Nobody in TV bats a thousand. Well, maybe the British The Office. But, by and large, even the medium’s most vaunted series have a dud episode or two in the mix. Just look at Stranger Things’ second season last year, which paired us up with a bunch of bargain-bin X-Men in one of the most disappointing TV episodes in…
As it’s done with every other cornerstone of family sitcoms, The Simpsons has taken the vacation episode to new heights (and lows). In its 29 seasons—and counting—the animated series has journeyed to France, Australia, China, Iceland, and the town of Bronson, where even the children are stone-cold badasses. Over time,…
As much as the introduction of DVD commentaries promised revelations inside the creative process, plenty of times they offered more insight into the banter of the people involved, as seemingly important scenes sail by unexplained. Longtime Simpsons producer-writer Mike Reiss, a frequent presence on the hours and hours…
Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. So every month, The A.V. Club narrows down the endless options to five of the books we’re most excited about.
Hey, remember how the final sequence of Six Feet Under was a unique, sublimely devastating summation of the show’s vision of its characters’ shared human experience? Pretty great stuff. Well, imagine an animated sitcom conservatively a decade-and-a-half past its prime grafting that ending onto its own middling,…
Another season of the The Simpsons has come and gone, breaking another handful of records along the way. At this point in its history, after almost 30 years on the air, the show has become a well-oiled machine, churning out 20-25 episodes a year without hiccup (usually). So how does it all come together? Animatic…
Grampa needs some expensive medical treatment, so the family heads off to a foreign country whose very different economic system allows for inexpensive health care for all. Yes, the Simpsons are heading to Cuba! No, wait, that was last season. Okay, well, once there, the family finds that their new surroundings offer…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
You know Cyrano de Bergerac even if you don’t know Cyrano De Bergerac. The protagonist of Edmond Rostand’s century-old play—based loosely on the life of an actual French polymath—is a canonical figure, his romantic plight, panache, and prodigious proboscis immortalized in countless stagings, adaptations, and lit-class…
“Left Behind” is about everything and nothing. To be more accurate, this record-setting episode (since every new Simpsons sets a new longevity record now) begins being about more than a half-dozen things, and then never pays off a single one. An oil-in-water quality suffuses episodes like this, the half- (at best)…
The pointed and poignant commentary offered by stand-up comic Hari Kondabolu in his truTV documentary, The Problem With Apu, has elicited varied responses from the makers and one of the stars of The Simpsons. In his film, Kondabolu impaneled other Indian-American actors and comedians to explore the reductive…
“Yeah! I am the champion of this very bad idea!”
Smashing through a record that literally only ever comes up these days in the context of how long The Simpsons has been on the air, the canonically long-running Fox show is finally about to break Gunsmoke’s 635-episode hold on the title for longest-running scripted prime-time series ever. (For context, Gunsmoke was a…
Midway through an interview largely given over to the ongoing discussion about the problematic nature of his 29-year run as Springfield’s most prominent South Asian character voiced by a white guy, Hank Azaria told Stephen Colbert that he was just as unpleasantly surprised by The Simpsons’ recent, defensive…
Since “Lisa Gets The Blues” reaches back to a classic episode for what emotional resonance it’s got, allow me to reach back to Nathan Rabin’s Simpsons (Classic) review of “Moaning Lisa” to similarly prop up my review of an episode that didn’t inspire much in the way of its own poetry. In discussing Lisa Simpson’s role…
Barbara Bush died today, at the age of 92. As the wife of one American president and the mother of another, Bush often portrayed the role of an idealized non-political First Lady (or First Mother), rarely weighing in on polarizing issues, and focusing her public efforts on apolitical issues like literacy. (That…
Earlier this month, we short-sightedly declared the lunatic, surprisingly malleable “Steamed Hams” as having “reached its zenith” when human meme Jeff Goldblum played Principal Skinner in the now-classic “22 Short Films About Springfield” scene. Ah, but that is not for us to declare; the shadowy, online cabal of…
“Made in the finest Filipino sweatshops by the cutest kids you ever saw!”
If there was any doubt that last week’s Simpsons episode, “No Good Read Goes Unpunished,” was written at least in part as a direct response to/dismissal of Hari Kondabolu’s TruTV doc The Problem With Apu, a quick glance at showrunner Al Jean’s Twitter account should make the cause-effect relationship pretty clear.…
Hari Kondabolu’s TruTV documentary The Problem With Apu first aired last November, offering up a critical examination of The Simpsons’ hard-working Kwik-E-Mart operator, along with the various cultural factors, writing decisions, and acting choices that led a white man’s caricature of an Indian accent to become a…