2009 is coming to a close and with it the decade of the naughts (some people go with “aughts”, I like “naughts”). That means that from now through the end of the year you, the internet denizen, will be fucking inundated with a plague of lists of biblical proportions. Fighting it won’t help and ignoring them all will be impossible. Most are going to be completely stupid and not worth even a second of your time. Then again, some of them are going to be so over-the-top, so ridiculously dumb and ill conceived that they cross that strange line and become so bad as to become entertaining. This list, “The best TV episodes of the decade (from shows not on any of our other lists)” is an example of the latter category.
I won’t subject you to its full regimen of horrors here (and I realize that by linking to it I’m just doing what they want anyway), I’ll just say that half of the shows from which they select episodes never should’ve been created in the first place. Picking a “best” episode out of these is like selecting a “best” war crime. The entire enterprise is awful to the point of revulsion. That said there is some dumb Simpsons commentary on here and it needs to be mocked. Fisking time:
The Simpsons, “Moe Baby Blues” (May 18, 2003)
This was the Season 14 season finale. I was pretty checked out by Season 14, and since I don’t like to directly criticize things I haven’t seen, I watched it just now. It is awful. It is beyond terrible. It is the very nadir of Zombie Simpsons boredom and stupidity.
The Simpsons spent most of the ’00s trying to prove that it still deserved to exist. No matter how hard showrunner Al Jean tried to bring the show back to its roots after Mike Scully turned it into a cartoonish fantasy early in the decade, there was always something missing.
This is that old “blame it all on one thing” trope that’s so utterly meaningless. Also, “cartoonish fantasy” handily describes this awful installment of Zombie Simpsons.
The series, which had done everything, mostly lost its ability to surprise. Every so often, though, it came up with an episode like this one, offering a funny new way to use the characters.
Again with the pure Zombie Simpsons canards. Surprise is about the only thing the show did do, with wild crazy crap that wasn’t funny and didn’t make a lick of sense no matter how drunk or stoned you were. This episode has that stuff in spades. As for a “funny new way to use the characters”, if you drop the “funny” from that statement it’s pretty much all they did. Look at Moe. He used to be a recognizable guy, a bitter bartender that life had passed by. Then they tried to make him sympathetic and turned him into . . . something. Kind of like Flanders if he’d never gotten married and life had finally snapped him.
Here, forlorn bartender Moe becomes obsessed with caring for baby Maggie, in ways both hilarious and rooted in the characters we’d grown to know. “Moe Baby Blues” added a new relationship to the show, and represented one of the few consistently funny episodes this decade.
Zombie Moe, where he’s the most needy and pathetic guy ever, is in full effect here, if that’s what they mean by “rooted in the characters”, then yeah, I guess it’s true. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. “Added a new relationship” is also of questionable value, though if by that you mean copious use of the string music of suspense and lots – lots – of exposition, then yeah.
I am, for lack of a better term, choking on my own rage here. Not at this list, which hardly anyone will even remember a week from now, but at “Moe Baby Blues”. That is as bad as Zombie Simpsons gets and the fact that you could slip it seamlessly into Season 20 or 21 just makes the continued existence of Zombie Simpsons that much sadder.
I need a drink and a shower.
The plot of that Moe episode readily springs to mind almost every time I think of how bad The Simpsons has gotten over the last decade (to say nothing of how Moe’s character has been ruined). It’s a textbook example of Zombie Simpsons, through and through. That someone has listed that very episode in any kind of “Best Of” list beggars belief.
They picked episodes from such television classics as “Gilmore Girls” and “Everybody Loves Raymond”, so Zombie Simpsons seems to be on the right mental level. Also, it wasn’t even a top ten, or twenty, or whatever list, so there wasn’t even any need to pad. Apparently each one of these was so sterling it just necessitated inclusion. Ah fuck, I’m bitching about a dumb internet list aren’t I?
Even when you know it plays into their hands its still near impossible not to do.
In the past, the Simpsons had shown hints that Moe wasn’t happy, and I think it worked quite well in “Homer’s Phobia”, in which Moe, after the reindeer attack, says “well, I guess it’s suicide again for me”. I think that’s a good level of sickness, showing us something about the insecurity of men who act overly macho and violent without dwelling on it. The trouble is, the show seems to have taken that one line about suicide and bloated it into something huge and foul. Now Moe is seen to be, as you say “the most needy and pathetic guy ever”, publicly weeping, wailing and rending his garments at how wretched his life is. This is when he’s not attatching himself like velcro to other characters, often some female he has fallen for (in the case of “Moe Baby Blues”, Maggie – who he never seems to have a close relationship with again). Perhaps I need to watch the earliest seasons again, but I’m quite sure Moe used to have some strength and hardness to him. I seem to recall him in “There’s No Disgrace Like Home” giving Homer advice about his marriage in a manner befitting someone with an emotional skeleton.
I suppose that, when keeping a show going for this long, there’s only so much that can be done with a character that started out as a bartender archetype. It still doesn’t mean I would like to see grandiose displays of tragedy on The Simpsons.
Zombie Simpsons seems to have a penchant for taking characters and making one jokey characteristic define them. Usually this involves juat hammering into the ground jokes about their personalities that were maybe funny enough to be alluded to once or twice. Moe? One-time surly bartender, now chronically depressed/self-loathing/needy/suicidal. Comic Book Guy? One-time sarcastic shopkeeper, now go-to guy when Zombie Simpsons wants to make fun of fan critism of the show. Milhouse? One-time geeky best friend, now gay. Martin Prince? One-time class braniac, now gay. Patty Bouvier? One-time obnoxious sister-in-law, now gay. Lenny and Carl? One-time regular-schnook-double-act, now, er, gay.
I don’t think what they did with Patty was ever so bad, since she wasn’t especially differentiated anyway, and any focus on the twins was generally on Selma. Plus, she was actually outed as opposed to just being the butt of “lol gay” asides. Which is the trouble with all the rest of the gay jokes you mentioned – they aren’t anything but “lol gay”. The Lenny and Carl thing that keeps being mentioned here is little more than “two men who are close must be gay…that’s the joke”. The Millhouse thing is “Millhouse is the butt of jokes…gay is a joke”. Even the thing with Smithers, which is nearly as old as the entire show has long ago been stretched until it snapped. I would honestly be all for a respectful and professional approach to LGBT culture in The Simpsons, but what we actually get is little more than the result of wading through 4chan /b/ and pulling out most of the swearing and racism. But, I guess that’s what people want.
I get the feeling that the guys behind the show lazily fall back on the gay thing when they want to try a new strain of jokes for a particular character. There were jokes alluding to Barney being gay in “Bart’s Comet” and “Simpson Tide” (and possibly others) but I guess the writers/producers thought that sobriety was a better direction in which to take Barney’s character.
OK, as much as I dislike the post-new millenium Simpsons, even I can think of better episodes from that period than Moe Baby Blues. Granted, none of them are “great,” but they’re at least more deserving of the title than that phoned-in nonsense.