'The Simpsons' Will Finally Say Goodbye to Apu This Season
And it's the right thing to do.
The Simpsons is reportedly bidding adieu to Apu. According to a recent interview with producer Adi Shankar, the controversial Hank Azaria-voiced character will not return to the series as frustrations subsist over the racial stereotyping of Indian Americans in light of comedian Hari Kondabolu's The Problem with Apu documentary.
Shankar told Indiewire that he'd led a campaign to crowdsource a spec script that "in a clever way subverts him, pivots him, writes him out, or evolves him in a way that takes a creation that was the byproduct of a predominately Harvard-educated white male writers’ room and transforms it into a fresh, funny and realistic portrayal of Indians in America."
He goes on to claim he'd found precisely that script, in hopes that Fox might produce a single episode, but informed by that the show intended to write out the character altogether. Which is to say that the show appears to be more comfortable axing the character than entrusting his representation to those inaccurately and unwillingly represented by him for three decades.
Per Consequence of Sound, Apu appeared in only a single frame of a recent episode. It could be the case that we've already seen his last days as a prominent figure on the show, but Shankar is committed to producing the winning script for his smash Youtube channel, The Bootleg Universe.
