Introduction

After season seven saw “The Simpsons” serving up a few spicy nuggets in what was otherwise a pile of flavourless mush, season eight provides… well, much of the same. At this point, “The Simpsons” as a series was heading into a last gasp funk, being content to rest on its laurels and producing passable material that kept the droning masses entertained and the producers’ wallets stuffed. However, what’s far more interesting than the actual episodes here is the decidedly nasty undercurrent that threads them together – the astute viewer will note that the show becomes much meaner, cruder, and altogether more dismissive to its fans. The writers were getting far too big for their boots, providing several notable displays of arrogance that leave the season with a ragged and bitter aftertaste. As such, it’s the first one in the Simpson chronology that I struggle to find much merit in.

Episode List
(Highlights in bold; lowlights in italics)

1) Treehouse of Horror VII; 2) You Only Move Twice; 3) The Homer They Fall; 4) Burns, Baby Burns; 5) Bart After Dark; 6) A Milhouse Divided; 7) Lisa’s Date With Density; 8) Hurricane Neddy; 9) El Viaje Misterioso De Neustro Homer; 10) The Springfield Files; 11) The Twisted World of Marge Simpson; 12) Mountain of Madness; 13) Simpsoncalifragilisticexpialad’ohcious ; 14) The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show; 15) Homer’s Phobia; 16) Brother From Another Series; 17) My Sister, My Sitter; 18) Homer Vs The Eighteenth Amendment; 19) Grade School Confidential; 20) The Canine Mutiny; 21) The Old Man and The Lisa; 22) In Marge We Trust; 23) Homer’s Enemy; 24) The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase; 25) The Secret War of Lisa Simpson

Brief Discussion

Season eight can be best summed up as the ‘year of the secondary characters’. Over the course of the 25 episodes, we see Ned Flanders undergoing a crisis of faith (“Hurricane Neddy”), Edna Krabappel and Seymour Skinner falling in love (“Grade School Confidential”), Mr Burns meeting his long-lost son (“Burns, Baby Burns”) and Reverend Lovejoy regaining his enthusiasm for preaching (“In Marge We Trust”). Episodes like these are all somewhat entertaining, but I couldn’t help but miss the time when “The Simpsons” actually focused on, you know, the Simpsons. There are quite a few editions where only Homer gets any real screen time, the other family members doing little more than popping up for a few seconds, doing whatever’s stereotypically expected of them and disappearing. It doesn’t help that the humour quotient rapidly dropped; with gags based on arbitrary craziness or characters being pushed so far out of model they might as well be different people. Boiled down to one statement, season eight is simply the product of lazy writing engineered to get maximum reward for minimal effort. Parts are fun, but there’s nothing of any integrity, artistic value or creative note, and the evil Triumvirate of “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”, “Homer’s Phobia” and “Homer’s Enemy” could effectively be re-titled ‘A Lesson in Hubris’. Buy it if you must, but the earlier years of “The Simpsons” are far more worthy of your cash.

Detailed Discussion

Now on my eighth consecutive “Simpsons” box set review, I have to admit that dealing with the series is getting harder and harder, as is writing these commentaries. With the golden, intelligent days of the first four years now far off in the horizon, the good episodes have gone from almost total through to ‘every other episode’, ‘five a season’, and finally ‘none at all’ – and there’s only so many ways I can say that “this show is a shadow of its former self” without sounding like a broken record. So, you have my apologies in advance.

When it comes to television, there’s a time for any truly great series when it breaks away from its creator and becomes far bigger than anyone could have envisioned – but it takes an equally good team of producers and writers to keep the monolith afloat, and also (and perhaps most importantly) the integrity to know when to quit. Having transcended the status of ‘television show’ into ‘brand’ and finally ‘cultural icon’, “The Simpsons” became untouchable – and like so many icons before it, that shift marked the final sound of the death knell. The rot had been setting in for some time, but the eighth season was when it finally keeled over, falling face-first into generic sludge aimed squarely at the stereotypical "drunk frat boy" crowd.

Nowhere are the problems more evident than the evil trio I mentioned earlier, which I’ll go through one by one. “The Itchy & Poochie & Scratchy Show” is perhaps the worst, seeming like an inoffensively bland offering on first view but revealing much nastier depths on deeper analysis. The episode deals with Lisa and Bart’s favourite cartoon ‘Itchy and Scratchy’ hitting a creative slump and trying to pull out of it, and the writers use it as an excuse to attack more critical fans of “The Simpsons”. Bart states that Itchy and Scratchy (aka “The Simpsons”) is as good as ever and that viewers should actually be grateful to the writers, while Lisa says that the show is still great and only seems worse because the formula is familiar. The episode is horrendously arrogant, completely missing all of the pertinent points critics had been making in favour of childish finger pointing and name-calling. When a writing staff feels it can insult its show’s fans, you’re looking at a big quality-danger sign.

