The Simpsons: 5 Things You Might’ve Missed In The Past Five Years
A wedding, a mayor, and some brand new parodies? What else has changed in Springfield lately?
Season 30 of The Simpsons has just hit TV screens, with season 29 seeing them overtake Gunsmoke as the longest running TV show of all time. While those early episodes are endlessly quotable and feature scenes that belong in a pop-culture museum, the newer episodes have not captured the public's heart.
Sure, they still pull in decent viewing figures and get the occasional Emmy nomination, but these days its perfectly possible to be a Simpsons fan who hasn't watched a new episode in the decade since the movie came out. While it would be foolish to argue that the quality is still as consistently high as it was in the Golden Age, there are certainly still enough bright spots to keep fans entertained.
And more than that, these are characters we've loved and grown up with; characters we identify with. You might have stopped watching, but their lives have kept on going. Yes, some episodes reek of a lack of ideas, so palpable in some episodes you can hear the sound of a barrel's bottom being scraped, but others have offered some surprising new turns for Springfield's residents.
5. They Did A Halloween Episode That Wasn’t A Treehouse Of Horror (And It Was Bloody Good)
Treehouse of Horror episodes have been a staple of The Simpsons since Season 2, and the results have been middling for the past decade or so. Movie references have mainly overtaken scares, and while their parody of Freaks in Season 25 was a gem of the later years, it doesn't measure up to The Shining one. Sorry, Shinning. D'ya wanna get suuuued?
Enter Halloween of Horror in Season 27. Though The Simpsons did air a Treehouse of Horror that season, this one is undoubtedly their 'Halloween episode' of the season. In it, Homer inadvertently gets three men fired from a Halloween store while shopping for decorations. As he stays home on Halloween with an already scared Lisa, the three men break-in, intent on vengeance. What follows is one of the tensest set pieces The Simpsons have done in years, recalling Lisa hiding from an axe-wielding Flanders in Bart Of Darkness.
The B-plot is satisfactory enough too, which constant Simpsons viewers know is not always a guarantee these days. It follows Bart and Marge wandering Springfield and features a decent musical number about the increasingly risque Halloween costumes on the market.
Oh, and it also scored an Emmy nomination too.