The Siiiiiiiimp-sooooooooooooons................
Victor links to this article on The Simpsons. Everybody seems to agree that the show has lost its touch, but somebody must be watching it....
I was a sophomore in college when The Simpsons got a regular spot on Fox. I was living in an off-campus dormitory (next door to a mental hospital.) Sunday nights were pretty grim -- all these carless sophomores who'd drawn terrible room lottery numbers, sitting around looking at each other because the bus didn't run to campus on Sunday nights and, no matter what they promised, your friends were never coming to visit you.
At 7:55 PM on Sundays, one of the guys on the first floor would climb on top of a table and start twiddling with the rabbit ears on the hall TV. A couple of other guys would stand in the stairwells and bellow SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMPSOOOOOOOOONS!. The doors would start opening and slamming shut as dozens of sophomores scurried down to the first-floor lounge toting popcorn or whatever else they could come up with in the way of snacks. I must sound like I'm about a hundred years old: hall TVs...rabbit ears...TV lounges.... Anyway, the show seemed fresh and daring then, especially to a bunch of sophomores, and watching it with forty other people was a treat in itself.
So now I'm an old married lady. My husband and I had been complaining about the decline in The Simpsons since around 1998 or so, but kept watching it out of loyalty, until the infamous Frank Grimes episode. I thought it had finally hit its low point, until they killed off Maude Flanders.
We did catch the 300th episode last night. It was a "guest voice" episode, where they shoehorned Tony Hawk into a plot involving a skateboard competition. *yawn* The next episode was sharper -- I particularly liked the Seven Sisters dream sequence, although the Sapphic joke could perhaps have been omitted (there are people who allow their children to watch the show.)
My favorite episodes are "Twenty-two Short Films about Springfield" and "Homer Goes to Clown College."
