Important The Simpsons Poll

You quit at the right time, in my opinion. Looking over Season 10's episodes, I still watched religiously but even then there was flying roast pig syndrome. For my money, the last truly great episode was "Lisa the Simpson" from 9th, also the last one of Oakley-Weinstein as showrunners and even that one suffers from a weak subplot. People talk about the "Behind The Music" episode as the last great one but that's only good because it's meta and outside the rut the show had dug into.

Around 2005-06 I had just moved to a new town and started college classes so I was absolutely broke and watched network TV again to pass the time. I remember some Simpsons then being actually funny and poignant reminiscent of the early years and I think it's because Al Jean had retaken the showrunner role. So that might be of interest.

I think I like fewer season 9 episodes than you, but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if these numbers are pretty close to what I’d say for seasons 1-8.  I feel like a lot of people rank seasons 4 and 5 higher than 6 and 7, whereas 6 at least is probably my absolute favorite (I say this with the caveat that I understand that this is a fairly silly exercise and hardly the most substantive way of discussing the merits of a show).

Season 1, Episode 1:  "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"

What's It About?
In this, the pilot episode of Matt Groening's animated sitcom The Simpsons, which originated as a series of 48 animated interstitial shorts on the 1980s sketch comedy program The Tracey Ullman Show, we are introduced to the Simpsons family, our lead characters:  Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie.  We are also introduced to several extended members of the family, namely Homer's dad Abraham, and Marge's older twin sisters Patty and Selma, as well as several other denizens of Springfield - an American city of indeterminate size and location - who would go on to become series regulars, such as Principal Seymour Skinner, nuclear power plant owner Monty Burns and his ultimate yes-man assistant Waylon Smithers, bar owner Moe Szyslak, and barfly/best friend to Homer Barney Gumble.  The plot is as follows:  when Bart sneaks off to a sketchy tattoo parlor at the Springfield Mall to get a tattoo, the family must spend the entirety of the money they've socked away for Christmas gifts to get it removed.  When Homer learns that his Christmas bonus from his employer Mr. Burns has been canceled this year, thus depriving the family of their Christmas money fallback plan, he hides this fact from Marge and secretly takes work as a mall Santa so he'll have money to buy presents with.  Bart discovers Homer's secret, but is humbled by his father's sacrifice.  However, Homer is dejected when he learns that his take home pay from his gig is a measly $13, and he allows Barney to rope him into visiting the dog tracks with Bart in tow on Christmas eve.  Homer bets all his money on a long shot dog who promptly finishes last and is abandoned by his hard-hearted owner.  The dog runs towards Homer and leaps into his arms, and when Bart asks Homer if they can keep him, Homer agrees.  The dog, Santa's Little Helper, who will have a much more prominent presence in the series than the family cat, Snowball II, becomes the family's Christmas gift for that year, and Christmas is duly saved.

What did I think of it?
I've actually seen this episode quite a few times, dating back to my childhood, and I have warm feelings towards it.  I'm sure some of that is nostalgia, but I also think it's a genuinely solid episode.  The joke writing certainly isn't on par with the show at its peak, but between some funny lines and a good visual gag or two, there's a decent number of laughs to be had here.  I think the episode's real saving grace, though, is that the emotional beats actually land.  I think there's a lot of much funnier episodes of the show where we're expected to be touched by Homer's loving behavior after he spends the entire episode being a selfish asshole and a lot of those episodes are great, but the emotional beats ring hollow.  Here, however, Homer is a flawed and very dumb man, but at heart he's a working class guy who worked a shitty gig to try to give his kids a happy Christmas.  I think it's a genuinely touching episode.  Please don't take the grades I give these episodes too seriously, because they're going to be very arbitrary and I'm trying not to put a great deal of thought into them, but I'll give this one a B.

Stray Thoughts
One of the most interesting things about this episode is looking at which characters seem the most fully thought out at this point.  Bart is probably the closest to the character we'll come to know and love from the show's golden age.  Homer alternates between seeming pretty well fleshed-out and feeling a lot like his character from the Tracey Ullman Show shorts, and Dan Castellenata's voice in particular alternates between sounding the way we expect Homer to sound and sounding like he did in the shorts.  Marge doesn't really get much to do here.  Lisa, on the other hand, manages to both be her normal precocious self and a torment to her brother, at one point taking turns with Maggie ruthlessly poking at the bandage where Bart had his tattoo removed, although I think the show's writing isn't yet sharp enough for her witty remarks to really shine at this point.  Harry Shearer already has Principal Skinner's voice figured out, but his flubbing over lines at Springfield Elementary's Christmas music recital is both fairly weak comedy material and shows that the show writers don't quite know what to do with him yet.  Also, from my understanding, by Season 2, Groening had a detailed animation bible for his animators to follow in terms of how the physics of this cartoon universe is supposed to work and how characters are supposed to look, but here there's a lot of background characters who look almost nothing like your normal Simpsons characters, and many of them break a lot of Groening's later rules for how characters are supposed to look. 

