Something I'm definitely aiming to achieve more of in 2023 would be greater in-depth coverage of The Simpsons' Season 8. I've gone on record as saying that it is my favourite Simpsons season, and yet I'm deeply conscious of the fact that I've had less to say about it, thus far, than any of the seasons before it (except for Season 5, which I also hope to give a whisker more focus this year). And what with Mardi Gras upon us, now seems the perfect time to revisit "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" (4F20), and take look at the first of our trio of possible (though improbable) Simpsons sequels, "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", in which we follow Clancy Wiggum to New Orleans, and his futile attempts to reinvent himself as the star of a gutsy new action series. I covered the second segment, "The Love-Matic Grampa", a number of years ago in this piece, and while Moe and Abe's pseudo-sitcom still endures as my favourite of the three, there's a devoted place in my affections for this one too.
I think of Season 8 as a pretty underrated season on the whole (it has two really formidable fan favourites, "You Only Move Twice" and "Homer's Enemy", but in my experience most viewers tend to prefer Season 7), and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" may well be the most underrated of them all. When it first aired, on May 4th 1997, a lot of viewers were uncertain what to make of it (like much of Season 8 in general!). A decade or so onward, and I'm not sure if that prevailing sentiment had really shifted - I can recall back when Wikipedia was a wee young thing, and their entry on "Jumping The Shark" cited this episode for lampooning the various ways in which a TV series can slip past its prime, before adding that, most ironically, "Spin-Off" was itself seen as a jump the shark episode by numerous fans "due to its poor quality". "Poor quality", as though it were fact. Nowadays, it's generally appreciated that the writers were up to something intensely meta with this installment, and that if you were taking each segment at face value then you were doing it wrong. And yet I still don't think it gets even half the credit that it deserves. An episode as balls to the wall odd and as doggedly outside of the box as this frankly belongs in more Top 10s than I'm accustomed to seeing it in.
"Spin-Off" was the third installment in what I'm henceforth going to refer to as "The Death Trilogy" (to pilfer a term from Gus Van Sant), following on the heels of "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" and "Homer's Enemy", episodes all built around showrunners Oakley and Weinstein's increasing preoccupation with the likelihood that they'd inherited the series in the evening of its life ("The Principal and The Pauper" can be seen as a close cousin of the Death
Trilogy, but I'm content to look at that one as an outlier that got
fortuitously packed off to become Season 9's problem). "Poochie" gives us Denial, Fear and Anger all wrapped up in one highly defensive package - it grapples with the paradox of how a long-running series can be as strong as it ever was, and yet not hit the mark because its audience is no longer impressed by such perfection. "Enemy" is an altogether stranger beast, a commentary on the series' increasing disconnection from reality and its degeneration into the territory of nonsensical cartoons - it represents the Searching/Bargaining stage of Season 8's journey, and is more introspective in nature than "Poochie", even if the answer it ultimately reaches is an indifferent shrug from a hardening heart. "Spin-Off" rounds off the trilogy with a lavish Acceptance party - notably, it feels like it has less of an axe to grind than either "Poochie" or "Enemy", having already vented the worst of its anxieties on Frank Grimes and Poochie the dog, and being more open to embracing the maelstrom of mediocrity it senses will shortly consume it. "Spin-Off" is about the general lousiness of television, but it's made with real love and affection for that lousiness. Some commentators, including Robert Sloane, author of the essay, "Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment In The Simpsons" (featured in the 2004 book Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture), identify a self-congratulatory underpinning to the entire enterprise, asserting that the main purpose of "Spin-Off" is to remind viewers what superior programming The Simpsons is compared to 99% of the dreck they could potentially be watching instead. And while "Spin-Off" is, indisputably, expounding a point about the creative bankruptcy that fuels a lot of the decision-making in the television industry, it avoids coming across as overly petty or spiteful in its observations (except perhaps in the base assumption that a spin-off is an inherently tacky concept, which would be steeped in all kinds of irony). For one thing, all three proposed spin-offs were parodies of archetypal programs from earlier eras in television - cop dramas of the 1980s, fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, and variety shows of the 1970s - as opposed to reflections of trends in contemporary entertainment. Part of the joke is that these hypothetical series were always going to seem hopelessly out of the place in the television climate of the 1990s. But there's also a level on which the writers appear to have had fun looking back on television's history and reimagining the shows of yesteryear to accommodate their own ingenious Simpsons twists; for an episode so concerned with what Sloane describes as "the general banality of television", it gave the crew leeway to flex some pleasingly inventive muscles.
