In addition to being one of the worst episodes ever and not being funny at all, tonight's Simpsons episode featured all the hallmarks of its modern craptitude. Nonsensical and inappropriate lines from characters (Principal Skinner reads Facebook? really? fucking facebook jokes on the Simpsons?), awful horribly placed guest stars (someone named Emily Blunt? who is that?), a song and dance number (featuring Josh Groban of all people... twice!!), they had Fall Out Boy inexplicably do the closing theme (ok, sort of makes sense since the name Fall Out Boy is a very obscure Simpsons reference, but still they weren't in the episode at all)... the list goes on.
But. The most important thing.... Well, look, in season 7 they made Lisa a vegetarian. Classic episode and it totally made sense for her character. She's intelligent, outspoken in her ideals, crazy left wing... it ain't shocking that she'd be a vegetarian. Then in Season like, 13, when shit started going downhill, they made her a Buddhist.... okay, I can go along with that. Not one of the best episodes, but you know what, there have been other episodes about religion, like the classic Homer the Heretic in Season 4. It was weird, it's a mediocre episode, and completely forgettable.
Well, now it's Season 2,405, a landmark for a television series. It is clearly a decade since The Simpsons was really culturally relevant (if you think or hear differently, you are fooling yourself. God damn you Matt Groening; couldn't do a Seinfeld and go out on top...). The show absolutely pales in comparison to its former glory, not least of all because they have amped up the wacky, crammed in more jokes (subsequently leading to more mis-fires), and made Homer an actual cartoon character (there was some episode where something completely unrealistic and stupid happened and frankly I'm happy I can't remember it.). They basically Family Guy-ed themselves, and even Family Guy isn't relevant any more (and also, has not been in roughly seven years).
The point is, they have to do new things and tonight was a Lisa episode and guess what? They made her a lesbian. I saw Mike Reiss, former show runner and writer for The Simpsons in its prime talk at Cornell once and he joked about the same thing. That Lisa was a vegan first, then a buddhist, and at some point she'd become a lesbian. It was funny at the time, particularly since I expected the show to end within a season or two. That was five or six years ago, and I guess it wasn't a joke.
Oh sure, they never came out and said the L word or had her kissing a girl and liking it. But when a show is primarily about "best friends" spending too much time together, and they dance to a Josh Groban love ballad in a fantasy world they created for themselves, AND the director goes out of his way to show numerous shots of the two girls holding hands... it doesn't take a Professor Frink to figure out the subtext.
Absolutely terrible. The show has hit a new bottom in terms of horrible episode-ness as far as I'm concerned. This one might be worse than the episode where Bart and Sideshow Bob teamed up to stop Frank Grimes Jr., the illegitimate son of Homer's ex-co-worker who was killed in Season 8, who had been murdering or threatening the family... I don't know, it fucking sucked. I would pay good hard earned money to erase the past eight years of The Simpsons from the collective memories of the world and do not get me started on that fucking movie.
Not that there's anything wrong with Lisa being a lesbian.... It just made for absolutely abysmal television that urinated on everything I held dear watching television in the 90s. Oh well.
