Reports Of Marge Simpson’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

ALSO THIS WEEK: Sorkin, bears, and The Bear

Welcome to The Five Spot, a Friday roundup where I run down my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Come on, man

The season 36 finale of The Simpsons featured a flash forward. It focused on a now-adult Lisa and Bart trying to mend a relationship that had fallen apart over time, a rescue mission to save Homer from being sent to Florida (now “a maximum-security prison for old folks”), and a sweet video message from Marge, who, in this speculative version of the show’s distant future, has passed away before Homer and left a note for the kids to watch after she was gone. I didn’t watch it when it aired because I haven’t kept up with the show in recent years, but anyone who has watched The Simpsons for any significant amount of time knows what was happening here: a sweet story punctuated with jokes that ends with the family in a stronger place than they were when it started.

Great. Good. Again, the show has always done this kind of thing, despite and/or in addition to its reputation as an absurdist funhouse. Which is why it was so annoying this week to see headlines like this flood the internet: “‘The Simpsons’ kill off Marge Simpson in Season 36 finale and fans are outraged.”

That’s from the New York Post. I don’t know exactly where this version of the story originated and I care too much about my sanity to investigate it, but this article was published on Wednesday and seemed to be the tipping point that led to the flood of “Marge dead now” blogs. Let’s see what some of those allegedly outraged fans had to say.

“Why are marge and ringo dead?” another person asked.

A third fan tweeted, “What’s this I’m hearing they killed Marge Simpson off????”

“Marge Simpson is dead? Utter woke nonsense!” a different critic wrote.”Marge Simpson is dead?! wow,” someone else penned. Another viewer ranted: “WHY DIDN’T SOMEBODY TELL ME THAT MARGE WAS DEAD?!?!?”

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Also, gross. Also, I have yet to figure out how any of this is woke. Those guys have really lost the plot with that whole thing.

Anyway, this is where I get to tell you the stupidest part in all of this: the episode in question, the season 36 finale where Marge left a sweet video message for her adult children to watch after her death, aired on May 18.

Over a month ago.

Five days before Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning debuted.

Once again, ugh and gross. It all caught so much momentum that Variety reached out to Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman — who was probably, like, on a vacation at the time — to confirm that no, Marge is not “dead” and yes, this was all very stupid. He also provided his theory as to why and how it all went haywire like this.

“Here’s my take: Websites need traffic, and headlines equal traffic,” Selman said. “And then you can explain that the headline was misleading at the very end of the article. Every single media outlet that ran this story knew that in no way was Marge dead. They all knew it, but they ran the headline anyway.”

Right, so this is where I actually have a little expertise. At my old job, in addition to writing deranged blogs about television characters I didn’t like getting devoured by predators, I was also one of the editors in charge of assigning and packaging shorter articles about whatever entertainment news was breaking or trending. And, if I had to guess, and I do because I refuse to learn anything more about this than I already have, here’s how it played out…

— Somewhere, probably Reddit, had a discussion about the episode shortly after it aired that had the thing about Marge dying in its heading

— Someone who works at a website somewhere saw it and packaged it as, like, “Is Marge Simpson Dead? Everything You Need To Know About Blah Blah” to have it show up in search results

— A week or two later, someone screenshotted a similar headline about it and posted it on Twitter without the additional context

— Over the next week or two, people who haven’t watched The Simpsons in two decades and now get their enjoyment from being loud and wrong online saw other people posting about it and posted things like “Marge dead??? Woke???”

— Less reputable sites like, for example, The New York Post, which generally do not care how stupid or manipulative a story is, decided to run with it under wildly misleading headlines because they would cut off someone’s toe on a livestream if they thought you would click on an ad next to the video

— More reputable sites saw this and recognized it was stupid

— It blew up on online anyway because in addition to The Simpsons, a television show that just ended its 36th season, there is also “The Simpsons,” a cultural entity that everyone knows about and insists was better when they were in high school — see also: Saturday Night Live — and thus becomes a lightning rod for opinion-havers

— The story got too big to just ignore, especially in the slow weeks of June

— The more reputable sites broke down and covered it with the context and explanation and implied acknowledgement that it was dumb but their hands were tied, even if some of them did fall into the headline trap in the hopes of wringing traffic out of the whole cursed endeavor

— Variety called the showrunner, who, again, I’m picturing at a resort in Hawaii, just deeply confused about all of this

— I blogged about it

This brings us to today. Again, it’s all very stupid. And possibly woke. Congratulations to Marge Simpson on surviving this near-death experience

FOUR: “It’s Aaron Sorkin time” — Aaron Sorkin