Fran, here it why your argument doesn't work.

The fact that they'll never make another Tenorman doesn't mean the show has gone downhill. The fact that its gotten predictable, boring, and preachy while forcing its audience to endure tedious set-ups for banal attempts at edginess means its gone downhill.

Just the last 3 years? Personally, I think South Park jumped the shark around season 6. I'll grant its had some good episodes since then, but I don't find them to be very essential. I'll call "Scott Tenorman Must Die" the high water mark. Everything's been downhill since.

Family Guy
Far more than The Simpsons, Family Guy has seriously overstayed its welcome. I think its been much more damaging to its reputation, too, than The Simpsons' slow decent into merely good. Family Guy should have stayed cancelled. McFarlane had another gem in him with the underappreciated gem "American Dad" but…

No, Tim didn't get voted off for singing Queen, but he was voted 10th of 11. Now he needs to do 7th or better. While its discouraging that he finally crawled out of the bottom 3, can he do it two weeks in a row?

Those crafty judges
I'd ordinarily have agreed that the judges should have held onto the save. If Mike gets the least votes at this point, its hard to see him winning. I mean, I get the complacency factor, but still.

C'mon, you still got to watch The Simpsons 20 years ago. That's not a waste. Wikipedia tells me it was "Saturdays of Thunder". That's a quality season 3 episode, I think.

So over this show
I vaguely recall being at least cautiously optimistic about this show pre-hiatus but even before it came back I kept asking my fiancee if we really intended to continue watching it but she seems to think we need to stick it out or we won't watch enough TV together or something. Since its come back,…

Well, gosh guys, I'm just happy to be here
I actually think Crystal has very quietly repurposed her attitude from "I don't give a fuck about this show" into a "Well, gosh guys, I'm just happy to be here" attitude of casual acceptance of her brilliance. I think she's been uncannily savvy about it, too. She's been…

I know enough REM fans that I tend not to even think of Country Feedback as a deep cut. Everyone I know loves the song. I concur with pretty much all of the comments about alternate suggestions. Helps being a big REM fan, but they have a lot of really fantastic deep tracks in their catalog. Even some very underrated…

I will gladly take any advice on any subject from a guy who built a ball pit in his living room.

Leave
Totally agree on "I Will". One of my favorite Beatles tracks period, especially for a relatively underappreciated one. Though for The Beatles that's pretty relative.

Leave
Totally agree on "I Will". One of my favorite Beatles tracks period, especially for a relatively underappreciated one. Though for The Beatles that's pretty relative.

Much better this week
Thought they were using their resources a lot better this week. Especially Michael Sheen who was a total non-entity last week that I had a hard time accepting him even as a celebrity cameo. MUCH better stuff this week and the piling on of the Britishisms was a lot of fun. Jack had some better…

Crystal's Dad
Though mostly because Siobhan's seemed like there was something a bit off there. Plus I was weirded out by the fact that he shaved his beard between the B-roll shoot of him at the piano and his talking head.

What was there to abandon about the root canal. I wouldn't have expected it ever to be referenced again. It was a small point in an episode. Not something anyone was waiting with baited breath to be resolved. Its a freaking dentist's appointment. And the EGOT thing was 6 episodes. I realize time was wasted explaining…

Call backs are great. Continuity is great. I just don't think the root canal earned it. It was really just a MacGuffin for the real plot of "Anna Howard Shaw Day". It felt weird. Especially next to the EGOT callback, which was weird in a completely opposite manner. It was like "Oh, right. That." Like it was supposed…

And yet, it wasn't natural. It felt weird and out of place. Because this isn't a serialized show. So heavily referencing a dentist appointment from an episode that aired a month ago seemed an odd thing to base an entire plot line around. Because why? I'm sorry, but this show doesn't do call backs like that so you…

C-, eh?
Yeah, that's about right. It didn't outright fail, but this was a weirdly off-key episode. I don't get where all the defense of this is coming from. Maybe I'd have liked it better if I saw it right after the Valentine's Day episode, since half of it was a weird, not at all essential but still very referential…

You know the kind of person who actually drops the F-word more than anyone else while professing their righteous distaste for the word?