The Last Book I Read

A few years ago I picked up a book about The Simpsons TV show that sought to explain why it was the most significant cultural artifact of the past twenty years. It's a premise of which I needed to be convinced (though I didn't reject it out of hand), but the author (sorry, but his name and the book's title have drifted from my memory) seemed to believe that merely repeating that thesis on nearly every page constituted proof, and after about twenty or thirty pages, I threw in the towel. I kind of think that John Ortved buys that idea too, but he was smart enough to turn over most of his book to an oral history consisting of reminisces by the show's creators, writers, actors and big-name fans, so that his own gushing is kept to something of a minimum. There's a fair amount of backstage stuff trotted out (notably the friction between creator Matt Groening and the writers who actually put the show together every week), and the accounts paint a good picture of the business of television, especially in relation to the show's impact in shaping the the early days of the Fox Network, on which it appeared. While I can certainly buy the fact that The Simpsons shaped comedy in a manner similar to Mad magazine in the fifties and sixties, or Saturday Night Live in the seventies, I have a hard time seeing it as subversive as either of those two predecessors (however much more popular it may indeed be). The Simpsons may represent the highest achievement of the age or irony, but I'm not convinced that it really broke any new ground (I mean, isn't Bart just a variation on Eddie Haskell?) aside from being animated. Obviously very successful, very creative, very funny-- but the greatest thing since sliced bread? I'm still not convinced, although Ortved's book does compel me to take the argument more seriously, and I'll likely be thinking about it for awhile with at least some possibility of changing my mind.