My Opinions Are as Valid as the Next Man's

Considering Sideshow Mel as some of what's best about a great show.

At least seventy-seven or eighty times a day I like to stop and contemplate how pleasingly bizarre of a character Sideshow Mel really is and what this suggests about The Simpsons.

“Krusty Gets Busted,” the twelfth episode of Season One, comprises the catalysing events of Sideshow Bob’s deviation into cartoonish supervillainy. After Sideshow Bob was removed from Krusty the Clown’s show and incarcerated for committing armed robbery and framing the program’s host, Krusty needed to find a replacement for Bob. Befitting a Simpsonian in-universe cartoon logic that is unbeholden to the old-school constraints of sitcom plausibility or the cruel hands of time, Krusty found a similar-looking guy with an even more stentorian voice, even more pretentious bearing and even more insipid on-camera presence. Which resulted in a scenario where The Simpsons now has not one but two characters whose names begin with the word “Sideshow.”

In this sense Mel is a fitting mascot for the best of what’s distinctive about The Simpsons — this animated-satire format allows for strange mutations in the writing process, which as with much of the best writing in any format often catch the writer herself by surprise, to become established facts and uncontroversial lore of the characters’ environment. An already-batshit character of singular uniqueness like Sideshow Bob becomes a legendary and recurrent part of the show’s multi-decade run — but so too does a second-order one-off gimmick about Sideshow Bob being replaced by one Sideshow Mel. In contrast to how Bob, voiced so brilliantly by returning guest star Kelsey Grammer, has only grown into more of a nuanced, expansive and interesting fictional personage, Mel’s presence as voiced by series stalwart Dan Castellaneta has persisted every step of the way and has only become dumber and more defiantly one-note. And since the show continues to confound the tides of cultural relevance and profitability by getting renewed season after season, we have no reason to believe that these trends, nor those of most of the other more eccentric denizens of Springfield, are in any danger of altering course.

In his own words, all Sideshow Mel can be is himself. And that is nothing more or less than what we want him or The Simpsons to ever be.