"Spin-Off" pokes fun at television conventions of all stripes, but in the end (and this may be the single greatest factor differentiating it from the rest of the Death Trilogy), the butt of the joke turns out, in no small way, to be The Simpsons itself. Linking the three segments is a subtle but all-encompassing sense of existential despair, the nature of which doesn't completely reveal itself until the third spin-off, "The Simpsons' Smile-Time Variety Hour", which Kent Brockman introduces as coming from "the family that doesn't know the meaning of the word cancelled." The implication being that "Smile-Time" is to be viewed as a pre-emptive afterlife for The Simpsons following its impending (or so it seemed in 1997) cancellation. This is the most forthright the episode gets in communicating the uncomfortable subtext lurking beneath each hypothetical offshoot - the insinuation that the show is weighing up its options because The Simpsons cannot unreasonably hope to sustain itself for much longer. Troy reaffirms this sentiment in the closing sequence, when he offers a purported preview of Season 9 that includes magic powers, long-lost triplets, and Ozmodiar, a tiny green space alien that only Homer can see. One wonders, with hindsight, if Oakley and Weinstein had had a premonition of where Mike Scully would be taking the series after their departure. Ozmodiar wouldn't have been any more offensive than a lot of what we actually got.
Troy's presence, and his fourth wall-breaking wraparounds, obviously recall the very similar device used in the previous season's "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". But the true evolutionary ancestor to "Spin-Off" would be "22 Short Films About Springfield", also of Season 7, an episode heavily rumored to have itself been considered as the model for a potential Simpsons spin-off about the lives of the supporting Springfieldians. It and "Spin-Off" have the same interest in the kinds of parallel stories suggested by the intricacies of the Simpsons universe, and what we could be watching if narrative bias wasn't so heavily slanted toward the titular family, with many of those individual sketches in "22" playing like miniature pitches for their own self-contained series (some with their own introductory credit sequences). The brief running time of each individual spin-off and the "variety pack" nature of the episode appears to mimic, as with the structure of "22", the impatient attention span of a viewer with a finger pounding compulsively on the button of their remote, anxious to know what might be unfolding concurrently on the next channel. What both episodes finally confirm is that all roads eventually lead back to the titular family, upheld as the inevitable nexus of their mutual universe - whereas "22" (perhaps unconsciously) undermines its suggested spin-off potential with its need to keep returning to the happenings in the Simpsons' kitchen, "Spin-Off" knowingly inserts the family into all three segments as a means of reenforcing the inescapability of each offshoot's roots. Not only do the Simpsons get the final spin-off to themselves, they make an awkwardly-implemented "guest" appearance in "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", and Homer drops in for a brief chin-wag in "The Love-Matic Grampa". Cross-overs with the parent series are a common device in spin-offs (recall those divisive appearances from the cast of Cheers throughout the run of Frasier), and are implemented here with a deliberate clunkiness that (in "Wiggum" in particular) echoes the kind of cross-promotional tactics previously used in service of The Critic in "A Star Is Burns". This continued reliance on the family is used as yet another shorthand for a creative dead-end, their familiarity and tried and tested star power apparently necessary to keep these flailing new enterprises propped up...even if (as "Smile-Time" seemingly confirms) the Simpsons were, at the time, finding it a struggle enough just keeping themselves afloat.
