“Smithers, I seem to recall you had a penchant for bell bottomed trousers, back in ’79.” – C.M. Burns
“Sir, that was my costume from the plant production of HMS Pinafore.” – Mr. Smithers
“Oh, yes, of course. Your spirited hornpipe stole the show as I recall.” – C.M. Burns
Another week, another forgettable episode from Zombie Simpsons. Homer and Bart get into a fight about broccoli, then end up on a father-son sailing ship. Along the way, Homer gets scurvy, is thrown overboard a couple of times, vomits, and gets attacked by an octopus. Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Marge runs Homer’s fantasy football team. Both suffer from montages, expository dialogue, expository voice-overs, and the usual range of problems.
– A long couch gag ends with Scratchy’s blood splattered on the TV. That was odd.
– And we open with repetitive shots to some guy’s nuts. Who says the writing sucks?
– Bart and Milhouse watching a red band trailer would be a lot better if they didn’t stop to explain everything as they were doing it.
– The setup was a bit of a stretch, but Marge getting her mammogram search blocked was okay.
– Homer and Marge are having another one of their expository conversations, but this one is in the bathroom.
– This broccoli thing just goes on and on and on. Ate up a lot of time, though, so there’s that.
– Homer takes a call from Lenny about his fantasy football draft. Does this make any sense as dialogue with Lenny?:
Lenny: Homer, where are you? Our fantasy football draft is about to start.
Homer: Today’s our draft! I’ve gotta pick a good fantasy team. When I lost last year they made me do something so humiliating….Jebus loves Tebow.
No, no it does not.
– Homer and Bart both get kidnapped in the middle of the night because how else could they get out on a boat? This show doesn’t just take bad shortcuts. It takes bad and unnecessary shortcuts.
– Guh, this guy is a waste of Nick Offerman’s talents.
– Trunks of life jackets just appeared out of nowhere. One-year-olds have a better grasp of object permanence than this writing staff. It’s astonishing.
– Hey, the B-plot just showed up. Marge helpfully explains that she’s getting messages from Homer’s fantasy league. Sure glad she told us that or we’d never have figured it out.
– The trash talking that so upsets Marge isn’t even funny. It’s just lame: “Homer, your quarterback is garbage”. Ooh, cutting!
– Homer just got scurvy for some reason. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but it did happen.
– Montage! (Though maybe HMS Pinafore isn’t the kind of thing they should be reminding us of.)
– Homer’s now telling us how Bart’s feeling. That’s a twist.
– Homer just puked for some reason.
– There are way too many useless lines for me to quote them all, but this is fairly typical:
Homer: Wait a minute. He can’t order me around. I’m his father.
Offerman: He’s your superior officer, so he can and will order you around.
They’re so hooked into just telling us what’s happening that I don’t think they even notice it anymore.
– The B-plot is back so that Selma could explain what’s happening and then they could do voice over to explain it some more.
– Offerman just asked Bart how he was feeling. They really can’t go a scene without doing this.
– Remember when Lionel Hutz was tempted by liquor? It was much better than this bit with Offerman.
– Hey, now there’s a storm.
– And now it’s giving Homer and Bart a chance to restate what’s happening for the umpteenth time.
– They really can’t stop:
Marge: So, did your sailing adventure help you work out your issues?
Anyway, the ratings are in, and it would appear that last week was a football and heavily promoted fluke. Just 4.32 million people wished that boat sank last night. That’s barely half of last week’s number, and is right back in line with how bad things were last year. In fact, that number is good for #8 on the all time least watched list, and this is the earliest in a season that’s ever happened. I still have no idea whether or not the show will get renewed again, but if these numbers keep up, there will be more stories about “Simpsons at historical low”.
Dead Homer Society 
33 responses to “Behind Us Forever: The Wreck of the Relationship”
Have you ever thought that you’re actually in hell, with your punishment being watching mediocre new-era Simpsons’ eps for all eternity?
Charlie made that hell for himself the day he decided to do this blog. The Devil has limits.
Ah the cruelty of that self-made hell, one ironic enough for Hell Labs’ Ironic Punishment Division.
The last great Simpsons season was Season 9 and Charlie is right about everything: Sub par writing, too much exposition, lame plots and gags, lame one off characters and celeb cameos, plot holes, nonsensical stuff happening, etc.
SNPP stopping episode capsules mid season 13 and low ratings of under 5 million viewers have said it all, besides DHS.
p.s. Last episode for me was Behind The Laughter. All other episodes are ZS.
p.p.s. Hope Tracy Ullman got money for Making the Simpsons famous in the first place.
I like to think Behind The Laughter ended the show. The only thing missing was that big finale in which Sideshow Bob actually kills Bart.
Indeed.
The show certainly has absolutely no sense of staging whatsoever. I agree that almost all of the dialogue is exposition without giving a single thought of time or place.
That Lenny phone call was terrible in that respect (and the dialogue itself), but Marge thinking out loud in church may have been the worst. Not only is Marge explaining every single detail, she is apparently actually talking to herself out loud instead. No voice in her head, she is actually speaking aloud during a prayer session yet conveniently and miraculously no one notices. That is until Marge steals the church’s WiFi router for some half-baked reason (with zero consequence). Even then they just blankly stare.
This is an admittedly lame excuse to bring it up, but it’s been bugging me elsewhere today:
Is anyone else really starting to get creeped out by blank looks on modern cartoons now? Seth Macfarlane shows are by far the worst offenders (American Dad’s writing is okay, but it’s also guilty of this), but certainly not the only ones.
