After Springfield, a Drunk Princess
The Simpsons is technically still on the air. That fact arrives differently depending on who you are. For people who grew up on the first ten seasons—who watched those episodes the way you reread a book you love—it sits somewhere between a miracle of contractual survival and an ongoing embarrassment. The show that defined a sensibility is now mostly a reminder of what that sensibility looked like when it was still alive.
Futurama got cancelled twice, and the second cancellation still registers as a small unresolved thing. It was the show Groening made when he was thinking past the template—genuinely strange, emotionally ambitious, willing to be sad in ways The Simpsons had stopped being. People who love it carry that second cancellation around.
So when Matt Groening announced Disenchantment for Netflix—a fantasy animated series, twenty episodes dropping in August 2018—the obvious question was which version of Groening this would be. The setup: a medieval kingdom, a permanently drunk princess named Bean, her companion Elfo (who shares some genetic material with a certain beloved green alien), and a personal demon named Luci. After Springfield’s present day and the year 3000, a fantasy kingdom is the logical third step on the timeline.
What Groening does best, when he’s working properly, is world density—the sense that the universe extends past the edges of the frame, that background characters have histories, that the mythology existed before you arrived. Whether Netflix’s model of releasing everything at once allows that kind of detail to accumulate, or just floods it, I couldn’t say at announcement time. Twenty episodes is enough rope to either build something real or hang yourself with it.
I wanted it to be good. That specific wanting—for the person who gave you something you loved at the right age to give you something new worth loving—is its own uncomfortable feeling. You want it badly enough that you’re already managing your expectations before you’ve seen a single frame.