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| The very bedrock of the show -- its recurring characters, its setting, the basic premise of the series -- is satirical. The show builds from the founding idea that the Simpson family are an average American household; early raves about the show frequently pointed out that the Simpsons seemed much more realistic than the flesh-and-blood people populating live-action sitcoms. This "realism" consisted of a world in which no authority was legitimate, no leader uncorrupted. The parents were all bumbling, the cops all corrupt. The celebrities -- including guests from our world -- were all grotesquely vain, the businesspeople veritably oozing pure evil. And yet it struck deep chords around the English-speaking world because -- like all great satire -- it rang true. We did -- and do -- live in a world of corrupt authorities, clueless leaders, rapacious businessmen. It wasn't just funny; it was true. | ||||||
| One of the fatal miscues of the overwhelming majority of the doomed dotcoms: their belief that because people were doing certain things online, they wanted to do everything online. It wasn't, that is, that young people wanted their whole culture delivered to them online; it was that there were certain kinds of culture that they could find only on the internet. And this, moreover, was partially because the rest of the culture was so thoroughly dominated by a hyper-corporate, top-down approach that many young people felt completely alienated from it. It had very little to do with them. But the internet -- which, because of their "innate" skill, they'd stuffed full of the stuff they could relate to -- was seemingly all theirs. The internet was not, as the late-comers to the dotcom feeding frenzy seemed to believe, the actual thing that all these people were yearning for; it was just the metaphor. | ||||||