Marriage and Family Relationships on Television :  "The Simpsons" and the Parody of the Normal Family

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Other essays and articles in the Arts Archives related to this topic include : The Full Extent of Damaging Representations of Women in the Media •  Gender and Generation in the Film “The Graduate” (1967)  •  The Presence of the Classic Epic Hero in the Film Star Wars

While the television show representing an American family and marriage "The Simpsons" may be based on parody and the sitcom format, there are still a number of complex academic issues that one can glean even from something that appears, on first sight, to be so cut and dry. Adherence to gender roles creates conflict and as one writer notes, “The popularity of The Simpson is of particular interest. While some writers, in the USA, stress the value of its critique of western materialism, others have suggested the frequent violence by males in the series—regardless of any satirical or ironic intention” (Robertson 2005). The males, as stereotypes dictate, often engage in crass, violent, or distasteful behavior while the stereotypical television women clean up their messes. This truly gets to the heart of any marital conflict that occurs between Homer and Marge and is just another way in which the normative family is presented in a form so stereotypical that is humorous, a complete parody of marital, familial, and related societal expectations.

Aside from the initial drift away from traditional family and marriage expectations presented in the show, the Simpson family represents the middle ground for families and that is how it manages to so effectively use (and often poke fun at) stereotypes. The husband and wife are loving and get along and as Lee would define it, they have a “storge” relationship which is constantly present but dictated by realistic and everyday concerns such as finances, children, community and other matters. In this sense they are very much middle-of-the-road and an “everyman” family that we all can claim as our own, even if in some small way. They are able to find time for romantic love as well as keep up with their 2.5 children, but as one critic notes, they do not necessarily always devote as much of their lives to interaction with their children as one might expect from such a “typical” family. “In television families, children dominated family interaction and there were open avenues of communication between parents and children… In the Simpson family, while parent/child and child/parent communication predominated, there was less communication than expected in those dyads and significantly more communication between spouses”(Larson 1993).

 The assumption about families is that the mother and father (or some form of that set) are responsible for the socialization and complete formation of their children. The truth, however, is different, especially in the Simpson family. While as noted previously, there is not as much communication between parent and child as one might expect, the Simpson children are old enough to glean much of their value system from their school as well. In fact, the majority of Bart’s trouble-causing takes place at school or with people outside of the family and many of Lisa’s interests have nothing at all to do with her family either. As a mobiocentric family with relationships based on shifting categories such as work, school, and regular interaction outside of the nuclear family, these children seem to be just as much a product of their external (non-family) environment as with their family.

As much of the research about the representations of the family and marriage on television and in shows such as the point of analysis here,  “The Simpsons”  suggests, this again defines the show as a stereotypical representation of the “typical” normative family because this is how things are thought to be “right”… families that do not interact with the outside world and make significant connections with the communities do not fit into the typical model of the family. It is in this way as well that the Indian-born (and thus culturally isolated in a homogenous community) Apu and his wife subvert the norms presented in the show, especially as they rarely appear outside of their work or home.

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