjected the following, which would feel rehearsed if it weren’t so unapologetic.
“First of all, The Simpsons is an incredibly progressive show, and I thought we had earned our honour for the hard-hitting satire we’d done over the years … but you never know. These are strange times,” he says sadly.
The Apu issue raised by Kondabolu resurfaced again in an interview with Groening in April, in which he said we live in an era when people “love to pretend they’re offended”. Others then said he hadn’t understood the concerns of Kondabolu and his supporters at all.
Apu is every Indian character from a dated British sitcom of the 1970s, the only difference being he remains on air. (The Simpsons is still in production.)
I ask whether Groening thinks more people announce they are offended because there is more space online to fill now, and strong opinions — especially outrage — are popular as they lead to increased traffic?
“First of all, when I said people love to pretend to be offended, I was not talking specifically about anything. I was talking in general about our culture,” he says carefully. “There is a go-to stance of being offended, and that has been around for decades. There is always something that’s going to ‘ruin America’. At one time, it was video games. There was also bad language on TV. Things change, and people feel extremely frustrated as there’s an imbalance and polarisation in our culture.
“But you’ve got to choose your battles. There are real things to be upset about, and there are things that are just trivial.”
In the interview from April, as I read it anyway, Groening compared the offence caused by Apu with “people pretending to be offended by Bart’s very mild sassiness” in the 1990s. Was I interpreting it correctly, that he equated the two? “No, I was just using that as one of many, many examples. We’ve had incredible hate mail over the years, and there’s not a single thing we do that doesn’t get a reaction. But with the most recent controversy, I kicked the hornet’s nest, and I’m not going to do it again.”
There is nothing to add? “At some point, I will talk about it at a greater length, but not at the moment.” In Disenchantment, I say, there is a joke in which an idiotic man says proudly: “That’s OK, I don’t listen to women!” The target is the majority, the patriarchy, the people in power, and I suggest that the issue people have with Apu is that, by caricaturing him, The Simpsons is having a pop at the expense of a minority. That’s the difficulty. “You’re going to try and pull me into this,” says Groening. “I have a lot of stuff to say. I just ...”
He stops. I ask when he will talk about it in depth. “When it’s a good time,” he says nebulously. “Then I’ll debate anyone. I’m in great agreement with almost everything people say as far as injustice goes, but I like my own work.” So he gets why people will continue to ask about Apu? He nods. The gist I get from him is that everyone, largely, wasn’t offended by Apu for 28 years, and Groening seems surprised and a bit fed up that they are now, hinting that some great outpouring is coming, just not yet. He’s like a man leaving a bad date, saying he will call later, because he doesn’t want to appear insensitive, but probably never will.
This awkward, bristling and defensive exchange aside, Groening is good and enthusiastic company. Born in Oregon in 1954, he still seems to be the same man who travelled to Los Angeles in his early twenties to make it as a writer. He’s a pop-culture nerd and collector, an excitable giggler, so imbued in his own creation that he effectively uses it as a shelter from the real world. He launched a cartoon strip in 1977, about LA and his experiences there, called Life in Hell, which led to a commission to make animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show. These contained the first sightings of the Simpsons, with characters often based on people Groening knew, even family members, and their popularity led to the 22-minute shows the world has come to love.
Now, in Disenchantment, Groening is looking to the past. The show’s swords and castles fill a medieval fantasy world inspired in style by everything from Bambi to Jason and the Argonauts. Originally, the idea was for a second Simpsons movie — a sequel to the successful 2007 spin-off — that would have featured Homer, Marge, Bart and Lisa in such a world, with Homer as king. But the studio didn’t go for it, so here we are. It riffs on JRR Tolkien, Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe, whose best work is The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. That title tells you a lot about the humour in the new show.
The setting — the new Springfield, if you like — is Dreamland, but whereas the town the Simpsons live in is well-to-do and, if not aspirational, then at least adequate, Dreamland is described as “a crumbling medieval kingdom”. So, is Dreamland based on America?
“Perhaps, yes,” Groening says, and laughs. “I would say there are definitely things that resonate in that way.” It’s timely, then? About a place that used to be considered perfect but isn’t any more? “Yeah, I hope it feels ...” He stops, but doesn’t disagree, adding that he asked his animators to draw a damaged world with no straight-edged swords. Everything is chipped and imperfect, the visuals, he explains, that Blade Runner had: a design that showed us how dirty fantasy can be.
The king in his show makes inappropriate comments about his daughter, in much the same way President Trump has been known to do. “Well, yes, er, I think that’s inadvertent,” Groening says, stumbling a little. So, they are not based on Donald and Ivanka? “We had no intention at all of that, but if it works, good.”
A one-time music journalist, if Groening, I suggest, is like any band, it would be REM, emerging from an indie and punk background to storm the mainstream accidentally. His (fairly typical) response? “I worked with Michael Stipe once. He did a voice on a TV special I did called Olive, the Other Reindeer. It’s very obscure.”
I then ask what his aim was with The Simpsons, nearly 30 years ago. “Back in the very beginning, we talked about how to invade pop culture and subvert it,” he says. “It sounds grandiose and pretentious, but that was the idea. Our motto was entertainment and subversion. Soon The Simpsons got so big, I felt we didn’t have to subvert every single time. But that’s basically the idea.
“Originally, with traditional networks, things were bland because you didn’t want to offend Grandpa and shock Junior,” he continues. “But with The Simpsons, we said, ‘Who cares about Grandpa and Junior?’ We tried to do the smartest jokes we could, and it turns out kids are not as fragile as people said. And some grandpas like The Simpsons too. Everybody doesn’t have to get every joke. And, by the way, just because you don’t get a joke, it doesn’t mean you have to get confused and angry. Maybe you’ll get the next one?”
Groening’s favourite episodes, by the way, are the first 13, from late 1989 and early 1990. That was when he realised this cartoon about an ordinary family could make his life extraordinary; when he realised every word he wrote and said was starting to matter.
Disenchantment, Netflix, Aug 17
The best Groening characters
Bender Futurama
According to his companion Leela — she of the one eye and purple hair — Futurama’s robot is an “alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler”. That is entirely accurate.
According to his companion Leela — she of the one eye and purple hair — Futurama’s robot is an “alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler”. That is entirely accurate.
Luci Disenchantment
A cocky, confident personal demon to Princess Bean, in Matt Groening’s new show. Like your conscience, should you have none, he wishes pain on the world, but does it cutely.
A cocky, confident personal demon to Princess Bean, in Matt Groening’s new show. Like your conscience, should you have none, he wishes pain on the world, but does it cutely.
Mr Burns The Simpsons
The character that became the most mimicked of the entire series, Mr Burns is the power-plant owner with issues, who allowed writers to get away with their most risqué jokes.
The character that became the most mimicked of the entire series, Mr Burns is the power-plant owner with issues, who allowed writers to get away with their most risqué jokes.
Mrs Krabappel The Simpsons
In 2013, Marcia Wallace died and The Simpsons took the rare step of killing off a character — she was the voice of Bart’s long-suffering, bitter, resolute, much loved teacher.
In 2013, Marcia Wallace died and The Simpsons took the rare step of killing off a character — she was the voice of Bart’s long-suffering, bitter, resolute, much loved teacher.
Homer The Simpsons
Possibly the best cartoon character ever written, stuck in an endless battle between voice and brain. Homer is an everyman, but not written as dim. Rather, he is loving, trying very hard to succeed, despite the challenges.
Possibly the best cartoon character ever written, stuck in an endless battle between voice and brain. Homer is an everyman, but not written as dim. Rather, he is loving, trying very hard to succeed, despite the challenges.
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