The conceit that made The Simpsons the
longest-running animated series and sitcom in U.S. television history was
simple enough: Focus attention on a working-class family whose members are all
of above-average intelligence relative to their age—with the notable exception
of the breadwinner—and let hilarity ensue. Most of the resultant humor
focused, in the early seasons, on Bart’s ready ability to outsmart his elders;
in later seasons, Homer’s tendency to win the day without any know-how or even really
trying stole the show. Here and there, toddler Maggie’s age-inappropriate
intelligence, Lisa’s nerdy maturity, and Marge’s throwback do-gooderism offered
a spoonful of additional comic relief.
 

The premise behind Bob’s Burgers is altogether
different. Instead of being across-the-board shrewder and more insightful than
their peers, the Belcher kids are defined by the type of their intellects rather than their magnitudes: Louise is
strategic, Tina self-conscious, and Gene unpredictable. More broadly, and far
more importantly, all three seem to suffer from significant mental and
emotional disabilities. Louise, the youngest Belcher, wears bunny ears at all
times, relishes violence and conflict, and only rarely shows even a hint of
emotional attachment to her parents and siblings; Tina, the eldest, is a
depressed and anxious pre-teen whose creepy obsession with sex is made all the
more unsettling by the fact that she speaks in a boyish monotone; Gene, the
only son and middle child, alternates between making insightful observations
and farting uncontrollably, between an attention span measured in seconds and
being willing to eat or say or do absolutely anything if asked. The upshot of
all this is that viewers can smell the dysfunction a mile away—even if they
lack the clinical terminology to diagnose it. 

By comparison, Bob and Linda Belcher, the show’s Baby Boomer
parents, are refreshingly normal-seeming. Linda is on occasion overbearing and
melodramatic, and her voice and physical mannerisms undoubtedly grating, but
she’s reasonably intelligent and loves her children ferociously. Bob’s not a
particularly good father, in part owing to his fixation on an ailing small
business and in part due to his garden-variety egotism—which has, over the
years, made him less attentive to his offspring. Viewers therefore get to
witness all at once two common fears about Baby Boomers: either that they’ve
grown up to become squares like their parents (as with Linda), or that their
narcissism and baseline immaturity has doomed them and their families to a
diminished quality of life (as with Bob). Meanwhile, their kids stand in for
not one but two generations of overdiagnosed and overtreated younger Americans,
though in Bob’s Burgers there’s a notable twist on even that (somewhat
tired) form of social satire: The Belcher kids’ presumptive diagnoses would probably turn out
to be perfectly well-founded. 

A few of the show’s peripheral characters are interesting as
well—there’s erstwhile burger-joint patron Teddy, a middle-aged bachelor who’s
chatty, “local,” and unsophisticated; the mysterious Calvin
Fischoeder, Bob’s landlord and a likely grifter; and Mort, a white-bread
funeral home director with no social circle—but most of the show’s extras are
simply foils for its ingeniously zany plotlines. More important is that, unlike
Bob and Linda, who have at least a dollop of parental instinct, the Belcher
children live in a borderless world, one in which kids are free to give vocal
and dramatic expression to their every neurosis.

As middle-school-aged children on the cusp of young
adulthood, the looming question for the Belcher brood is, “Will they stay
like this into adulthood? Is this what the next generation of Americans looks
like, in crude caricature?” Of course this has been the chief fear of
red-blooded middle-class Americans for years: That soft, upper middle-class
living, marked by self-indulgent lawlessness, will become standard in the
United States. Thus Louise’s instinctive unwillingness to be feminized by her
father, mother, or school; Tina’s androgyny and repressed sexual deviance; and
Gene’s perpetual infancy. These same phenomena likewise encapsulate two fears
long endemic to the nation’s eldest two generations: That women will refuse to
or forget how to “act like women,” and that boys will never evolve
into “real men” capable of fighting and winning wars and running the
economy. Implied in all of this is that Bob, and perhaps America, would meet
with greater economic success if a lid were finally put on such first-world
eccentricities as the Belcher children display.

