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Taking Influence with Justified and Bob's Burgers

by Tristan J. Nankervis on September 28, 2026

How do you build on the past?

Something I think about is straight-up replication of style. The rise in AI specifically has led to discussion on what it means to be a person and to have a specific creative voice; many have correctly noted that LLMs and other generative AI are only capable of empty imitation, and indeed that most examples shared that aren’t outright incoherent simply present the most broadly popular idea of ‘good taste’, creating spectacle without any substance, personality, or emotion. I was actually worried for a while that what I do could actually be replicated by a semi-randomized word generator, and I tested out trying to write an essay with ChatGPT; trying out “write me an essay comparing Mass Effect and the films of Quentin Tarantino in the style of George Orwell” got something that was readable and basically correct but, you know, could have been written by any idiot familiar with all three of those elements. The amount of work I was putting in to get to a good prompt was not worth the results.

On the other hand, the idea of these parameters as a creative motivation – to see oneself as an LLM – has preoccupied me. Apparently, one of the best ways to be smart is to imagine what a smart person would do in your situation and then do that. Mindless recreation of the past is something a lot of critics tend to be harsh on, but I do think that using someone else’s style as a structure to build your own thoughts on is a necessary part of the learning process, and can allow you to go to new and interesting places, and two TV shows that I think point to this are Justified and Bob’s Burgers.

Justified has the significant advantage of beginning as literal adaptation; the first episode is an adaptation of the Elmore Leonard short story “Fire in the Hole”. However, it deliberately held itself to the principles of a Leonard novel; creator Graham Yost kept his writers in line with the phrase “What would Elmore Leonard do?”. The three chief demonstrations of this: the American crime genre, the sparkling dialogue that takes the long way around a sentence, and impulsive acts of violence that come out of nowhere and rapidly push the story in one inevitable direction. This complete dedication to one voice ends up carrying it through even weaker patches; I’m happy just to listen to these people talk.

Roger Ebert once described movies as empathy-generating machines; I do believe he meant that they generate empathy with the characters onscreen, and he was right, but I also think it’s correct to think of them as generating empathy for the worldview they present and how they say things through cinematic technique. When we talk about movies critically, even the most criticism-averse viewers – those who think of critics as snobbish elites because they had the temerity to not like the movie they liked – tend to make the mistake of thinking of movies as exclusively idea-generating machines, where the value is exclusively within the ideas the movie presents (and, more often, the ideas the characters directly talk about). This can be fun, but it can also reduce all art to its value as propaganda.

Justified presents us with art as a pleasure-generating machine, and Leonard’s voice answers the most basic question of that: where does the pleasure come from? In this case, the way people talk, and the shock value that comes with violence. The mistake that imitators can make – which Justified does not – isn’t in recreating the past, but in forgetting to ask what we take pleasure in from this past idea. You can compare Justified taking on Leonard’s voice with how Bryan Fuller told the Hannibal directors to treat each episode as a moody European arthouse film; the pleasure there is intense, Gothic imagery, and so we know that even in the most expository or even pointless scene, we’re gonna see that shit.

When it comes to Bob’s Burgers… Okay, I have no idea if BB was actually intended to be an update of The Simpsons for 2011. I’ve never found any commentary from the writers or producers as to how much influence America’s favourite family had on America’s new favourite family, and I’m gleefully engaging in a classic academic impulse of treating wild speculation as fact and going from there. That said, I think it’s useful to treat BB as a kind of next-generation Simpsons and act as if it were a kind of corrective to that show.

The big thing I can never get past is that it has very much the same kind of tone; the basic idea of both shows is a working class family in an American small town that comes into conflict constantly, struggles to make enough money to live, and in particular with parents who aren’t perfect but try their best, with the characters ultimately loving and caring for one another and this giving them a sense of hope. Both shows have a bittersweet sense where we’re constantly failing but constantly almost succeeding that makes us believe a better future is possible (this unintentionally creates a bleak undertone to both shows going for decades with sliding timescales; season sixteen has an episode that flashes back to 2012 when the show began in 2011).

