The Simpsons Goes After The "Tea Party"....

Used be a time - oh, for maybe its first ten years - that the Simpsons was the most cutting-edge counter-cultural show on television - an animated version of the Saturday Night Live of the late 70's. Over the past decade, it has de-evolved into a subpar poorly written and executed sitcom, whose writers throw in as many liberal tropes as possible, while taking clumsy shots at conservatives, which may earn them kudos at the water cooler but get them brickbats from open-minded viewers of any political stripe.

Possibly the worst offender was this episode....but coming close was Sunday's entry, where a dim witted Homer takes on the role of a FOX news host, and convinces his dim-witted countrymen to join him on a pointless crusade, in which they all wear gravy boats on their heads. The HuffPo gets the joke:

(they wear them like colonial hats -- *wink wink*)

Yeah, it's mostly the stuff liberals find funny, but there were two things that irked me. One was having the fictional FOX producers essentially call their audience idiots, to which Lisa responds with outrage. Maybe just a case of the writers protecting themselves, as they were depicting the FOX audience as idiots? The second was showing Chris Christie as a gluttonous buffoon, too busy eating chicken to run for president. Consider your lucky that he's biding his time, ladies...

Putting the hate of the Left into the mouths of FOX...

Best takedown is from the owner of the Dead Homer Society blog, who labels all Simpsons episodes past season 10 as "Zombie". He's got a point, they've been stumbling around aimlessly and brainlessly for quite some time now:

The subject matter was stale and the satire was stuff that has been done better elsewhere, but the place you can see it most is in the little tricks they use to make this expired milk seem fresh. They ran current jokes in a news ticker, they had static images of the Republican presidential field on a table, with Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain’s photos crossed out with easy-to-add-late graphics. They know that these episodes don’t work well, but they went ahead and did it anyway because if you can take some potshots at Glenn Beck a year after he was dumped off television and add in some political jokes no one will care about two months from now, then you have to do it.

Watching this, I really can’t help but think the staff would rather be writing for Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show.

Exactly. Is the Simpsons now considered a "minor league affiliate" of Comedy Central, or is it just a home for their rejected writers?

Either way, some good news comes out of it:

Anyway, the numbers are in and they are really, truly awful... a mere 5.11 million people remembered Ted Nugent after the Steelers came back to tie it late. That’s easily the lowest so far this season and is tied with Season 21’s “Million Dollar Maybe” for the second lowest number of all time.... Season 23 is now all but assured of being the least watched season ever. The only question now is how far it sinks.

Oh, with an election coming up in 2012, I'm sure the real digging hasn't even begun...