Of the three hypothetical spin-offs, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." is the one that feels
the least divorced from the series proper, tonally speaking, and as such may be the most palatable to casual viewers more interested in an enjoyable Simpsons story than in anything too arch. The Simpsons was already well within its element spoofing ridiculous action-orientated dramas of this ilk, a practice it initially restricted mostly to footage from "McBain" movies, but which had, in recent years started to bleed over into the dynamics of the Simpsons' everyday existence. There isn't such a world of
difference between the climactic boat chase up to Big Daddy's mansion and the
kinds of overblown action sequences periodically favoured by Oakley and
Weinstein during their run (the part where Wiggum expels Daddy's henchman by blowing him away with the boat propeller in particular feels like a gag that could have happened in any contemporary episode). I've no end of praise for Oakley and Weinstein, for their
intelligence and their willingness to take risks, but this is the one
aspect of their tenure on which I'm a little more mixed. (Bob swinging off of a
dam by holding onto a detonating cord in "Brother From Another Series"
is fucking awesome and I will never tire of seeing it; by contrast, that
climactic showdown between Lovejoy and the baboons in "In Marge We
Trust" always struck me as kind of dumb. Less dumb than the baboon
showdown in Ad Astra, mind you.) There are also jokes about New Orleans culture that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in a regular episode entailing a trip to the Big Easy - notably, an appearance from chef Paul Prudhomme, espousing (somewhat inexplicably) the catchphrase of fellow purveyor of Cajun cookery Justin Wilson ("I Gar-Ron-Tee!"), to the irritation of Skinner. In other regards, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." marks itself out as a very specific pastiche of 1980s crime dramas, most obviously Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice. It's noteworthy that, while such shows might have been looking distinctly old hat in 1997, when "Spin-Off" was made, more recent years have seen the rise of the cultural movement known as synthwave, a niche genre of electronic music/art dedicated to evoking a characteristically 1980s flavour, and for which Miami Vice, with its sun-drenched palm trees, bright colours and weakness for showy vehicles and swanky attire, has proven a cornerstone aesthetic. The series has gained fresh relevance, in helping to construct a mythical vision of the 1980s, one that's instantly recognisable but might never have existed, except in media image. The opening sequence to "Wiggum" has most of the cliches down - the obligatory shot of Wiggum whizzing along in a shiny convertible with the wind in his hair, the opening theme tune conspicuously striving to recreate the sound Jan Hammer's discography, the clip montage offering individual introductions to the principal cast, each culminating in a comical freeze frame (though I'd associate that particular quirk more with The A Team than either Vice or Magnum). What's evident from the narrative itself is that the chimerical cool that Wiggum has gone in search of, and which once came so effortlessly to the likes of Magnum, Tubbs and Crockett, just seems to keep eluding our hero.
The premise of this faux pilot has Wiggum relocating to New Orleans to pursue a new career as a private investigator; in a hilariously graceless chunk of exposition, we learn that he was compelled to leave his former stomping ground of Springfield after suffering disgrace for his "massive corruption" as chief of police. That in itself is not such an implausible outcome for old Clancy. His exodus does not go unaccompanied - Wiggum's marriage to Sarah has also broken down, for reasons that the script does not care to specify, and he has custody of Ralph. The curveball of the arrangement is in the casting of Skinner as Wiggum's sidekick, "Skinny Boy". Wiggum and Skinner seem an unlikely pairing off the bat (in the series proper they had little connection, outside of Skinner being principal of the school Wiggum's son attends), but the real kicker is in the reference to Skinner's former life as a hustler on the streets of New Orleans, from which his foray into a career in education was apparently just a meagre distraction. Here, this plays as a deliberately clunky means of transplanting him into the action, the joke being that a character as categorically prim and starchy as Skinner should be a woefully unconvincing fit for such a backstory. But...the thing is that it's not altogether far removed from what we were shortly expected to swallow as canon in "The Principal and The Pauper" (there, he was an ex-street punk, as opposed to an ex-hustler, but it's in a near enough ballpark). That the two episodes landed so close together is eyebrow-raising enough in itself. For now, I don't want to get into the specifics of "The Principal and The Pauper" and the contentious matter of whether it does or doesn't succeed, but it is interesting to note that the two episodes take what is effectively the same joke and give it a radically different treatment. In "Wiggum", it's never presented as anything other than knowingly ludicrous writing, and while there's an element of that in "Principal", it also attempts to use it as the basis of a serious character drama involving Skinner's bifurcated sense of identity.