It feels like animators/directors are pulling some magician-style misdirection shit, and don’t bother working on the bits that nobody’s likely to be looking at. Except, oddly, for eyelids. For some reason they still bother to give people shocked or saddened eyes, but they’re still posed like cardboard cutouts.
It’s true that a lot of times, someone’s just going to have a neutral expression. Not everything evokes a physical reaction. But I swear, it seems like so many screengrabs from these shows are just one character emoting at a prop. Maybe I’m nuts. Maybe it’s always been like that. Who knows.
(I would mention today’s wonderfully expressive screengrab, but that’s like determining if your hamburger tastes “off” by comparing it to lobster.)
I miss the days when cartoons were made by talented artists and writers. I really do.
I remember when characters were well-drawn and actually had personalities. They were fascinating and you actually cared about them. I remember when episodes actually had plotlines–smart and funny stories full of heart.
Animated shows these days suck. No wonder people are so fucking stupid.
Congratulations, you’re the billionth person to complain about the mediocre state of modern animation. So original! So illuminating!
Never heard people venting those problems before. You’re so sharp and insightful.
Now go away. It doesn’t matter how, just do it. Nobody needs you. They never did, not even your long-suffering parents. Your very existence is a plague on all mankind. You use air from asthmatic children, your bloated gullet consumes food better spent on the truly starving. This blog consumes better spent on a dialysis machine or a vacuum cleaner. Take your meaningless, Mad-Lib complaints and go fall down a cliff made of rusty razorblades with a pure, lemon juice waterfall at the bottom.
Geez, if you feel this blog and the commenters are such a waste, why do you spend time reading this stuff?
He’s my school.
….So you want to kill some commenters on a blog to save asthmatic children and end world hunger?
Compared to other disturbing comments on this blog go, that rates about a 5/10.
Wtf is your problem AY? Useless DHS/internet troll.
Yea, I tend to stare at the lifeless bodies of those who aren’t speaking in cartoons like Fg/Ad if I watch them. Very creppy stuff.
When shows go on for a long time, the animation usually gets more stiff, consistent, and sometimes sterile. It’s noticeable in The Simpsons, Spongebob, really, any show that goes on for more than 4 or 5 years. Maybe it has to do with the animators settling on consistent character models. Just look at the early episodes of most big TV shows. Often, the people working on the show haven’t completely decided what to do. The first season of The Simpsons is a little wonky. The voices are different, the characters behave differently, and so on. Soon the writers figured out what they wanted to do. The same thing eventually happened with the animation, with the artists finally deciding on how the characters should look and sticking to it. (though too rigidly, in my view)
Character models are almost always going to be more consistent over time. That is entirely expected.
What is more annoying is that more fluid animation and a wider range of facial expressions simply becomes static. There is no creative reason for that to happen. Especially in a comedy show in which the animation plays part of its role in “selling” the joke through the action. There used to be plenty of attention to detail on shows like The Simpsons and (to a lesser extent) Futurama that eroded over time in favor of bland stock expressions.
I believe that was one of the few saving graces of last week’s crossover–it really punched up the animation. Even the “angry worm tongue” made a return. I took little stuff like that for granted until ZS sucked the animation quality dry…though I think the relation between increasingly stiffer, expressionless animation and the beginning of the ZS era is more of an unfortunate coincidence than anything.
In the case of Fox shows, it does seem that the channel itself mandates keeping shackles on its animators from drawing too much attention to the animation itself. So it’s back to 70s & 80s Filmation style rigidness. Cost really doesn’t factor decisively with Fox, just control over the “look” of its franchises.
True. I don’t see why a stricter on-model policy means they would have to give up exaggerated facial expressions.
I would also like to add that you’re right overall about (western) animated shows in general. Unless they’re static from day one, this sort of trend was even common back in the 90s. The animation would decline after the first few seasons to a more rigid or more mechanical appearance. I’m talking about key animation and extra flourishes on average. Sometime it was budget cuts, sometimes just general streamlining to crank them out faster. On rare occasions a show would lose superior animatiors for an inferior one over time.
While not nearly as bad as ZS has gotten, “Duckman” (remember that one?) has a notable dip in animation quality between the first and last seasons.
It’s a rare show that reaches season 5 with its animation quality above average, let alone outstanding.
Good observation.
Do they even bother drawing the characters any more? I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a computer with every pose and facial expression of every Simpsons character already saved on it, and they can just assemble new animations by copy and paste.
Argh not this again…
Yes! I used to have that program!
At this point, if they switched to a model-based computer animation like Flash, not many people would notice.
The new Fox Sunday lineup sucks you got two great shows in Bob’s Burgers and Brooklyn Nine-Nine but they form a shit sandwich with ZS.
Good sweet lord. The FXX marathon convinced 4 million people to tune in to The Simpsons again and the season premier convinced them to tune right out. That’s impressive in a freight-train-crashing-into-an-orphanage kind of way.
On another note I feel like DHS and it’s members/regulars will always be ostracized in much the same way Lisa and her Mensa group was on They Saved Lisa’s Brain, if you know what I mean.
So, again, why did they need another Simpson Tide ep?
They should just, like, take the first five seasons, and redraw them with better animation yet keeping their original look. And air them again.
Good idea.
With modern editing techniques, we can complete the series without new animation!
Lol