30 Years Ago, 'Deep Space Homer' Blasted The Simpsons Into a New Comic Stratosphere

Against all odds, and after 35 consecutive years on the air, TV’s longest-running sitcom is experiencing an unexpected revival in popularity. But if an increasing number of critics and diehard fans agree that — to quote a recent Vulture article — “The Simpsons is good again,” there’s less consensus about when, exactly, the show stopped being good in the first place. Was it “The Principal and the Pauper,” the Season 9 episode that revealed that Springfield’s resident mama’s boy of a school administrator, Seymour Skinner, was not who he said he was? How about Season 10’s “When You Dish Upon a Star,” which accelerated the show’s pandering habit of casting celebrities to play themselves in fawning cameos? Ask this writer, and he’d be forced to sadly recall the time the Simpsons went to Japan and got jostled by Godzilla.

Almost no one would argue that The Simpsons jumped the shark with “Deep Space Homer,” aka the one where NASA blasts quintessential American dolt and hapless family man Homer Simpson into orbit. The Season 5 episode, which aired 30 years ago today, is often cited as one of the show’s best, and for good reason: It’s hilarious in a classic Simpsons way, wrapping a sharp satirical point — that our constant race for television ratings affected even, well, the space race — in a breathless volley of verbal and visual gags, from a choice Planet of the Apes parody to a guest-starring James Taylor tactfully tweaking the lyrics to his own “Fire and Rain.” Laugh for laugh, it rivals almost any half hour of the show’s seemingly indefinite run.

Still, there is a case to be made that “Deep Space Homer,” for all its perfection as a joke machine, was a point of no return for The Simpsons. If this was far from the moment that the show began to drift away from its early greatness — from what made it timeless and special — it could be identified as the moment that precipitated that later drift. After all, how do you keep a comedy down to earth when its hero has literally left Earth? The wackier version of The Simpsons, the one the show became in its second and third decades of existence, arguably wouldn’t exist without this unlikely foray into zero gravity, this odyssey of absurdity.

On a DVD commentary track for Season 5, showrunner Dave Mirkin (who also wrote the episode) and Simpsons creator Matt Groening reveal how they butted heads over “Deep Space Homer.” Sending Homer to space “gave us nowhere to go,” Groening recalls arguing. “How do we top that?” (Call it the Fast & Furious dilemma.) The cartoonist needn’t have worried. There were plenty of big Simpsons stories left to tell. If anything, “Deep Space Homer” expanded the show’s narrative possibilities into new realms of zany improbability; not even the sky was the limit for a show no longer beholden to questions like, say, is it remotely realistic for NASA to put a man of Homer’s qualifications (or entire lack thereof) into a billion-dollar shuttle?

By sending Homer into the cosmos, the writers untethered their series from the sense of reality that defined it in its early years. You could argue that they had begun to sever that reality even earlier — through conversations with God and the Devil, through visions of the future, through an escalator to nowhere and a bottomless vortex that swallows Ozzie Smith whole. But these were quick cutaway gags, little bits of surrealism happening on the margins of human-scaled plots. “Deep Space Homer” built a whole episode around an idea previous seasons might have tackled only through a daydream or nightmare.

The Simpsons would never permanently leave the stratosphere of relatable human stories (even the show’s widely maligned teen years strain for family pathos), but it would keep pushing beyond that bubble after “Deep Space Homer,” constantly readjusting its own notions of what was too out there. In that sense, you can draw a straight line from Homer’s chip-devouring cosmic ballet to the Simpsons traveling to an alien world in a debatably canonical, non-Halloween episode. “Deep Space Homer” said that, going forward, the show could and maybe would do anything for a laugh. However freeing that may have been for the writing staff, it made a strong case for a version of the show that kept its feet more firmly planted in quotidian American life.

Maybe the malleability of the characters’ circumstances — the whole universe of situations that opened up before them — made the series more satirically limber. Without worrying about violating its own internal logic, The Simpsons could take aim at any subject or corner of society. The tradeoff, though, was that Groening and company sacrificed something smaller and more touching on the altar of Mad Magazine wackiness. Yellow complexion and four fingers aside, the Simpsons were, in those first few seasons, as real as any family on TV. A big part of that was their modest means — the unglamorous money troubles that often defined their lives (and hijinks) in Springfield.

“Deep Space Homer” pointed towards a Simpsons less grounded in such realities. What had started as a show about a working-class family with working-class problems was now an anything-goes comic jamboree, willing to promote its lowly hero to astronaut duty for an episode and a laugh. Homer, once the working definition of a working stiff, became someone who could travel the world, hobnob with movie stars, go to the Super Bowl, and run for political office. Money was no object as plot or a joke demanded: In Season 7’s “The Day the Violence Died,” Homer hands Bart a big wad of cash out of his wallet like it’s nothing.

In that same commentary track, Groening dusts off a pet phrase he often uses to describe his hit show: “Rubber band reality.” It’s his way of saying that The Simpsons, as an animated series, could do things that live-action sitcoms couldn’t, while still snapping back to something relatable and realistic. “Deep Space Homer” is arguably an ideal example of that principle. It’s nutty in both a macro and micro sense, using a generally ludicrous premise as a launchpad for jokes involving talking chimps, subtitled ants, and Homer’s face morphing briefly into Popeye and Richard Nixon. But to Groening’s point, the episode is built around something real: the story of an ordinary schlub desperate to earn respect by doing something extraordinary. “Deep Space Homer” works because its mile-a-minute lunacy orbits an emotional truth. That’s what really launches it into the show’s upper echelon.

The problem with a lot of later Simpsons (with later defined as the last couple decades!) is that the rubber band never snaps back. The show, in its sprawling middle age, often did zaniness for the sake of zaniness, forgetting to invest it with any sincere feeling. An animated sitcom became a cartoon. Maybe that was the stealth anxiety of Groening’s objection to “Deep Space Homer”: He got a vision of his beloved characters disappearing into a black hole of weightless comic buffoonery, of irrelevant irreverence.

On the other hand, maybe the episode helped expand the scope of what The Simpsons could be in good, ambitious ways, too. Can the show’s giant conceptual leaps be traced back to its one small step into spaceman troubles? After “Deep Space Homer” came such bold bends in formula as the vignette collage “22 Short Films About Springfield” and the expanded-universe wink "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase." We also got, yes, “The Principal and the Pauper” — now seems like a good time to confess an admiration for that sly commentary on a fanbase hostile to any change to status quo. And of course, there’s the withering “Homer’s Enemy,” which allowed the show to critique itself… including the incongruous decision to send perennial underachiever Homer Simpson to outer space!

And maybe the show couldn’t do the ambitious things it’s doing now, during its unlikely return to form, if it hadn’t first pushed against the barriers of good sense and its own winningly earthbound sensibility with “Deep Space Homer.” Thirty years on, for better or worse, that episode looks like a truly evolutionary step forward for The Simpsons. To that end, the final joke, a parodic nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, seems particularly apropos — and not just because this show now seems like it’s been running since the dawn of mankind.

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.