“Okay, when I call your name, uh, you say ‘present’ or ‘here’. No, say ‘present’.” – Moe
If there’s one scene that’s been played over and over again in Zombie Simpsons, it’s the listing of the celebrity names. Once upon a time even celebrities playing themselves (James Woods, Tito Puente, everybody from “Homer at the Bat” and “Krusty Gets Kancelled”) got actual introductions. Now they appear and have their names read aloud. This is actual dialogue spoken by Lisa in “The Great Simpsina”:
Ricky Jay. David Copperfield. Penn. Teller.
It sounds like she’s reading roll call at a talent agency picnic. Once all of them had shouted “present”, we got the usual self serving celebrity dialogue of feeble jokes at their own expense. It’s marketing masquerading as satire, and it’s the kind of humorless comedy that used to be restricted to award shows and The Hollywood Squares.
That sad conclusion, the fight scene felt like watching someone play a bad Final Fantasy clone, came at the end of your standard sitcom “child meets old person guest star, learns stuff” story. These have been around forever, and this wasn’t a particularly well done version. Along the way, Lisa got to be the instant professional, Jack McBrayer got to play Kenneth on a show other than 30 Rock, and there was a harmless “parody” of Criss Angel.
The numbers are in and they are atrocious. For the sake of decimal consistency, I have to round off last night’s numbers and use my standard two decimal places, which gives a number of 5.00 million viewers. However, it’s worth nothing that TV By the Numbers goes to three decimal places, and last night’s came in just a shade under 5 million at 4.996. Even the rounded number makes this the lowest rated episode of all time, coming in well below last year’s “Million Dollar Maybe”, and the third decimal place makes it the first episode to ever come in under five million viewers. Two more episodes at roughly this level will drag Season 22 into a virtual tie with Season 20 for lowest rated ever, and three will put it over the top, so to speak.
Dead Homer Society 
20 responses to “Taking Attendance”
Here’s a good joke ZS will never go along with because their producers are money-run canyonero-driving cowards: the next time a celebrity shows up, they have the main character the episode is about say “and now, because we he/she/they have paid us to say this, here’s ….” That would be way funnier than their lame last Tuesday’s Wall Street journal jokes about American economy and such.
I have to admit that there is still chance that this season sinks low. First of all like you said all we need are three loads of crap, while we still have five coming anyway. Second, let’s see what we got left: Ned hooking up with Edna, Homer becoming a hairdresser (I’m sure this one will be another one of them infested with guest stars from some crappy homemade makeover shows who either teach Homer that being a hairdresser is not what life is about, or just fight him for the sake of laughter) and the last one with the family going on another stupid trip to some dumphole, I believe.
Of course, like every other show often does it, the best of the season having aired last Fall, we must now face the crappiest of their crap, and therefore the chance is still strong they will come up with another shameless indigestion of a sleep-deprived undergrad producer’s mind.
The episode promos are really starting to seem more and more like SNL promos.
Maybe the ratings will drop low enough so that the writers realize that their audience isn’t stupid and they can put a tad bit more effort into the scripts.
But that’s just wishful thinking.
The writers cannot realize it because this is true. They are making the show for idiots and that what keeps’em running. One day though, even idiots won’t watch it anymore, and only then is it prone to end.
No such luck. The merchandising is still too profitable.
Reading comments bashing The Simpsons makes me reminiscent for the years before I was legal drinking age when people first started going on the Internet to complain about how “The Simpsons is not good anymore.”
Thanks for helping me forget, just for a moment, that I’m 37 now, somewhat less attractive, and that all that college debt was for nothing.
You’re welcome?
I will say that even though the storytelling was extremely lazy (as usual), this episode was sadly one of the highlights of the season so far. I can’t account for WHY the writers chose to center an episode around a parody of Criss Angel (who was last relevant ~5 years ago), but at least it had a pretty big handful of funny moments.
Marge’s rebranding of BLTs as “PPPs” early on made me laugh out loud, as did the History of Cobwebs book, the part where Lisa tried to throw away the magic trinkets, and Teller’s outburst about how “that was the curse the witch put on us!” For Season 22, that pathetic bundle of laughs marks an exceptional episode. Then again, coming after the disgusting fuckery of “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing,” just about any episode would be exceptional!
