“No! No, let me explain! Every Friday evening after work Mr. Burns undergoes a series of medical treatments designed to cheat death for another week.” – Mr. Smithers I’ve been staying with friends in Arlington, VA this week and doing the D.C. tourist thing in Our Nation’s Capital while a constant loop of “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington” plays inside my head (with a side order of “Amendment to Be“). That left watching another lifeless Zombie Simpsons Halloween special pretty low on my priority list. But watch it I did, and it was, well, lifeless. At the risk of repeating…
Category: Ratings FAIL
Behind Us Forever: The Town
“Hey, ma, I’m on TV!” – Drunk #1 “Hey, where’s that weather chick?” – Drunk #2 “Ooh, this is some wicked party!” – Drunk #3 “Hey, have you seen Sully?” – Drunk #4 Zombie Simpsons has settled into its rut well enough that they have a “travel” episode pretty much every season. This year, they went to Boston, though in a break from tradition they also had the family move there for six minutes of screen time. Other than that weirdness, it was a very typical travel episode: a few real things and people got renamed, everything was pretty nice,…
Behind Us Forever: Friends and Family
“I want to go on the yard work simulator!” – Bart Simpson The official synopsis for this week’s episode of Zombie Simpsons: Mr. Burns’ search for a clan to play his virtual-reality family leads him to hire the Simpsons, except for Homer, since Burns intends to play the father. With nothing to do, Homer befriends the new next-door neighbor, a woman who eats, drinks, thinks and acts like him. A more honest synopsis: Burns goes to a therapist, who then dies for no apparent reason. At the funeral, which the Simpsons attend because reasons, Burns realizes no one loves him.…
Hey, Everybody, Season 24 Is Over
“Hi, kids! . . . What the . . . is this Saturday?” – Krusty the Klown I’m still going to do Behind Us Forever for this week’s episodes, but the last two days have not been kind in terms of free time. In the interim, how about a little ratings schadenfreude? Sunday’s episodes both scored dismal ratings, with the first one (“The Saga of Carl”) coming in at just 4.01 million viewers, and “Dangers on a Train” bumping up a bit to 4.52 million. The former is good for #2 on the all time least watched list, with even…
A Spectacular and Unwatched Catastrophe
“What the hell was that?” – Krusty the Klown Give Zombie Simpsons credit, when they embarrass themselves for a pop star, they really embarrass themselves for a pop star. From start to finish, “Lisa Goes Gaga” relentlessly displayed the pitiful imagination and mediocre craftsmanship behind Zombie Simpsons. In an episode where they outright tell the audience, right up front in an opening narration, that they’re discarding the usual rules and that weird and strange things are going to happen, just about the only weird and strange things that they managed to conjure were a lot of Lady Gaga outfits. Unfortunately…
A Season Best and an All Time Worst
“Like one out of every nine Americans, I’m left handed. And, let me tell you, it ain’t all peaches and cream. Your writing gets smeared, Lord help you if you want to drive a standard transmission.” – Ned Flanders I have two good things to say about “Ned ‘N Edna’s Blend”. First, we dodged the “storytelling episode” bullet. When they were backstage at the beginning talking about why they didn’t do Lenny’s story, I thought for sure we were in for four short, equally dull segments, but it turned out that they went with the less annoying single, long dull…
Failing to Make Fun of James Bond, Bravo Zombie Simpsons
“Well, here we are at the Brad Goodman lecture.” – Homer Simpson “We know, Dad.” – Lisa Simpson “I just thought I’d remind everybody. After all, we did agree to attend this self help seminar.” – Homer Simpson “What an odd thing to say.” – Bart Simpson Near the end of “The Spy Who Learned Me”, Homer and Marge are running away from a nameless (and apparently Bolivian) guy who has just pulled a gun on Homer. This is the dialogue . . . Marge: Why is he trying to kill you? And why did she call you her love?…
“Thanks, Zombie Simpsons!” – The Cruise Industry
“Don’t forget to check out the galley. That’s real shag carpeting!” – Captain McAllister The title of yesterday’s episode, “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again”, is a reference to a famous 1996 David Foster Wallace article for Harper’s, in which he embarked on a giant luxury liner to experience the narrow, selfish, and vapid thinking that underlies the modern cruise industry (as well as the bland and mostly uninteresting people who think of it as the height of fun). It’s an enjoyably cruel piece of writing (it was later used as the headline piece to a…
Underage Sex Shouldn’t Be This Boring
“Mom, this is a little ahead of schedule, but I need help with my love life.” – Bart Simpson “Oh, my special little guy has a sweetheart.” – Marge Simpson “I knew it! Alright Bart, who’s your girlfriend?” – Lisa Simpson “Mrs. Krabappel.” – Bart Simpson In what I assume was an unintentional irony, early in “Beware My Cheating Bart”, the writers had Bart say, “Doesn’t anyone realize I’m only ten years old?”. The episode certainly didn’t, and it managed to be worse than most “Bart gets a girlfriend” stories to boot. Bart seems to vacillate between being an experienced…
Old Dogs, Old Tricks
“I suggest you leave immediately.” – C.M. Burns “Or what? You’ll release the dogs, or the bees, or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you? Well, go ahead. Do your worst! . . . He locked the door!” – Homer Simpson Zombie Simpsons frequently repeats things from The Simpsons, but every once and a while they come up with a perfect confluence of failure, where all of the show’s many flaws combine into a single, memorable scene. The most recent one I can think of came last year, when they tossed…
All Exposition All the Time
