The producers of The Simpsons announced on Thursday that they will be pulling the 1991 episode, ‘Stark Raving Dad’, from all streaming services, as well as future broadcasts, because the episode features the voice of Michael Jackson.
The move comes less than a week after the wide release of the new documentary Leaving Neverland, and 28 years after the episode first aired. But will it actually help?
Executive producer James L Brooks said it was the “only choice to make”, and went on to say:
“This was a treasured episode. There are a lot of great memories we have wrapped up in that one, and this certainly doesn’t allow them to remain. I’m against book-burning of any kind. But this is our book, and we’re allowed to take out a chapter.”
I’m all for holding celebrities accountable for their actions, and I understand the desire the show’s producers have to distance themselves from Michael Jackson.
But everyone knows the episode exists. We’ve all seen it at least once; some of us have seen it dozens of times, depending on how much of the 90s and 2000s you spent in front of the TV.
Clips of the episode will most likely still be available to watch on YouTube. If people want to watch the episode in its entirety, they’ll watch it on DVD or download it illegally.
This kind of feels like an empty gesture. What does removing the episode from circulation actually do for victims of abuse? And why only respond to the allegations against Michael Jackson?
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Aerosmith’s lead singer, Steve Tyler, once pressured his teenage girlfriend into getting an abortion, and Ted Nugent, amongst other things, wrote a song called ‘Jailbait’ about how hot a 13-year-old girl was. Both have appeared in different Simpsons episodes over the years. It’s worth noting that Nugent’s appearance took place in 2012, 31 years after the release of ‘Jailbait’.
The allegations against Jackson are undoubtedly huge, but cherry-picking which survivors’ stories we value enough to actually respond to is pretty much the opposite of what movements like #MeToo are about.
This move feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the documentary, born from a desire to distance themselves from Jackson. But frankly, in 2019, nobody was thinking about his episode of The Simpsons until the producers themselves brought it up. Michael Jackson undoubtedly appeared in millions of things throughout his lifetime – scrubbing his presence from everything would take an eternity, and also be pretty pointless.
People can choose to avoid the episode if watching it makes them uncomfortable – that’s what I’ll be doing. Or, as one writer for Vulture argues, they can rewatch it in light of the recent allegations, and consider how Jackson was perceived then compared to now.
Supporting victims requires a lot more than trying to remove an 18-year-old episode from existence. If the producers were consistently interested in supporting victims, maybe this gesture wouldn’t feel so hollow.