This is the only episode of the show proper to air in the 1980s, airing on December 17, 1989.  Also, here's a fun fact:  in my synopsis above, I very nearly called the sketch comedy show that The Simpsons shorts originally aired on The Liv Ullman Show rather than The Tracey Ullman Show.  Liv Ullman, the costar of Persona and frequent Ingmar Bergman collaborator did not run a sketch comedy program in the 1980s, or any other decade, to the best of my knowledge.  Glad I reread this before posting and caught that error.

Are Bart's irreverent alternative lyrics to "Jingle Bells" about Batman the genesis of these gag alternative lines?  I genuinely don't know, it's just something I've been ambiently aware of since I was a small child and The Simpsons was already wildly popular.

Lastly, in future, I'm hoping to keep my synopses sections a bit shorter than this.  I'm just looking to concisely summarize the episodes for anyone who wants to follow along and hasn't seen an episode (unlikely at this point, but quite likely if I make it deep into the post-classic years) or is a bit hazy on the plot details.  

What's a good candidate to add to the Canon of Great Simpsons Lines?
I'm going to try to give one suggestion for a quotable line from each episode that could be added to a canonical list of such lines, if such a thing existed.  In the first ten seasons, most episodes will be replete with such lines, so there'll be plenty of times where I won't pick your favorite line, or you'll question my choice, and that's fine, I'm not saying that my choice will be the only memorable line from any given episode.  Where I think this will get interesting is trying to come up with a line from, say, a Season 27 episode that's supposed to stand alongside the likes of "I call the big one 'Bitey'," or what have you.  

Anyway, for this episode, I'm going to go with "How many grades does this school have anyway?", which Homer asks Marge in dismay during Bart and Lisa's school music recital.  It's presumably six, Homer, or maybe seven if this is one of those old-timey elementary schools where sixth grade is in elementary school.


And please feel free to chime in with your own thoughts on this episode, regardless of how long it's been since you've seen it.

I stopped watching after Season 9. The drop in quality was too noticeable. I've never seen anything from Season 10 onwards.

Watching the show as it aired, my personal "Simpsons is bad now" event horizon was "Alone Again, Natura-Diddily." Even as a 13-year-old I recognized the incredible crassness of killing off Maude Flanders just because Fox was cheapskating Maggie Roswell. I probably should have bailed with the previous episode ("Saddlesore Galactica"), and I'm pretty sure I continued catching episodes here or there through season 12, but Maude's death marks the point I stopped watching every week.

I recall a number of repurposed Christmas songs from elementary and middle school in the 80's well before Bart. Cracked seems to have tracked that one back to 1966:

www.cracked.com/blog/the-secret-true-history-jingle-bells-batman-smells

At the time, I thought the Simpsons was a little tame and old fashioned for not using "Deck the Halls with Gasoline" that was more popular at my school at least.


www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeLyEQYyOC8

The last episode I truly loved was Behind the Laughter in season 11, but for the next five years after that there were regularly some amusing lines. The problem with latter-day Simpsons is that the good jokes are vastly outnumbered by shitty jokes, something seasons 4-5 didn't really have

Season 1, Episode 2:  "Bart the Genius"

What's It About?
In this episode, we explore Bart's troublemaking personality a bit more.  We see him angering Homer with silly wisecracks during a game of Scrabble, and getting himself in trouble with Principal Skinner after he spray paints an unflattering portrait of the latter on a brick wall of Springfield Elementary.  Then we learn about his academic struggles, as he utterly fails to make sense of a math problem in an IQ test being administered in Ms. Krabappel's fourth grade class.  However, Bart manages to swap out the name on his test with that of his bookish and sanctimonious classmate Martin Prince, and the 216 IQ subsequently assigned to Bart by submitting Martin's answers in place of his own gets him sent to a school for gifted children.  At this school Bart manages for a short while to continue convincing the adults around him that his lack of success in his classes has simply been a matter of him being bored with material too simple for him; meanwhile he and Homer enjoy some quality time together, with the latter very proud of his supposedly genius son.  Eventually an explosion caused by Bart in his new school's chemistry lab prompts him to confess that he cheated on the IQ test, and we get a restoration of the status quo, both in terms of Bart's position as a ne'er-do-well and poor student at Springfield Elementary and in terms of his antagonistic relationship with Homer.  Characters introduced in this episode include Martin Prince and Edna Krabappel.

