- We find out Marge is only with Homer as a "Fine, fuck you mom!" moment at the end of the episode. I don't know how to feel about that one.
To be fair, the show's writers have long dropped both blatant and cryptic hints that Marge and Homer's marriage is a sham and that Marge has LONG LONG LONG since fallen out of love with Homer. IIRC they even did a couple of episodes where it's stated that Marge hasn't filed for divorce because of the fact that Marge gets off on the fact that all of the other married couples envy her and Homer's marriage and come to them for marital advice/confide to her and Homer how "their marriages are worse than Homer/Marge's" and beg their help in fixing them whenever shit hits the fan and they are on the brink of splitting.
For all the talk of things that caused The Simpsons decline, I think you can point to Phil Hartman's passing as a MAJOR loss to the show, and his death was right around the time the decline became noticeable.
Not only was Hartman two of the show's very best regular side characters in Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz, but he was always popping up in random voices here and there (Like the Big Brother guy, the crooked Cable installation guy, and of course Lyle Lanley) and he was always a riot.
I don't buy that. Hartman was a popular side character but he never actually was a lead character.
The real turning point, was Futurama. Groening took all of the good Simpsons writers to that show and left Mike Scully and the bottom rung writers to run Simpsons. Then Al Jean came back and after a super brief batch of episodes that indicated a potential return to form, Jean ran the franchise straight off of a cliff.
Come to think of it, I do kind of think of it as a different show. After all, why not, it feels like one of two things: not the real show but shitty fan fictions written by Tumblr tards, or a good friend you grew up with who later devolved into an insufferable SJW.
At least we live in an age of DVD box sets, and we've got about 10-15 seasons worth of episodes, so we can watch good Simpsons whenever we want. Imagine only being able to see the newer episodes on TV unless you were smart enough to tape a whole bunch of episodes back in the day.
To be fair, Simpsons in reruns have always been a huge fucking grab bag in that they air shit out of order. Even FXX does it; which is OK if you want random episodes and occasionally get one you never saw. It's one of the few shows in reruns where stations air it out of sequence.
Undoubtedly it's dogshit, these future episodes always are.
Not really; the future episodes are among some of the few decent Simpsons episodes because they break the status quo even briefly and give us glimpses of what the show could be if Al Jean wasn't keeping everyone frozen in time.
Plus, outside of Barthood, these episodes are the only time we get to see Lisa get her comeuppance with the plot point that Lisa's doomed to be trapped in a loveless marriage to Milhouse, have a daughter who hates her guts, and basically alone and isolated and her degeneracy culminated in her having to resort necrophilia fetishism to get off.
I get a feeling there's a lot more to this than what I just read.
For me, my problem with WSMB is that they cut out a key line from Part 1 in the syndication version that creates a massive plot whole in the syndication version of Part 2. Which makes me wonder who the fuck was in charge of making said cuts.
Also, it should be noted that they filmed two endings (the Maggie and Smithers did it endings) and that the original plan was for IIRC Barney or either Patty/Selma shooting Burns and then actually following it up with them going on trial and getting convicted and being written out of the show for a couple of years then bring them back and follow up on them being released and struggling to get back to their old lives after serving prison time.
But they ditched that high concept idea and even the Smithers ending sidesteps the ending with Burns intervening to keep Smithers out of jail and instead "punishing him by cutting his salary".
"I love our court dates!"
"It's the only thing we do as a family anymore!"
Judge Constance Harm reminds me why I started to hate authority and strict order.
Constance Harm was voiced by the actress who played Lois on Malcolm In the Middle and came off like writers on Simpsons, like a lot of MITM fans, hated Lois and somehow convinced the actress that played Lois to spoof her character's unlikability and wrapped it in a Judy Judy parody to get it past Fox that they were crapping on MITM.
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