And yet, never has an animated show exhibited such
light-hearted contempt for average men, women, and children. To call Louise,
Tina, and Gene’s middle-school classmates drooling idiots is to merely describe
their appearance, demeanor, and intelligence with precision. Some of them
actually do drool, and all are imbeciles for whom two-dimensionality would be
an improvement on their characters. What few neighborhood adults populate the
Belchers’ highly-circumscribed little world are conspicuously underwhelming.
All of which encourages the view that, while the Belcher kids are indeed
suffering from emotional and (as to Tina and Gene, if not Louise) intellectual
degeneration, at least they’re not flatliners like everyone else. This celebration
of eccentricity would be a tad
unsettling if it wasn’t also so uniquely American. What others abroad might
term antisocialism is, in the United States, individualism at the level of the
individual and patriotism at the level of the nation. 

Ultimately, what makes Bob’s Burgers perhaps the funniest
animated series ever aired on U.S. television—and adorably escapist, rather
than arch-conservatively dystopic–is the sitcom format, which ensures that
borderlessness does not, ultimately, lead to chaos. True, the humor of the
series is often predicated on every joke or snippet of dialogue going two or
three steps farther than one normally might be comfortable with, but the
emphasis is finally not on American family life permanently jumping the rails
but on the ways modern living lets families ride their own nonsense to its farthest
waystations. So it is that when Tina threatens to punch a female classmate if
she ever gossips about her, the violent threat is issued not merely once or
twice but ten times. In the same episode, Gene confronts mild, harmless,
intermittent bullying at school with severe, persistent, physically threatening
bullying of his own. Louise, meanwhile, makes manifest her anger at her
father’s shifting affections by literally attacking a gift her father gets for
her brother with a sharp object. In other words, the overstimulated Belcher
kids habitually pass on their over-stimulation in the form of overreaction, or
else honor the ways they’re emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped with
gross under-reaction—much like, many would say, American culture tends
to do. These days, any crank will tell you, no public nuisance fails to produce
a public outcry, no private slight fails to become an occasion for a public
meltdown, and no grotesque facet of American culture is so harrowing that the
nation’s children can’t gradually become desensitized to it.

The Belchers’ five-booth diner may require a re-opening
after its initial opening (and a re-re-opening after that, and a
re-re-re-opening after that; ephemeral disasters seem to follow this family),
but open for good it finally does, and if it makes virtually no money at all—a
fact uncomfortably remarked upon by Bob in most episodes—it also never quite
goes bankrupt, either. The message is implicit: With a younger generation like
this, and with parents like these, America’s middle class may never prosper,
but it’ll somehow eke by. If this throughline seems identical to the one
popularized by The Simpsons in the 1990s, it’s because, while the
Belchers are certainly not the Simpsons, they’re still, at base, an
all-American family whose members are perfect avatars for an empire in decline.
Only in a nation unmoved by its own excesses and turgid economy can simply
treading water as small businesses come and go—the opening of each episode of Bob’s Burgers features at least one
local storefront that won’t make it to the next episode—be considered good
enough.

It’s nearly impossible to find an animated television family
designed to be lifelike, so it’s not reasonable to expect animated art to
mirror actual life. But for all that, there’s a sense in which—at the level of
metaphor, and with an eye towards an entire nation rather than just one nuclear
family—the Belchers are as representative an American family as we’ve seen on
TV in a very, very long time.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.

For a man or woman of a certain age, it’s hard to imagine a
single commercial or non-profit venture having had more of an impact on one’s
psychological maturation than Legos or Sesame
Street. Yet even today’s youth might say the same thing: In 2013, we have
Lego-based television shows (Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu and Legends
of Chima, both on the Cartoon Network), Lego-based video games (more
than forty-six so far, including sequences based on Lego Star Wars, Harry
Potter, and Indiana Jones sets), and even a forthcoming
feature-length film (The Lego Movie, due out in 2014 and starring the
voice-acting talents of Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, and Will Arnett).
Meanwhile, Sesame Street, now in its forty-fifth year of broadcasting,
remains ubiquitous in the lives of millions of American children. In short, it
would be difficult to name two cultural touchstones more worthy of being
written about by pop-culture critics, yet less often discussed in the
mainstream media. I’m thirty-six, and like many my age I spent much of my
childhood amongst the friendly monsters of Sesame Street, and another
significant percentage of my child’s play amongst store-bought and self-modeled
creations from Lego’s City, Space, and Castle lines of building bricks. So when
The Lego Group, now in its sixty-fourth year of operation, suddenly sat front
and center in the news last week due to a new report on design changes to its
building blocks, I paid closer attention than I would have anticipated. 

