This past week The Simpsons have been in the news for a variety of reasons. The entire cast of Girls will be joining Lena Dunham in an upcoming episode, a bit of a reunion for a show that's still on the air (but on hiatus). The show's future remains in doubt, with rumors floating around that FOX may not renew the series for a 27th season (I know people frequently want to kick The Simpsons for not being as good as it was a decade or two ago, but it would be a grave injustice to not give the show a "final" season to tie up loose ends-it's basically the equivalent of Gone with the Wind in television at this point and deserves a proper sendoff and not just a limp to the finish line). And finally, and perhaps the biggest news for me personally was the announcement that the series will no longer be releasing future seasons on Blu-Ray/DVD. This, for me, was harshest not just because I'm slightly OCD about my movie collections (I have all eighteen seasons that have been released on DVD), but also because it's part of a frightening trend in home entertainment: the slow loss of film and television in the name of convenience.
I'm not, it's worth noting, pulling something that my father does frequently when subjects of music comes up (though with this news I see his point a little more sympathetically). Frequently my dad is one of those people who still peruses vinyl collections and actually buys physical CD's at Target and Best Buy or any place that carries them. My dad does not do this because he has an aversion to technology (if anything he's far more adept at trying new technology out than I am, as he runs the family Vudu account and was on iTunes before almost anyone I know). It's because my dad loves the extras of an album or a CD: the cover art and the album notes and the CD collection he keeps in his closet with the visual impact of piles of music. Those little tactile extras that come with owning a CD rather than a digital download of a song. These are all things that are slowly becoming extinct-I frequently forget how fun it was to peruse through album notes, seeing what photos of a singer were listed amidst the lyrics and the fun of the art and design put into it, something that most people under the age of about 23 have absolutely no real concept regarding.
But that's not quite my point here. I love having physical copies of entertainment, but that's increasingly not pragmatic. The reality is that with technology advancing, it's easier to produce more and (vinyl enthusiasts be damned) crisper production of music for the masses through digital means. This is also the same for books, though I am acting like my father in this regard (I still don't have a Kindle, and regularly buy paper books). There are advantages to removing these formats, and not just convenience and quickness-the environmental aspect of producing things online rather than using raw materials to create these things is definitely something to keep in mind. If we were moving everything in a mass way from physical to digital, we'd probably be doing a greater good and those of us trying to amass a physical collection would just have to deal.
However, that's not what's happening, and that's one of the things that truly scares me about this Simpsons canary-in-the-coal mine: every time we get a new format, not everything moves from one format to the next. And this doesn't just include DVD extras and actor commentary (which I think are invaluable tools to getting to understand a particular movie or television show better), but the actual physical disc as well. If we're reliant on something like Netflix for all of our viewing needs, frequently television programs and movies are run through that streaming service at a moment's notice, with movies and TV shows coming out of the vault like a Disney home video release. The digital copies of movies available on Amazon and iTunes are surely expanding, but that doesn't mean that it's comprehensive in the same way that VHS and DVD are-there are movies that haven't been released on either of those two formats yet, and re-inventing yet again isn't going to help that argument. I recently realized, for example, that the film Funny Girl wasn't available on Netflix-a major classic of 1960's cinema and one of the most significant movies of Barbra Streisand's career (a career important enough to the public still that she landed a Number 1 album last year). Granted, the film is available on Amazon instant video (and Amazon's goal of trying to provide EVERYTHING to its consumers may be the silver lining of this entire endeavor), but so many people want to just use Netflix as an answer to this problem, which frightens the hell out of me: don't you want to keep your options as wide as possible?
And let's be honest here-digital entertainment has not gotten to the same level that DVD and certainly not Blu-Ray has reached. Digital streaming is awesome, but it's plagued by buffering, by Wi Fi readiness, and you sometimes get your best options on a tiny smart phone (where a movie like Lawrence of Arabia or Ben-Hur is going to look terrible). Much like how there is a specific and wonderful experience with seeing a movie in theaters, home-viewing of a DVD/Blu-Ray has not gotten to the point where digital is an equal solution. This isn't to say we aren't getting closer (and I suspect on this front, unlike in theaters, we'll get there), but we're still not there yet. And as a result of both of these reasons, I wish The Simpsons would reconsider the DVD decision, and that we would all take a moment to reflect on what may be another cinematic iconoclasm with this retreat to a different format.
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