“It’s not as good as it used to be.”
The degree to which The Simpsons has fallen from grace is entirely subjective - and largely dependant on how angry the particular dark alley of the internet you have lurched into proves to be. But whether people still think that the newer episodes are good entertainment or whether they think that the show has become an abomination that brutally sexmurders another little part of their childhood with each subsequent 22-minute instalment, everyone agrees on one thing: “It’s not as good as it used to be.” Just when this “used to be” may… well… be is an entirely different argument, of course, but that’s for another day.
It's Ullman Show or bust
Scores of articles can - and most probably have - been written about the general changes to the show that have lead to this downward spiral, but this is not the place for those arguments - yes, it’s annoying that they repeat storylines, that they change established show history, that every character has gone from “animated human being” to “one-dimensional cartoon caricature”, that every single minor job in Springfield is held by Gil, Lindsay Nagel or that irritating “Yeeeeesssss” guy - but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Nor are we going to dispute that any given classic episode of The Simpsons still stands up as being amongst the best and most rewatchable episodes of television ever.
Stop smiling. Nobody likes you.
What we’re looking at today are single moments or plotlines that - regardless of the overall quality of the season they sit in - are just awful. The sort of moment where the show crosses the borders of good taste, happily drops a steaming pile of animated poo on the meadows of shock-factor appeal, streaks naked and defiled right through the realms of black comedy and finally collapses dirty, sweaty, and aroused in the barren wastelands of “What the fuck were they thinking?”
It's just north of Skegness
5: Homer contemplates killing his Sisters-in-Law. More than usual.
One for the lads
Homer has never liked Patty and Selma, of course. And he’s often had fantasies about bad things happening to them.
But in The Cartridge Family, in the show’s ninth season, we see a Homer who flat-out plans on shooting them.
You see, Homer has bought a handgun, and is currently waiting for the government checks etc. to pass so that he can pick up his weapon. Already disturbingly obsessed with getting his hands on the weapon, Homer sits on his front lawn, thinking of all the things he could shoot if he had a gun.
When I say “things”, I of course mean “people”. Not content with wanting to shoot a Target truck, or a parade of adorable ducks, Homer turns his steely murder-eyes on a passing Patty, Selma and Ned Flanders. This isn’t just one of those fantasies that he has in his head, either. He sees them enter his designated killzone, and is genuinely angry that a five-day waiting period is stopping him from shooting all these people dead, right there and then. Seriously, he was TOTALLY GOING TO DO IT!
Oh Homer, you lovable rogue...
It’s worth noting that the episode - which was originally banned from transmission in the UK - does carry an anti-firearms message (just about, it’s all rather sloppily handled), but still, Homer sits out on his front lawn planning on killing his friends and family, and the only thing standing between him and a spot on Springfield’s Most Wanted was the fact that he had to wait less than a week to get a gun.
A gun that he was approved for, and that is canonically still in the Simpsons’ household.
How long before brutal strangulation just isn't punishment enough?
Because Boybands were a big thing in the 90s, The Simpsons thought that the time was right to dedicate an episode to Bart joining a boy band in… 2001.
Pictured: Cultural Relevance
Let’s just get it said right off the bat that there are a lot of things wrong with this episode anyway. And also, of course, hindsight makes this one harsher (airing as it did just seven months before 9/11). But still, New Kids On The Blecch in the twelfth season saw Bart involved in a shady military conspiracy that saw downtown New York attacked, and that's messed up no matter when you air it.
Bart’s boy band, you see, is nothing but a government tool to recruit impressionable young kids into the navy via subliminal messages. Bart and co. are performing their hit song on a fully armed Navy destroyer when word comes in that MAD Magazine are going to run a cover that makes fun of the band. So, acting rationally, the band’s manager-slash-criminal-conspirator Lt. LT Smash immediately commandeers the warship with Bart still on board, and takes it to NYC, where - in order to silence any mockery that would damage his recruitment effort - he blows the everloving shit out of the magazine’s headquarters.
Fuck you, kid...
So, to reiterate, Bart was part of a plan by the US government to bomb New York in order to ensure high recruitment numbers for the military.
It's true that Bart was not aware of this at first, and didn’t actively encourage the destruction of the New York skyline.
"I got standards, Man"
But this is still the only episode of any family sitcom ever where a member of the family becomes the unwitting pawn of an entirely successful plot to blow up a chunk of a major populated area.
Though I never trusted that redhead...