Bob’s Burgers recycles some joke ideas from The Simpsons; the most notable to me are the suggestions that Gene is gender-fluid that are similar to jokes about Bart and Homer (though, tangent: I’m irritated with the fandom for giving me the impression that Gene is constantly dressing up like a woman and playing female roles. There’s more proof that Abe Simpson is gender-fluid in the first eight seasons of The Simpsons than there is for Gene across sixteen seasons of BB). It’s more present to me in the characters and how they’re built, and how they are ‘structured’ differently.

At first I thought that the characters were completely, startlingly original, and that is still true, but you can also see not only how characters fit the same ‘types’, but how ‘types’ are actually swapped across gender lines. Like Homer and Marge, Bob and Linda are an impulsive free-spirit married to a wet blanket with odd preoccupations, it’s just the man and woman have been swapped around. Louise has both Bart’s impulsiveness and his ability to regret following his impulses on a deep moral level. The one matchup on gender lines is that Tina and Lisa are both creative types caught between personal idealism (to the point of stubbornness) and serving a larger community, with the difference that Tina lacks Lisa’s confidence.

(If Gene lifts from another character – and I doubt he does, given how he kind of grew into his personality over the first season – that character is not in The Simpsons)

You can also see how much the show has discarded to make the show fit a kind of ‘nicecore’ attitude. For one thing, Bob doesn’t strangle his son, but also there are larger conceptual choices made that soften the characters; my favourite is that, like Homer, Bob is working gruelling hours to support his large family, but it’s in his dream job. Like, sure, he’s exhausting himself, never has time for everything, and never has enough money to pay rent, but he’s spending his days doing exactly what he wants to do. Depending on my mood and the plot, I’m either sympathetic to Bob’s exhaustion or annoyed that he’s complaining so much about doing something somebody else wants to do; this is very different to Homer generally being sympathetic for having to work a shitty job, unsympathetic for selfish and lazy behaviour, but also kind of sympathetic because he’s somewhere he hates eight hours a day, five days a week. To put it another way: Bob’s life is generally how he wants it, he just wishes it was easier; Homer is trapped in a shitty life and making the best of it.

This also speaks to the differences in overall intellectual heft. BB is much, much more formulaic than Golden Age Simpsons; every plot can be divided into one of three categories. The first is a basic Restoration comedy plot, where a character finds themselves in a situation, commits to a stupid plan, watches the plan wobble and fall, then picks up the pieces after with a poignant speech; the other two are characters riffing on an idea (like Teddy owning a tub with caterpillars cocooning in it or Tiny not liking her babysitter) or three-parodies-in-one-episode montages.

This has two benefits, one going into an episode and the other coming out. Firstly, it reduces the difficulty of constructing an episode; one can pretty much plug in a few details and get the rest of the way very quickly. Secondly, it makes the show feel more light on its feet. There’s a weight and intensity to The Simpsons that comes from it having both script and visuals be beaten into something dense and strong; jokes and structure are worked out methodically and in great detail, with writers working together to make jokes as funny as humanly possible, and most of the writers were educated enough to come up with obscure jokes. 

Bob’s Burgers is more approachable (the one thing I don’t like about it at all is the disdain characters show for learning or reading). I’ve reached the point of annoying my partner slightly because I can predict how plots are going to resolve; I suspect this predictability is part of the appeal, like hearing a chord progression resolve. The pleasure of novelty of information is combined with the pleasure of predictability. This relates to The Simpsons in that it’s a structure that takes the best parts of individual scenes of the show to create this formula; reorganizing it into a neater structure. If you’ll excuse the awkwardness of the metaphor, The Simpsons has a much higher ceiling of quality but risks a much lower floor that can only be avoided with a lot of hard work; Bob’s Burgers has a lower ceiling (its heights tend to come from particularly vivid concepts) but also a higher floor, and it’s managed to spin the concepts of The Simpsons into a much more consistent output over a much longer time. 

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