Complicating the gag in "Wiggum" is that the episode seems to vacillate on just how viable Skinner is in the role of streetwise sidekick, presenting the character as both ridiculously out of his element in theory and yet absurdly proficient when it comes to the crunch. In one scene, Wiggum asks for the word on the street and Skinner admits that he hasn't lived in New Orleans for forty-two years and much of his contemporary understanding of the city comes from an article he read in "Parade" magazine. In "Grade School Confidential", an episode in very recent memory, Skinner's age was given as forty-four, so...are we to believe that he honed his tough street guy credentials when he was just two? Then again, Skinner isn't exactly bluffing about those credentials either - given that he manages to subdue an alligator with his bare hands, albeit one with corks around its teeth (of course, he was also a soldier in Vietnam, but that aspect of his backstory isn't raised here). I'll credit Seymour with being the magic ingredient that makes the whole parody tick; his hidden talent for gator-wrestling notwithstanding, his fundamental Skinner-ishness remains perfectly intact for the duration. The joke about him having only vague awareness of that Mardi Gras function the city intermittently throws would feel wonderfully in character even if he were a native New Orleanian - he's such a thoroughgoing square as to be totally indifferent to such things, even when they're happening right on his doorstep.
From the outset, Troy promises us a "gritty crime drama, starring Springfield's beloved Police Chief Wiggum," - a statement that, to anyone familiar with Wiggum and his staggering incompetence, rings as flagrantly oxymoronic (and what happens in "Spin-Off" certainly feels less gritty than Wiggum's disturbing encounter with Snake and Herman in "22 Short Films About Springfield"). Adjectives featured throughout the segment itself, in poorly-disguised snippets of self-promotion, include "exciting" and "sexy" - words first used by Lisa when she and the family conveniently show up during the Mardi Gras parade to give Wiggum's new ambitions their tacky-ass seal of approval. Despite being explicitly signposted by Troy before the segment begins, the Simpsons' entry into this world is jarring, not least because it brings what meagre plot "Wiggum" has going to an abrupt halt. Bart insists that the family are in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras celebrations, but the real purpose of their visit is made plain when Lisa interjects (in what turns out to be her only line of the episode) that she "can't wait to hear about the exciting, sexy adventures you're sure to have against this colourful backdrop." This statement would have felt odd coming from any of the family's mouths, but seems especially jarring for Lisa, a point made all the more salient later on, when we learn of her principled refusal to take part in the gruesomely tacky "Smile-Time Variety Hour". In his essay, Sloane notes that "the line is awkward and forced, particularly coming from the rather self-aware Lisa," (p.155), although he doesn't highlight the most skin-crawling element of Lisa's pitch, which is the questionable appropriateness of an eight-year-old child, albeit one characterised as having the mentality of an adult, selling something as "sexy". Wiggum later echoes these very words at the end of the episode, when he anticipates a long-running enmity with crime boss Big Daddy that will take "more sexy and exciting" forms with each passing week. What's important is that the characters spend more time taking about how alluring and adrenalin-packed their adventures will be than is actually evidenced onscreen throughout the adventure, which is a predominantly empty affair, despite occasional morsels of dramatic development. In that regard, it could be seen to vacillate as much as Skinner; there is an inkling of genuine peril when Ralph is abducted, and the story climaxes in a legitimate (albeit ridiculous) action sequence, yet the final confrontation with Big Daddy (who, despite possessing the suave Southern vocals of Gailard Sartain, appears to be every bit as incompetent in his allotted role as Wiggum) is a total anti-climax. Daddy exchanges a lot of nonsensical bluster with our heroes, before suddenly bailing, surrendering Ralph and making his (prolonged) escape, which Wiggum allows for the expressed purpose of securing a recurring nemesis for his upcoming (although not) series. The whole thing is implemented with the obvious intention of instilling a marketing hook in audiences, and the lack of closure, rather than opening up narrative possibilities, suggests an overall aimlessness to the enterprise - an indication that the real interests lie in longevity, and in keeping the Simpsons train running, than in accomplishing anything of genuine merit.