What Did I Think of It?
Personally, this is one of my favorite Season 1 episodes.  It's not The Simpsons at its funniest, but there's plenty to enjoy here; it feels like the writers have Principal Skinner figured out better here than in the pilot episode where he was just awkwardly stumbling over lines at a school assembly, and Martin is great from the beginning.  I also like the satirization of the way that the education system treats intelligence, with, for example, the school psychologist eagerly examining Bart's head with calipers when he learns that the boy is supposed to be a genius.  I don't know if this is still the case, but while I know that IQ is widely understood today to be a measurement of quite limited utility which has been used to promote eugenics, when I was in elementary school in the late 90s and early aughts, these sorts of intelligence tests were still taken pretty seriously by schools without a ton of contextualizing intelligence tests as being a thing that measures how good you are at answering multiple choice questions correctly rather than an actual measure of intelligence.  It's also one of the episodes where the emotional beats mostly land.  Bart's characterization isn't consistent from episode to episode on the show, but here, it's clear that it's not so much that he's not a smart kid, so much as he's not good at the sorts of things being measured by tests.  He shows himself to be witty and clever throughout the episode, even if this is usually in the context of being a troublemaker with no regard for authority whether legitimate or not.  I'll give the episode a B+.

Stray Thoughts
I don't remember the name of the school for gifted kids that Bart goes to, but it's the sort of little detail that you get the sense would've been made into a clever background joke when the show was at its peak.  I like the episode, and think that it shows the promise that the show has, but the writing here definitely isn't quite as sharp or brilliant as it would eventually get, imo.

I'm glad the control hamster snuck out during the explosion, thus avoiding getting dissected.

When Lisa plays "id" during the Scrabble game, Homer objects that acronyms aren't allowed, and Lisa has to read them the definition for "id" from the dictionary to convince her parents that it's a component of the psyche.  Are contractions allowed in Scrabble though?  Like, if "id" weren't a word, would the letters "I" and "D" be allowed to form "I'd" in Scrabble?  I don't care enough to look this up for myself.

What's a Line to Add to the Canon of Great Simpsons Lines
This episode I'm going to go with "I'm sure Einstein turned himself all sorts of colors before he invented the lightbulb."

I recently had an IQ test (well there’s no one test, I took one for adults) so I watched this episode last night out of curiosity. It’s still—with updates—used for diagnostic purposes, e.g. if one measure of intelligence (capability is probably a better word) is out-of-step with others it probably indicates some kind of disorder or disability—I was mostly there to be measured against myself. For instance, I thought of this with the backwards-speaking guy at the school: I was, relative to the rest of my capabilities, very bad at backwards recall stuff, even if I was pretty good relative to what’s expected from the median adult IQ test-taker.

I wonder where the trope of a written IQ test came from, though (we see in in Seinfeld as well). An actual IQ test is administered in person, sometimes with little toys and puzzles, sometimes with verbal responses (e.g. you have to do arithmetic in your head), timing for each question, and only progressing so long as you get a certain number of answers right in a row. It’s not like a written test at all. I was nervous and went through a bunch of problem-solving books but, while I guess they exercised my mind, didn’t “help” me at all.

Regardless of the “reality” of IQ scores 216 is a ridiculously high number, like so high they wouldn’t need to test Martin to send him to a school. Martin has an uncanny resemblance to a truly gifted friend from elementary school, one who eventually did go to a separate school only to come back and socially fit in worse than ever (his dad looked a lot like Martin’s dad, like him, some kind of finance guy too). Honestly Martin seems like a pretty normal, if bright, kid to me, just a kiss ass.

Martin is fluent, and fluency was part of my test—you’re asked to define things which are hard to define without getting a bit circular, for instance—and Martin definitely has that but there’s really only so far you can go there. In the episode the Simpsons family—for understandable reasons—really leans into the cultural side of stuff associated with smart people but, as Hey Arnold! showed us, any dumb kid can enjoy Carmen so long as they understand what’s going on. The hard parts of Carmen are knowing when to read between the lines about sex (admittedly maybe not Homer’s strong point) and either understanding French (don’t need to be smart, look at the French) or being able to read subtitles (when did they start doing that for opera, anyway? I first went to a non-English-language one in 2013 and they had them then). Also you have to get through anytime Micaëla has an aria, girl’s the Martin Prince of Carmen.

Anyway I always think it’s funny that I was not supposed to watch The Simpsons as a kid (Bart being a bad influence?) but Seinfeld was fine, probably because my parents liked it so much and didn’t want to not watch it and because they knew stuff would fly over my head anyway. When I finally did start trying to catch up on The Simpsons in 2014 or 2015 (after I’d seen Prokofiev’s The Gambler!) I was surprised at how harmless it was. To me it often crosses the line into sentimentality, a judgment probably shaped from being able to watch Seinfeld since age 5.

I only watched from midway season 2 through season 8, though, so I was kind of surprised that they didn’t hint that Bart really was intelligent. It’s not subtly implied in later seasons that Bart really is a bright kid, it’s just that school isn’t a good environment for him (I actually expected Lisa to open the dictionary and find Bart’s nonsense work in there; also no Roy Batty's Pet Dove , contractions aren’t allowed in Scrabble). It’s probably a bad word to use here, but it made the episode seem too simple.