I'm not asking when the show got raped by a panda. That is already irrefutably documented. I'm curious what episodes people avoid for fear of flashbacks.
I'll start.
In retrospect, I knew the show was beginning to lose its luster after season 8. This was back before everyone was on the Internet judging shows season by season or episode by episode. The Simpsons still had its moments, but the "Who would want to watch a Jay and Silent Bob movie?" shtick was obviously becoming more of a crutch. That painful reference didn't exist at the time, so I kept watching. Blah, blah, blah...fanboy cred established. Here's my verdict.
Season 10 is the worst season ever. Three episodes in particular recall, to my mind, the protracted end of a relationship with an ex-girlfriend. This culminated on Valentine's Day 1999, after I'd been up for more than 24 hours finishing a novella, suffered through John Carpenter's Vampires, and was finally able to get in touch with my long-distance girlfriend of several years only to find I'd been dumped for the president of an anime club. ("An" because there was more than one.) Completely numb and unable to contact any of my friends, I sat through I'm With Cupid, and watched Apu and Homer go to retarded lengths to save their marriages.
Worst episode evar.
Beat that.
2 comments:
I've done some soul-searching, and some internet research. Then I threw that all out, and went with my gut: It's All Singing, All Dancing.
I'm sure that there are plenty of other episodes are empirically worse. But I remember actually wanting to like this, for some reason. I reasoned that even though it was a clips show, it contained the best musical numbers to grace The Simpsons. And who doesn't like musical numbers?
The person I was watching it with didn't, because she fell asleep within ten minutes. I sat through it, and wondered why I had bothered. The best songs, (Like the Stonecutters, and Monorail) just made me wish I was watching the episodes they were part of, instead. The worst were just boring, and could only survive in their original environment.
And then at the end, they made the joke.
"There is something worse:
And it really does blow:
When a long-running series does a cheesy clip show!"
At one time, The Simpsons. could joke about their cop-outs, and we'd laugh. James Earl Jones finishing an episode by saying that the Simspons were rescued by... oh, let's say Moe. The threat of TOTCHA for anyone who remembers Skinner's real name.
But that was then. Now, we get the Comic-Book guy, popping up and saying, "Didn't we do this exact same episode five years ago, except it was a hell of a lot funnier back then?" Except that a second Comic-Book guy never appears to say that hey, they've done so many we-know-we-suck jokes that they now form a fine layer of varnish over the bad episodes. They slouch in, do a tired little dance, and leave apologetically. And every time, this episode briefly flashes in my mind.
Your Internet research has failed you. Das Bus didn't air until a month later. In addition to the Moe rescue, it features one of my top whatever Simpsons lines ever. You know the one. It's the only quotable Sherri/Terri bit.
You are correct about the Skinner episode, though. It aired just a few months earlier. Back in the halcyon days before we began to suspect something had gone horribly wrong.
I need to stick up for this episode, even though it heralded the end of quality songs on the series. My wife saw it in a rerun and she thought, "Narraptor must like this." She was wrong, but it led to us watching the first episode of Futurama together on a 12" screen TV. Something good came from it.
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