Oddly enough, I can’t think of ANY funny joke from that twenty-one-minute-long eyesore. In the previous episode, we had Homer choking his dad and then Grandpa filming him having a stroke. Yes, storywise those are inconsistent, because Homer had tons of strokes before, and I don’t think he’d have enough strength in his 10-year-old hands to strangle the neck of a WWII veteran. However, these were at least world a chuckle.
In The Great Simpsina, I just… can’t think of any. Peaches thing was stupid, the raccoon thing just random, then comes the Great Raymondo with his magic shit for some reason, nothing he says is ever funny because of the seriousness in the debit of his voice. They could’ve at least make a church joke, an Apu joke, or, at last resort, have Dr. Nick show up and say “I also do magic”. But once again, they disconnected with the show and went into topic-related shit only to end up with an awfully pathetic scene and no explanations at all on how the show they took a minute to start actually ended.
In conclusion, IMO, this episode was pathetic and shitty. If you think this was funny, then I shiver in fear before what they should come up for you to consider “pathetic”.
Well, like I said, the episode WAS pathetic. But at least it stuck to a baseline level of mediocrity that involved having scattered laughs here and there, and at least a relatively consistent story, instead of whatever was supposed to be happening in “Many Strangled Thing.”
Basically I’m pleasantly surprised that the episode didn’t make me groan in anguish.
Well, maybe it’s just me, but I tend to halfway disagree with you because to me, both of those episodes were storywise inconsistent. A good storytelling, even if it needs to rely on jokes in order to progress, will never let itself be kicked in the butt in order to do so. And a joke isn’t a joke if it takes more setup than the actual punchline, it can sometimes be beaten to a pulp to milk the audience for more lulz, but in no way can a random joke that gets forcedly inserted (like the milhouse meme) be funny. I’m even sure whatever the script looks like for both episodes, at transition places like the one where Raymondo covers up pouting Lisa before the commercial, there is a note . Which makes it specifically pathetic.
As an example, take a look at the last Family Guy episode (if you ever watch it), the one where Brian dates Tiegs. Although it also does start with a lousy setup of shirt cleaning and Chinese people jokes (they all do it now), there is obvious progression which leads Peter to get arrested for public fighting, which is logical, which then leads Brian to meet a girl at the courthouse while he waits for Peter’s release, which is also logical. And finally, which its 1/3 part the episode already sets up the idea that it’s going to be about Brian dating someone again.
In Zombie Simpsons, once more, we start with peaches, then peaches get beaten to a pulp of pathos because they weren’t funny to start with, then they feel like they need to tie two ends between peaches and magic, so they bring in a raccoon. Which could’ve been a homeless dog. Which could’ve been a hobo. Which could’ve been a giant motherfucking peach chasing Lisa on a basis filled with vegetarian jokes. But it wasn’t. It was a raccoon. And the whole episode is like this: to make Lisa a magician we have a cheap conversation between her and Raymondo, then suddenly she’s great. To advance the plot we have Raymondo believe he found a pipul, probably because she’s a Simpson. And the rest, I don’t even want to talk about.
Once again, I don’t know how this can be plotwise consistent, other than a bunch of cheap improv gags of the Monty Python era, bind together to pretend they have a plot. You can’t do that with a thematic show. You can do it on sketch gags, Saturday Night Live, but NOT a cartoon sitcom, and especially the one that calls itself “The Simpsons”.
“Teller’s outburst about how “that was the curse the witch put on us!””
That was the only thing I really enjoyed, and yet . . . the callback to it was lame, and the reason I enjoyed it is that Penn & Teller are damn funny on their own. I could laugh at the exact same thing on their show, or on any one of their 8,000 yearly media appearances.
Haha, this site has terrible commenters now.
Thanks for doing your part.
Shut up, troll.
you guys are all wrong ,The Simpsons are as fresh and hilarious as ever
You mean “The Sampsons”, with Nod Flenders? Ya, they’re awesome.
[…] all it does is go through the motions, including the way it handles celebrity voices. The roll call from “The Great Simpsina” is a perfect case in […]
[…] all it does is go through the motions, including the way it handles celebrity voices. The roll call from “The Great Simpsina” is a perfect case in […]
Ricky Jay really is the best person alive though.
Just sayin’.