A recent study urges
parents to consider, when purchasing toys for their children, the indisputable
fact that Lego minifigures are substantially more likely today than twenty
years ago to feature angry or otherwise non-smiling plastic faces. Meanwhile,
anxious parents continue fretting publicly today, as they have for decades,
about the entertainment options available for their kids on television and at
the movies, meaning Sesame Street remains ever at the border of
conversations about American child-rearing, just as The Lego Group is right
now. And certainly there’s good reason for parents to worry about both toys and
television: Children are sponges, often noticing stimuli adults don’t. In
internalizing certain stimuli and ignoring others, they decide, by themselves,
the sort of adults they’ll become. The question, then, is a simple one for many
of today’s most anxious parental units: Does the anger painted on the face of a
toy make it more difficult for a child to access happiness? Would the gradual
loss of children’s programming of the caliber of Sesame Street—which is
increasingly likely, as each year it seems a greater and greater percentage of
children’s entertainment is provided by the Disney Channel rather than Jim Henson’s
heirs and successors—contribute to a generation incapable of growing up? And a
larger question: Isn’t one of American culture’s most unsettling blind spots
that it takes us longer to mature emotionally than seems to be the case in
other cultures? And isn’t this at least partially attributable to how we spend
our playtime as children and young adults?

The answer to the above questions may well be
“yes,” but it may also be that these are the wrong questions. When I
was a Lego-obsessed child, the thing about every Lego minifigure featuring the
same smiling, yellow-plastic face—and they did; it wasn’t until 1989 that
additional facial features got added to Lego minifigures, and it took until
2003 for Lego to introduce lifelike skin tones—was that you quickly learned to
ignore your Lego minifigures’ facial expressions in imagining your own
Lego-based melodramas. Children instinctively (and from hard experience) know
that not every moment is a happy one. If their toys seem to be selling a
different story, they opt for empiricism over marketing and ignore the false
positives in their midst. If, however, as is now the case, Lego minifigures are
carefully painted to represent a series of distinct ethnicities, facial
expressions, and emotional attitudes, it’s much more difficult for a child to
impose their imaginative will upon their playthings. The same is true for the
feature of modern-day Legos most children and AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego)
complain about, which is that increasingly Lego sets feature stickers to
portray complicated bits like engines or headlights or chassis details. This means
that once again children are denied the authority (and discouraged from
exercising their capacity) to imagine these features on their own.

If store-bought Lego sets represent, more and more, a
predetermined endpoint rather than a beginning, it says much for the
opportunities today’s kids do or don’t have to engage in imaginative play. That
said, the fact that Lego now regularly uses flesh-toned hues for its
minifigures rather than stock yellow headpieces is a far more significant
development than the one that made the news last week, at least from the
standpoint of child psychology. What happens when the cartoonishly fantastical
World of Lego begins to look significantly more lifelike, with minifigures that
are (variously) white, black, Latino, pale, tanned, young, old, et cetera? The
study states that what happens—as I’d suggest has been the case with Sesame
Street from the very beginning—is that children begin to make decisions
about which faces and temperaments are most relatable to their own experiences,
and it’s in those decisions that juvenile psychologies may well get formed, or
so instinct and common sense tell us. It’s all to the good that children can
now play with toys featuring faces that don’t look like their own, and perhaps
it’s even to the good that children can now play with toys whose facial expressions
better match the range of expressions present in kids’ real-time environs; the
question is whether it would be even better if Lego minifigures were configured
abstractly enough to encourage children toward entirely-homespun playtime
narratives.

When Sesame Street was testing its pilot episodes
before audiences in 1969, social scientists told Henson and his collaborators
that children would be confused if puppets and human beings appeared on-screen
together. Yet the juxtaposition of Henson’s friendly puppet
“monsters,” who individually represented dramatically different
emotional and intellectual archetypes, and human beings, who generally
exhibited the full range of homo sapiens’ complexity, scored much better
among young test audiences and so—just like that—the social scientists’
objections were pushed aside. The result, of course, is one of the most
celebrated television programs in American history. It’s also a cultural
phenomenon that tells us much about how Generations X and Y learned to understand
themselves.

