2
It is therefore usually at this point that the sitcom connects with the Americanisation or
cultural imperialism thesis. Worldwide, culture ministers, artists, and the general populace have
worried about the degree to which the consumption of American programmes entails the
consumption and internalisation of American values. Hollywood’s global power is indisputable
(see Miller et al. 2001), and so it is understandable that individuals and countries should be
concerned for the resulting effects. Director Wim Wenders, for instance, has claimed that ‘the
Americans have colonized our subconscious’ (qtd. in Miller et al. 2001), while the Australian
Weekend Magazine wonders:
What’s the point of saying no to America’s nuclear ships when we’ve said yes, a
thousand times yes, to the Trojan Horse of American Culture, dragging it through our
city gates into our very lounge rooms [….} We are, all of us, little by little, becoming
ventriloquial dolls for another society. We are losing our authenticity, our originality,
and becoming echoes. (qtd. in Miller et al. 2001:195)
In academia, too, there is no shortage of suggestions that America is infusing itself and its values
into everyone else’s bones and brains, as George Ritzer, for example, worries that ‘America will
become everyone’s “second culture”’ (1998:89), as we all become citizens of a ‘McDonaldized’
planet (see also Mattelart 1983, Gans 1985). However, despite the appealing rhetoric of such
fears, we must be wary of equating economic imperialism to cultural imperialism. And on the
sitcom front, we must be equally wary of applying conclusions on what sitcoms might be saying
to Americans to the larger audience of the world. As such, this paper will attempt to complicate
the picture of the family sitcom’s role in cultural Americanisation by examining a case study, that
of The Simpsons.
The Simpsons is one of the world’s most successful American television exports,
broadcasting in over sixty countries, as it has for over ten years now (Chocano 2001). If anything,
then, it should be regarded as one of the key culprits of Americanisation, its yellow figures
Convention