Thank God *NSync were around to see justice was served.
3: Homer is the victim of a sex crime.
Just a few weeks after Bart’s wacky terrorism hijinks, Homer Simpson got raped by a panda. Let that sink in.
Yaaaaaay Comedy!!!
In the episode Homer vs. Dignity, our hero takes on a job as Mr. Burns’ “prank monkey”. At first Homer just makes good, clean money by bullying his friends and co-workers for the amusement of a bitter old man he doesn’t like.
Well this isn't creepy...
But abusing those closest to him isn’t entertaining enough, so Burns has Homer dress up as a panda for… reasons. In full panda get-up, Homer enters the enclosure of Ping-Ping, Springfield Zoo’s resident Panda. It’s not long (only a few seconds) before Ping-Ping goes full-on prison movie and decides to show the fresh meat who’s boss.
Homer is dragged away by Ping-Ping, who in the cheerful words of the zookeepers has “taken a shine” to him. Thankfully the rest occurs off-screen.
Pandas are not a promiscuous species. In fact, the bastards are on the verge of extinction because they just straight-up dislike sex so much that they can’t be arsed to carry on babying, so that really must have been a good-looking panda outfit to whip Ping Ping into such a frenzy of passionfucking so quickly. But as much as we all want pandas to carry on as a species, let’s keep in consensual, people.
"Not tonight, dear, I have a headache..."
The episode ends with Burns (apparently successfully) destroying the youngsters of Springfield’s faith in Santa Claus, incidentally.
The man just can't help himself
2: Abe Marries Selma
Let’s take a break from the sex and violence for a moment, though, to talk about love. Terrible, terrible love.
In the show’s eighteenth season, Rome-old and Juli-eh sees Grampa Simpson marry Selma. Remember in one of the early clip-shows there was a joke that went something like “Who knows what the Simpsons will get up to between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable”? Straight up - this was actually one of the storylines that was suggested then.
They took a joke about episodes that were too stupid to happen, and then with the boundless enthusiasm that only the truly witless possess, thought to themselves “Actually, no, let’s totally do that!”
The creepy romance begins when Grampa and Selma babysit the kids together. They somehow wind up kissing and true love is born. Because he senses how fundamentally stupid this storyline is (or perhaps because as this article shows, he’s just a massive dickbag), Homer sets out to immediately put a stop to this romance.
Because our televisions now hate us, he fails, and the two actually marry.
What follows then is a peculiarly jokeless and ominous examination of the way that human beings can decay with age, and the terrible toll that takes on the ones who love them. Abe’s mental functions start to fall apart, to the extent that Selma leaving him alone causes his befuddled old-man head to go into a confused, lonely panic, and he accidentally burns down their kitchen because he just fundamentally isn’t safe to be left alone any more. Selma can’t cope with seeing her husband descend into senility, so after one last dance she readmits him to the nursing home, and both of the lovebirds are left alone by the time the end credits roll.
Does that sound funny to you? No, because you’re not a sociopath. But the thing is, it doesn’t even pretend to be funny. It’s like one of those CreepyPasta stories about lost episodes of shows that get more and more bleak until all that remains is the screaming. And that genuinely seems to be what the writers were going for.
Did I mention that the B-plot of this episode has Bart and Lisa fighting a fucking dragon? Because it totally does.
1: Homer causes the death of a long-running character. Jokes about it to her widower.
Do you remember Round Springfield, the episode where Bleeding Gums Murphy died? Even though he was only a minor character, it was a ridiculously poignant episode about death, loss, and the impact that a person can have on the lives they touched, even after they are gone.
Let’s talk about when Homer killed Maude Flanders.
The Season Eleven episode Alone Again, Natura-Diddily took a look at how The Simpsons had tackled bereavement in the past, and then dropped its pants and dickslapped said past firmly in the face.
Prompted by the departure of Maggie Roswell, the writers were tasked with writing the character out, and proceeded to do so in a manner that felt weirdly spiteful and mean-spirited from the start.
At a motor show, Homer invites the cheerleaders to shoot a barrage of t-shirts his way, before ducking, leaving Maude to take a full-on military assault of 100% Cotton to the chest, sending her to plummet from the stands to her messy death below. The fact that the manner of Maude’s death is a joke itself is the least of the episode’s problems.
