The Simpsons has had its fair share of dumb controversies over the years, from the Bart Simpson T-shirt backlash of 1990, to President George H.W. Bush’s public condemnation of the show, to the time the nuclear power industry took issue with Springfield’s three-eyed fish.
Now, in the year 2025, The Spectator, the conservative U.K. magazine, has flat-out called the show “evil” in a new article. Has anyone checked to see if there’s a way to switch the series to “Good”?
“Marge Simpson is dead. But does anyone care?” begins the article titled “The Simpsons May Be Genius — But It’s Also Evil.” After referencing the recent viral controversy involving Marge’s Simpson’s (bogus) death, the author, James Delingpole, notes that he’s a longtime fan of the show, specifically its (also bogus) knack for predicting real world events, such as the “Trump presidency.”
“I’m now beginning to suspect that all along it was a honeytrap designed to seduce you and your children into screen zombiedom,” Delingpole suggests, further arguing that “when I look at mothers in train carriages trying to distract their toddlers with iPhones or I see the way my bright and brilliant granddaughter gets sucked into the soulless void (and sly agenda-pushing) of garish, hyper-high-definition TV cartoons, I do worry what’s happening to their brains and I don’t think it’s good.”
While The Simpsons can hardly be blamed for parental neglect, or for dumbing down the medium that gave us MILF Manor, Delingpole seems to be saying that the long-running cartoon should know better. The Simpsons, he proposes, is getting away with feeding youngsters harmful content, such as Itchy & Scratchy, a show about “a sadistic mouse doing things so impossibly grotesque and disgusting to a cartoon cat that it would surely never have been permitted an airing on TV watched by children.” But it skates by because “we are watching it within the context of a family-friendly cartoon called The Simpsons, and because it’s ‘satire’, somehow it becomes okay.”
Focusing on this past season’s finale, “Estranger Things,” the writer seems especially peeved that its ultimate moral was that TV is “the one thing left capable of bringing us all together,” as evidenced by how future Bart and Lisa bond over an Itchy & Scratchy reboot after years of distance. Of course, that reading completely ignores the fact that what actually brings the two together (spoilers) is the discovery of a videotape of their late mother.
Delingpole concludes his article by stating, “I’m not saying The Simpsons isn’t genius. But I do think it might possibly be evil genius,” adding, “Marge isn’t really dead by the way. It was just another fantasy sequence, presumably bigged up by publicists with a view to keeping interest in the show alive.” Which is an odd argument to make, considering that Marge’s death wasn’t a part of the episode’s marketing push, and that detail only caught the attention of the public months after it aired.
It should be mentioned that Delingpole is also a noted skeptic of the scientific consensus on climate change, which seems like a bigger threat to children than The Simpsons, to be honest.
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