“Eww.” – Lisa Simpson Near the beginning of The Great Muppet Caper, Diana Rigg, playing wealthy fashion designer Lady Holiday, tells Miss Piggy all about her ne’er-do-well brother and the giant diamond that will be central to the plot. Miss Piggy then asks Rigg why she’s telling her all that stuff. Rigg’s response should be carved into the walls of studios, film schools, and wherever they’re producing Zombie Simpsons these days: It’s plot exposition. It has to go somewhere. Indeed it does, but “somewhere” is not “everywhere”, a distinction that was lost on “How I Wet Your Mother”. About two…
Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart, Or Just Stay Out of It Entirely
“Bart was feeling mighty blue.” – Homer Simpson “It’s a shame what school can do.” – Marge Simpson “For no reason, here’s Apu.” – Apu Nahasapeemapetilon Let me start by saying something nice. It was cool of them to use that one-man rendition of the theme over the end credits. It blew up on-line a few months ago and everybody loved it, and it’s heartening to see someone get recognition for a genuinely creative endeavor like that. Unfortunately, the end credits were about the only part of the episode where there was any spirit of craftsmanship or care. Everything leading…
Oh Hell, Let’s Move the Town Again
“Homer, that’s your solution to everything, to move under the sea. It’s not going to happen!” – Marge Simpson “Not with that attitude.” – Homer Simpson Give Zombie Simpsons credit for consistency, for the 500th episode they served up a perfectly banal rendition of their usual hacktacular schlock. They recycled two old ideas (family leaves Springfield, rebuild the town), had an illogical, meaningless and irrelevant celebrity voicing himself, and left plot threads hanging all over the place. No real reason is given for why the town suddenly decides they miss the Simpsons, nothing about the “Outlands” makes sense, either as…
Strange Twists and Collapsing Ratings
“I’ve had one of my unpredictable changes of heart.” – C.M. Burns About three quarters of the way through “The Daughter Also Rises”, the episode took a weird turn. Lisa went to ask Grampa for advice, which led, without any setup whatsoever, to her, Grampa and “Nick” being chased by the police, which in turn lead to her and “Nick” rowing a boat out to an island. No reason is given for why things went from relatively sunny and untroubled to dire and suspenseful. They just did. Similarly, “Nick” went from being suave and charming and generally very Colin-from-the-movie to…
Sensitive Moe Was the Least of Our Problems
“The Flaming Moe dates back to my forefathers who were bartenders to the Tsar.” – Moe Whatever else may be said about it, and we’ll likely be saying a lot this week, “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches” is further evidence of why there’s no hope whatsoever for Zombie Simpsons ever getting any better. It had a Halloween episode level of weirdness, gore, and insane things (Moe is apparently a yeti, for example), but still couldn’t manage to squeeze out anything satirical or intelligent despite not having any rules to play by. It had a celebrity playing someone other than…
When a Movie Template Goes Nowhere
“Now I finally have time to do what I’ve always wanted, write the great American novel. Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it, ‘Billy and the Cloneasaurus”. – Seymour Skinner “Oh, you have got be kidding, sir. First, you think of an idea that has already been done, and then you give it a title that nobody could possibly like! Didn’t you think this through?” – Apu Nahasapeemapetilon If I wasn’t so inured to the relentless mediocrity of Zombie Simpsons, I might find an episode like “The…
Somewhere, Birch Barlow Doesn’t Weep
“Bart, I don’t want you to see me cry.” – Milhouse van Houten “Oh come on, I’ve seen you cry a million times. You cry when you scrape your knee, you cry when they’re out of chocolate milk, you cry when you’re doing long division and you have a remainder left over.” – Bart Simpson A few episodes ago, Zombie Simpsons had Krusty point out that because of the lead time of their animation they come off looking like cheap, late-to-the-party hacks when they try to do topical shows. That fundamental problem was all over last night’s year late Glenn…
Didn’t Groening Already Make a Show About This Kind of Stuff?
“What’s normal to him, amazes us.” – Future Guy #1 “He will be our new god.” – Future Guy #2 “Yay!” – Future Crowd I’ll start right off by saying that this is easily the best Zombie Simpsons episode so far this season. That alone isn’t much of a compliment (if it is one at all), so let me clarify by stating unequivocally that the “First Church of Lard Lad” is the funniest thing I’ve seen on Zombie Simpsons in a long, long time. Even better, it was accompanied by a couple of other decent little set pieces that were…
Dated and Hack-y
“These days people like observational humor, about things they deal with in everyday life.” – Jay Leno “Oh yeah, you mean like when your lazy butler washes your sock garters, and they’re still covered with schmutz?” – Krusty the Klown “Well, kind of.” – Jay Leno It’s somewhat refreshing, if still well short of entertaining, when Zombie Simpsons drops the charade and just makes hacktacular Los Angeles/show business references. Once the episode got rolling with Krusty and Joan Rivers, they just went with it, basically ignoring the actual Simpsons except to note that they kept attending Krusty’s shows. It was…
Over the Falls
“Simpson, stop frolicking and get to work!” – Mr. Smithers “Right away, Mr. Smithers, I’ll just walk across these slippery rocks . . .” – Homer Simpson Near the end of “The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants” a man on a jet ski appears from the sky just before a raft with several able bodied men plunges over a waterfall because another able bodied man wouldn’t push them slightly to shore. At that point, Zombie Simpsons could safely assume that its audience was completely numb to plot whiplash. I certainly thought I was. Then Homer, who less than a…