What follows is a slew of jokes about Maude’s death from countless characters - even at her funeral Reverend Lovejoy makes a quip about how she was “only a supporting player” anyway. But it is Homer’s constant quips about it that really rankle (like the one about how parked in the way of the ambulance).
It’s worth noting that, while most the characters and writers are playing everything for laughs, Ned is visibly upset for the whole episode. It’s really uncomfortable.
It’s okay in the end, though, because Homer makes everything better by stealing Ned’s camcorder, secretly filming him in the shower, in the garden and at work like some sort of deranged stalker, before sending the video to a dating site against Ned’s wishes in an effort to get Ned laid by women he has no interest in, to get him over the wife that Homer himself killed not ten minutes of screen-time previously.
Let’s take a break from the sex and violence for a moment, though, to talk about love. Terrible, terrible love.
In the show’s eighteenth season, Rome-old and Juli-eh sees Grampa Simpson marry Selma. Remember in one of the early clip-shows there was a joke that went something like “Who knows what the Simpsons will get up to between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable”? Straight up - this was actually one of the storylines that was suggested then.
They took a joke about episodes that were too stupid to happen, and then with the boundless enthusiasm that only the truly witless possess, thought to themselves “Actually, no, let’s totally do that!”
The creepy romance begins when Grampa and Selma babysit the kids together. They somehow wind up kissing and true love is born. Because he senses how fundamentally stupid this storyline is (or perhaps because as this article shows, he’s just a massive dickbag), Homer sets out to immediately put a stop to this romance.
For those keeping score, Grampa has now had both Homer's mother-in-law and sister-in-law.
Next stop - Marge City...
Because our televisions now hate us, he fails, and the two actually marry.
What follows then is a peculiarly jokeless and ominous examination of the way that human beings can decay with age, and the terrible toll that takes on the ones who love them. Abe’s mental functions start to fall apart, to the extent that Selma leaving him alone causes his befuddled old-man head to go into a confused, lonely panic, and he accidentally burns down their kitchen because he just fundamentally isn’t safe to be left alone any more. Selma can’t cope with seeing her husband descend into senility, so after one last dance she readmits him to the nursing home, and both of the lovebirds are left alone by the time the end credits roll.
Does that sound funny to you? No, because you’re not a sociopath. But the thing is, it doesn’t even pretend to be funny. It’s like one of those CreepyPasta stories about lost episodes of shows that get more and more bleak until all that remains is the screaming. And that genuinely seems to be what the writers were going for.
The windows are singing the merciful cries of death
Did I mention that the B-plot of this episode has Bart and Lisa fighting a fucking dragon? Because it totally does.
1: Homer causes the death of a long-running character. Jokes about it to her widower.
Do you remember Round Springfield, the episode where Bleeding Gums Murphy died? Even though he was only a minor character, it was a ridiculously poignant episode about death, loss, and the impact that a person can have on the lives they touched, even after they are gone.
Let’s talk about when Homer killed Maude Flanders.
The Season Eleven episode Alone Again, Natura-Diddily took a look at how The Simpsons had tackled bereavement in the past, and then dropped its pants and dickslapped said past firmly in the face.
Prompted by the departure of Maggie Roswell, the writers were tasked with writing the character out, and proceeded to do so in a manner that felt weirdly spiteful and mean-spirited from the start.
This guy got to bow out with more dignity...
At a motor show, Homer invites the cheerleaders to shoot a barrage of t-shirts his way, before ducking, leaving Maude to take a full-on military assault of 100% Cotton to the chest, sending her to plummet from the stands to her messy death below. The fact that the manner of Maude’s death is a joke itself is the least of the episode’s problems.
Yaaaay Comedy!!!
What follows is a slew of jokes about Maude’s death from countless characters - even at her funeral Reverend Lovejoy makes a quip about how she was “only a supporting player” anyway. But it is Homer’s constant quips about it that really rankle (like the one about how parked in the way of the ambulance).
"But seriously, Maggie, we're sorry to see you go."
It’s worth noting that, while most the characters and writers are playing everything for laughs, Ned is visibly upset for the whole episode. It’s really uncomfortable.
It’s okay in the end, though, because Homer makes everything better by stealing Ned’s camcorder, secretly filming him in the shower, in the garden and at work like some sort of deranged stalker, before sending the video to a dating site against Ned’s wishes in an effort to get Ned laid by women he has no interest in, to get him over the wife that Homer himself killed not ten minutes of screen-time previously.
Like I said: Massive dickbag
No comments:
Post a Comment