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living outside of America (or, we might add, because he was talking to a Canadian interviewer!).
Nevertheless, though, he and a few other Americans I interviewed joined the non-Americans in
appreciating The Simpsons’s attempt to scratch away at a more mainstream media image of
America and American suburbia.
Conclusion
To talk of The Simpsons as counter to the mainstream, though, is paradoxical. After all, with very
few exceptions, media texts do not come more mainstream internationally than The Simpsons,
and when more than sixty countries import a programme, it is hardly marginal. Rather, and in
spite of its powerful voice of anti-suburbia and of being a presenter of an alternate America, The
Simpsons has received ample marketing and distribution, and is a key prime time offering in
many countries, attracting as many as sixty million viewers weekly worldwide (Chocano 2001).
Moreover, it is not alone in its mix of popularity and alternative presentation of American
suburbia, as Roseanne, Married…With Children, King of the Hill, and their re-runs work in
similar ways. Or, weighing in with arguably an even starker picture of strange and dysfunctional
America, The Jerry Springer Show has travelled the globe replacing or supplementing tract
housing and happy nuclear families from the picture of American life with the trailer park and
multiple layers of infidelity, anger, poverty, resentment, and bad personal hygiene. In other words,
as we sail through channels with our remote controls, it is becoming increasingly more common
that any American image of America and Americans we might find is mitigated. The American
Dream and the idyllic suburban existence must now share the box with satire of America and the
anti-suburb.
Convention