The most revealing aspects of "Wiggum" lie not in any pulse-racing action sequences, but in the parts of the segment that take place in the sparseness of Wiggum's new office, as he attempts to set up his detective business with meagre resources. Just as Moe's allegiance with the possessed love tester in "The Love-Matic Grampa" was entrenched in a pitiful desolation barely disguised by the machinations of the laugh track, so too does the heart of "Wiggum" secretly lurk in the overwhelming emptiness that pervades the segment. The doomed nature of the spin-off is depicted in the drab vacancy of the building interior, and in the (beautifully executed) sequence where Wiggum and Skinner open the windows to find the Mardi Gras celebrations happening right outside; there's always a party going on somewhere near Wiggum, but he just can't seem to find his way in. Like "Love-Matic", it ends up being a story of lonely individuals, of a couple of outcasts struggling to find their niche in a landscape that is both emotionally and creatively barren, and likely to discard their bid for the spotlight with total indifference. The joy of the segment lies in the chemistry between Wiggum and Skinner, which is genuinely delectable; both characters are equally at sea in their tough new environs, with the result that their mutual hopelessness manages to sell the absurdities of the spin-off as outright endearing. An anti-actioner with a King-of-Square Vladimir and perpetually clueless Estragon itching for a reckoning with a Godot to whom they can't get remotely close; don't tell me you wouldn't all watch the shit out of that.
"Wiggum" ends with a callback to the comical freeze frames that populated the opening montage, with Skinner making some lame wisecrack and the cast reacting uproariously. Freeze frame endings were another technique heavily favoured by Miami Vice, although "Wiggum" subverts the aura of uncompromising cool that accompanied its model series, using it to segue into the territory of cheesy sitcoms (also partial to a final freeze), with glib humor substituting for closure and an upbeat leitmotif that's every bit as phoney as any of the Pavlovian devices deployed in "The Love-Matic Grampa". It's always struck me as immensely significant that, in the specific frame they freeze on, Ralph doesn't look as though he's laughing so much as screaming. It's in his wide-eyed, tortured outburst that the segment lets us in most prominently on the cry of desperation that's manifest all throughout the episode, proving to be just as evident in the phoney-baloney laugh track of "Love-Matic" and the fixed plastic smiles of the family in "Smile-Time". A fraught compulsion to stave off a beckoning oblivion is the motivating factor behind every single ill-advised gimmick within the showcase, but there is, as Abe will shortly illuminate in "Love-Matic" with his "suffered so long" admission, a certain horror in the realisation that there is no end, that you have to keep on going, jumping through an interminable line-up of hoops for as long as you continue to draw a sufficient-sized crowd. What's articulated by Abe and hinted at in Ralph's expression is that each of these spin-offs constitutes a different vision of purgatory for the ailing series, a means for the media machine to carry on exploiting the property long after its dignity has expired (the freeze frame itself can likewise be seen as a signifier of such stagnation, with the characters trapped in a single moment ad infinitum). Of all of the Death Trilogy, "Spin-Off" comes off as by far the most pessimistic in terms of what lies in store for The Simpsons' future, the churlish frustrations of "Poochie" and the dark cynicism of "Enemy" having been supplanted with a queasy contemplation of the stalemate aligning on the horizon. As the swan song of this particular chapter in the series' history, it certainly goes down swinging with all the creative defiance it can muster.
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