Then there’s “Homer’s Phobia”, which is repellent in a different way. Dealing with Homer’s dislike of a gay man, it’s the kind of obnoxious trash that pretends to be tolerant and forward thinking yet does the exact opposite. This is highlighted in a series of scenes that are supposed to be ‘delightfully politically incorrect’, but come out as patronising and jeering, capped off with an ending that totally undercuts the point that was trying to be made. Both Homer and Marge are forced out of character to make the plot work, and the humour all comes from lazy stereotypes with no kind of social commentary.

Finally, we have “Homer’s Enemy”, which sees Homer attracting the ire of co-worker Frank Grimes, whose jealousy builds until he kills himself in an insane rage. The episode is a malicious embarrassment, with the so-called ‘Homer’ character at a new depth of stupidity that is fully severed from the grounded and likeable man he was so many years ago. The character misfire guts any kind of meaning from the episode, and its insistence on humiliation and cruelty for humour value destroys the whole thing.

Unfortunately, that cold blood runs through the veins of many other episodes, with “You Only Move Twice”, “Homer Vs The Eighteenth Amendment” and “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpialad’ohcious” all deriving laughs from people dying or being murdered. No black comedy. No social satire. No wit. And let’s not forget a character ‘hilariously’ being beaten up for supposedly being gay in “Lisa’s Date With Density”, as well as Bart’s transition into an unbearable and malicious tormentor in “My Sister, My Sitter”. All of those episodes have a few good moments and jokes, but those spiteful vibes are never gone for long, and act to pave in the way for season nine and beyond’s plethora of gratuitous disembowelments and fart gags.

One of the more frustrating things about season eight is that there are a few episodes with potential. However, most fall prey to ‘third act syndrome’, where the story suddenly takes a surreal or unnecessary twist in its closing minutes that fails to resolve the plot conflict in a meaningful way. “Bart After Dark” has some great Homer/Bart bonding in its middle scenes and a humorous plot with Bart working at a burlesque house, but attempts at discussing censorship issues with Marge going on a moralistic rant kills the story dead. Likewise, “A Milhouse Divided” sees Bart’s friend’s parents getting divorced, but instead of saying anything meaningful about that family, the story changes to Homer feeling he’s not good enough for Marge and ends abruptly on another cold-blooded note. Then there’s “The Twisted World of Marge Simpson”, which closes with a gang fight between the Springfield and Japanese Mafias. I’m assuming that the goal here was for off-the-cuff irrelevance, but the writing skill is so weak that it just comes across as a lazy, ‘this is trash but you’ll watch it anyway’ indulgence.

The rest of the episodes in the set are all just okay, with a few nice things, a few silly things, but mostly a sense of tiredness and boredom. “The X Files”’ Mulder and Scully pay Springfield a visit in “The Springfield Files”, with Homer becoming a boxer for no reason in “The Homer They Fall” and then going on a vision to find his soulmate in “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer” (it’s Marge. As if we didn’t know). Elsewhere, Lisa gets a predictable moral dilemma when she helps a fallen Mr. Burns regain his fortune in “The Old Man and the Lisa”, and rounds off the season with the passable but ultimately unfulfilling “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson”.

Having complained for long enough, let me just say that season eight is essentially insipid and occasionally nasty incompetence. There’s nothing real or genuine and nothing to care about, so unless non sequitur gags plastered over tedious plots are your comedy forte, I’d suggest avoiding this one.

DVD Extras

Now we’re at box set number eight, I’m sure you know the Simpson extras drill. The season is split across four discs with photo-album themed packaging, and available in either a shiny green box or a plastic Maggie ‘head’. The DVD menus are very simple to navigate, with the option to play all episodes at once, access additional features including commentaries, animatics and discussions from the production staff, and to have deleted scenes put back into place as you watch. The episode commentaries are mostly entertaining, although a general rule of thumb is that as the number of contributors goes up, the quality goes down. On quite a few of talks, the speakers are content to ramble on amongst themselves – which is entertaining enough, but not the kind of thing I want to hear when I could be getting interesting info on the show’s production. That said, the quality level is consistently high, and there are almost no other TV show DVD sets that are producing extras in such a rich abundance as those for “The Simpsons”. It’s a shame they couldn’t have made the episodes as good, but I’ve criticised enough for one day.

Conclusions

Despite the presence of a few entertaining pieces, season eight of “The Simpsons” is mostly a quagmire of poorly developed ideas that don’t go anywhere. Coupled with the increasing crudity of tone and the decidedly dismissive ‘you’re beneath us’ attitude of the writers, and you have the first bad Simpson season. Avoid.

***
"The Simpsons" on DVD:
Season One; Season Two; Season Three; Season Four; Season Five; Season Six; Season Seven; Season Eight; Season Nine; Season Ten

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age