Today I purchased The Simpsons Season 8, which marks the beginning of the TV on DVD season for me. TV on DVD season is the extremely expensive (for me at least) time before the fall schedule of television shows begin. Right now the networks are all attempting to get the previous season of a television show out on DVD before the subsequent season begins in a few weeks. Officially the season probably began last week when Prison Break's first season was released, but because I had no interest in buying that it began this week for me, with the release of one of the greatest hit or miss seasons of television ever.
Some people will probably tell you that the Simpsons sucked after season 3 or something silly like that. That's just plain wrong. In my opinion the show peaked in Season 6. However, I'd say that the season with the largest number of my favorite episodes has to be Season 8. How can you not like episodes like Homer's Phobia, Homer's Enemy, Homer vs. the 18th Commandment, Hurricane Neddy, and two of the greatest episodes ever, You Only Move Twice and Mountain of Madness? Unfortunately the writers also wrote some very mediocre, and even plain bad episodes, foreshadowing the future quailty dip/dive, to counteract the greatness of episodes the aforementioned episodes.
Season 8 marks the beginning of the writers really going off the wall and including random gags just for cheap laughs, leading to the unfortunate phenomenon known as Family Guy. However, at this point they were still able to harness these off the wall jokes and attempt to fit them into the episode in a coherent manner. When it works, it's beautiful. When it doesn't, it gets pretty ugly.
For many people the moment where the show "jumped the shark" (such a tired phrase. I propose that from now on I'll instead use "The Tipping Point", refering to when the quality of the show took a sever hit and dropped off sharply) is the episode Homer's Enemy, the episode with Frank Grimes as the disadvantaged guy who has had to work for everything in his life, while cartoon character Homer has gotten everything handed to him on a silver platter. The extreme meta-ness of this episode marks a turning point from where there is no going back for the show. The episode itself is very good. It's quite funny and smart, making brief references to past episodes to illustrate the differences between Homer and Frank Grimes' lives, but the self-referencing was too much for many people. However, that's not that only thing that changed for good in most people's eyes.
In the beginning of the series Homer was a hard working dad who loved his family. He was quite flawed, but one of his most obvious characteristics was that he cared deeply about his family. As the series went on the writers moved more and more away from this, until Homer was an incredibly hilarious oaf. From time to time though, he was also a complete and utter jerk, and Homer's Enemy is often referenced as The Tipping Point in regards to that. Although Homer attempts to be friends with Frank Grimes, it's for entirely self-concerned reasons, he wants everyone to love him, despite his glaring flaws, and once Grimes dies Homer ends up sleeping through his funeral and mumbling in his sleep like the obnoxiously self-centered jerk he had become over the years. This is an incredible turn off for many people, myself included.
It was a few more seasons before the Simpsons become mostly unwatchable, an abomination of it's former glory, and there were some really funny episodes in between, but none had any real emotional pull, like the greatest Simpsons episodes all do, after the show reached it's Tipping Point with Homer's Enemy.
In the next month I will be shelling out a bunch of money for the recent seasons of Veronica Mars, Arrested Devlopment, The Office and Battlestar Galactica. That's a fucking murderer's row if I've ever seen one
Next week: Veronica Mars Season 2
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