“Someone squeezed all the life out of these kids.  And unless movies and teevee have lied to me, it’s a crusty, bitter old dean.” – Homer Simpson

If you Google “Zombie Simpsons”, the first result is a post I wrote last year called “The Cost of Zombie Simpsons”.  Not being familiar with anything more than the barest outlines of Google’s proprietary alchemy, I can only guess as to why it’s that one and not another.  But if I had pick of our back catalog to occupy that choice spot of search real estate (it gets more traffic than all but a handful of pages here), it’d probably be that one. 

My strained pollution metaphor was prompted by my discovery of a Futurama fan who had never seen “Marge vs. The Monorail”.  He knew of The Simpsons, but had never seen one of their most well known episodes.  I wondered how many people out there, too young to have watched the show’s decay as it happened, lived under the misunderstanding that it had always been so ordinary. 

This week I came across two blogs written by guys who fall under that age bracket.  The first is a student at Tufts University who writes about television for the campus newspaper.  In an article titled “Fox offers laughs beyond Seth MacFarlane”, he spends 769 words talking about all of the comedies currently broadcast on FOX.  (The piece is part of a series of four, one for each network.)  This is the Simpsons bit:

Outside the MacFarlane empire, "The Simpsons" is still going strong in its 22nd season. It’s not what it used to be, but it still has some smart plotting, good jokes and original stories after all these years.

I obviously agree with the part about it not being what it used to be and disagree with the part about it being “smart”, “good”, and “original”.  But that’s neither here nor there.  What’s revealing about this is the fact that the entire article is about FOX comedies, and yet those two fleeting sentences are the only part that discusses Zombie Simpsons.  The show is only mentioned one other time in the entire piece, and that’s just to note that it’s been overshadowed by MacFarlane’s television hydra.  In other words, even to people who like it, Zombie Simpsons is far less culturally interesting than every other program on FOX.  It’s a placeholder that gets brought up only for the sake of completeness. 

The second blog is brand new.  Its author is a student at the University of Arizona and the first four substantive posts are a top 25 Simpsons episode countdown.  I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of lists over the years.  Most of the time they’re either entirely or predominantly episodes from the before time, the long long ago; those are my favorite.  Sometimes they’re a jumble of The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons, with picks ranging from Season 1 to the present; I like those kind less.  But, hey, it’s somebody’s opinion and they’re certainly entitled to post it on-line. 

What’s unusual about this list is the range of episodes it covers.  The earliest episode on it is from Season 5 and the latest is from Season 14 (though only a handful are from after Season 11).  I’ve never seen a list like that before.  The explanation for this unusual selection comes in the introduction to the first part (emphasis added electronically by Channel 6):

As a dedicated (and somewhat obsessed) fan of The Simpsons, I have seen my fair share of Simpsons episodes (302 to be exact) and decided I would attempt to rank my favorite Simpsons episodes of all time. I took a lot of different factors into consideration of each episode (story,gags,overall hilarity), but mostly just picked the ones that I know I can sit through time and time again.

(The rest: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

He describes himself as a “dedicated” and “somewhat obsessed” fan who watches episodes “time and time again”, but the back catalog is so dauntingly swollen with mediocrity that he’s never sat down and plowed through it all.  At 302 episodes, itself a powerful feat of television watching, he still hasn’t seen nearly forty percent of the show. 

There are only two possibilities with the given math.  Either he’s never seen a significant chunk of the early seasons, or he gave up on the show completely right after Season 14.  Neither scenario reflects well on Zombie Simpsons, but given his list I’d be willing to bet it’s the former.  If that’s true, it means that Zombie Simpsons has deterred him from seeing some of the best things to ever grace the airwaves. 

This is precisely what I was talking about in “The Cost of Zombie Simpsons”.  In its current dilapidated state, Zombie Simpsons is hardly worth bringing up in a discussion of FOX comedies.  But its irrelevance to modern audiences doesn’t prevent it from obscuring its vastly superior predecessor.