Countless side and peripheral characters have come and gone over the 30 years that The Simpsons has been on-air, so much so that you’ll probably remember more Simpsons-related names than actual real-life people’s names. While the quality of supporting Simpsons characters have ranged from awful (like Poochie) and retroactively creepy (like Michael Jackson) to iconic (like Super Nintendo Chalmers), the greatest character over the last three decades was and still is Frank “Grimey” Grimes, aka Homer’s enemy.
The greatness of Grimey doesn’t come from his characterisation – he’s a lonely workaholic who has a crumpled suit and a one-bedroom apartment that’s above a bowling alley and beneath another bowling alley after all – but rather what he represents and how he causes us to rethink how we should view the craziness of The Simpsons‘ world.
Grimey was unlike every Springfield resident we’ve been introduced to. Whereas nearly everyone in the town somehow manages to fail their way into some modicum of success – especially Homer – Grimey was created to be a realistic character who has had to work hard his entire life with nothing to show for it.
That kind of realism was (and still is) almost non-existent in The Simpsons and Grimey is a fascinating study into how an actual person would fare if they were to co-exist alongside someone as lazy and ignorant as Homer.
You may find Homer to be one of the greatest comedic characters ever created but if you’re really honest with yourself, you wouldn’t last a day working alongside him without completely losing your marbles. Grimey’s descent into rage and madness is all too uncomfortably real because you know that’s exactly how you’ll react as well.
By the end of the episode, Grimey has not only died in a tragicomical way, he’s somehow been regulated to the role of antagonist despite technically not doing anything wrong. It’s a dark and terrible end for Grimey, and the fact that the whole episode is still hilarious is a testament to how good the writing on The Simpsons was back in its heyday.
Great characters are ones that present a fundamental internal and external challenge to the protagonist. Since Homer will remain a lazy fatass until the end of time due to the nature of how TV works, Grimey instead presented these challenges to the viewers and making them question why they would continue to root for Homer after he literally drove an honest, hard-working man mad.
With Frank Grimes, The Simpsons is one of the few shows that managed to pull off the near-impossible task of infusing realism into a surreal cartoony world and managing to convey the messed up results without sacrificing all the comedy, and no character on the show has come close before or since.
Here’s to you, Grimey, you beautiful bastard.
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