Like Disco Stu, Gil was supposed to be a one-off. Then Phil Hartman died and they needed to fill up all the time that Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure used to fill up on the show, so…lots of Gil. (And lots of Disco Stu.)

Him neither!

Don't listen to him, Dennis!

Zach Stamler, I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. S10's pacing is weird and abrupt and the characterization is a bit cartoonier than previous, but "talking cow" was where the show ended for me.

I think you're at least as smart as an eight-year-old girl, Dennis. That's what you like to be called, right? "Dennis"?

I will say this: the lyric about how "you be drawin' on West best with a pen and a pad" is (probably unintentionally) hilarious, because he's depicting his character as this unstoppable badass who nonetheless does not mind having his back used as a surface to write on.

Good news, everyone! This article inspired me to look up the lyrics for this stupid song. For many years, I have heard it as:

If their goal was to make Australians happy, then yes, it should have been a red flag. If their goal was to make the rest of the world laugh at some caricatured Australians…well, let's just say they'd played knifey-spooney before.

Oh, I agree - the whole thing was pretty insulting. But the fact that they got Tony Blair's name right when Tony Blair did a brief, pleasant cameo as "hey, it's Tony Blair!", while they didn't use the real name of the real Australian prime minister when depicting the Australian prime minister kicking a child in the…

Did they diverge from authenticity re: Australia in any situation where doing so wasn't the point of a joke, though? I never felt like they didn't do their research on Australia—-just like they ignored it for the sake of a laugh.

I would agree. If Manjula feels like a central character (or even like anything beyond "Apu's wife from the one episode where Apu's mother showed up and married him off"), you kept watching the show for too long. Probably coincidentally, two of the absolute worst episodes ever are the two most Manjula-centric ones I…

Well, what am I supposed to call you? "Dennis"? I'll *never* remember all of that.

“Aw, hell no!”

Won't!

"Joe Namath has one of the strangest, most random, and funniest cameos in Simpsons history. He’s more interested in lecturing the audience on the dangers of vapor lock than helping Bart be a better quarterback."
The reviewer didn't seem to understand that this was parodying two very specific cheesy sitcom conventions:
1.…

I like "Realty Bites", and even like the use of Gil as a one-shot character, but, like Disco Stu, his subsequent appearances were trainwrecks. It just adds to the insult that Gil is introduced in the last (?) Hutz episode—-I feel like all the airtime that used to go to Hutz/McClure now goes to Gil, who would have to…

I'd only heard of Bart Starr from "Brother from the Same Planet".

If there's one thing the world doesn't need one more of, it's people's breakdowns of Simpsons quality. Here's mine.
seasons 1-2: "Roseanne", animated
seasons 3-8: "The Simpsons"
s. 9-10: "The Simpsons", except not quite as good
s. 11-12: some really shitty cartoon
s. 13: wall-to-wall terrifying surrealism
approx. s. 14-20:…

A friend of mine recently tried to argue that this last season of The Simpsons is the best the show has ever been. His example of a joke from a recent episode that is as good as the show has ever been? Setup: Homer calls Flanders "stupid Flanders". Rod says that his dad's name isn't "stupid Flanders", but is "Ned".…

The increasingly awful retconning of Nelson's absentee father and then the stupid episode where he comes back and explains why he was gone is a low point, even for latter-day Simpsons.