Each of the “Muppets” featured on early episodes
of Sesame Street could credibly be said to have represented a discrete
set of emotional and intellectual characteristics; some of these were
“positive” traits, some “negative,” though of course this
is a gross over-simplification (one popular theory holds
that it’s more useful to think in terms of “Chaos Muppets” versus
“Order Muppets”). In the broadest terms, however, each of the
“major” Muppets of the early years of Sesame Street
represented a personality portfolio a child could instinctively choose to
relate to or be repelled by. Because these bundled archetypes were commingled
on-screen with human actors, it seemed reasonable for children to see Henson’s
friendly monsters as worthy not only of sympathy but empathy. Sesame Street
thus featured a pantheon of Muppetry ranging from the generally admirable
(e.g., Big Bird, Elmo, Kermit, and Grover) to the generally undesirable (e.g.,
Oscar, Bert, and Cookie Monster). Yet each Muppet was just three-dimensional
enough for any child to find them at least partially relatable. 

Given all this, we might posit here a personality test, in
the mold of the Meyers-Briggs assessment, that uses Muppets instead of
readily-definable character traits as its primary touchstones. It seems a
worthwhile hypothesis, given that so many of the Muppets of the 1970s and 1980s
simultaneously exhibited positive and negative characteristics that were
essentially symmetrical. That is, each “positive” trait had a
“negative” corollary, and vice versa. For instance, Big Bird, and
later Elmo, were both naive and oversensitive, but also—on the other side of
the same coin—friendly and empathetic. Perennial fan-favorite Grover was unwise
and impetuous, but also courageous and self-confident. Telly was neurotic and
anxious, but also kind-hearted and sympathetic. Ernie was irresponsible and
flippant, but also jovial and extroverted. Cookie Monster, like The Count,
could equally be seen as harrowingly obsessive and admirably passionate. Bert
was often tense, irritable, and impatient, but he was also intelligent,
motivated, and a self-starter. Oscar the Grouch, like Kermit the Frog, sat more
steadfastly at one of the spectrum than the other: If Oscar was generally
undesirable for his ill temper, pessimism, and reclusiveness, the Kermit of Sesame
Street was consistently admirable for his intelligence, wisdom, and
emotional acumen. Other high-visibility monsters on Sesame Street also contained
important dichotomies, albeit more subtle ones: Herry Monster, for instance,
was, like so many of our fathers, equal parts imposing/unapproachable and
powerful/comforting.

As a child I most admired Ernie, Grover, and Cookie Monster,
which sounds suspiciously like my own psychological profile. I imagine some readers
will likewise be able to see themselves in some triangulation of Reagan-era
Muppetry. Are you a BCE (Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ernie)? A COG (Cookie
Monster, Oscar, Grover)? Whatever one’s predilections, the point is that we can
understand, now, why parenting advocates are constantly mindful of what their
children are watching, and why social scientists are so skeptical of Legos’
recent evolution. Still, the question for both parents and social scientists
remains the same: Are we really considering, in our activism and our science,
how children consume entertainment, or do our anxieties merely underscore what
building blocks and puppets mean to us now, as adults? When I consider my own
history with Legos, for instance, I’m reminded that up until the age of
fourteen I wanted to be an architect, as it was somehow kept from me until that
time that architects have to do a lot of math; likewise, up until my
mid-twenties I carried with me the sort of childlike naivety about the ways of
the world that would be familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on Sesame
Street. It wasn’t, in either case, that either my toys or my television were
too constricting, but rather that just enough imaginative freedom was provided
me by them to make my playtime either a danger or, depending on my luck and my
instincts, a boon.

Seth Abramson is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Thievery (University of Akron Press, 2013). He has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Southern Review.
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, he was a public defender from 2001 to 2007 and is
presently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He runs a contemporary poetry review series for The Huffington Post and has covered graduate creative writing programs for Poets & Writers magazine since 2008.