Pynch on The Simps

[Dave Monroe]

How do we love "The Simpsons"?
By Gail Pennington
Post-Dispatch Television Critic
11/14/2004

As "The Simpsons" opens its 16th season on Sunday,
pundits and Internet chat groups are bouncing around a
pesky question: Is the show still TV's most brilliant
comedy, or has it long-since passed its prime,
degenerating (as a Slate commentary suggested last
year) into a cartoon?

List-makers suggest that the glory days are long gone.
The first three episodes (and four of the Top 10) in
Entertainment Weekly's list of the best "Simpsons"
ever - issued to mark the 300th-episode landmark in
2002 - are from 1993. Three more are from 1994; 2002 -
are from 1993. Three more are from 1994; the newest
episode on the list (No. 4) is from 1997.

[...]

D'oh - doesn't matter. If "The Simpsons," poised to
leapfrog "Ozzie & Harriet" as TV's longest-running
sitcom, has lost a step (or two or 22) in 15 seasons
and 300-plus episodes, it's still as smart as Albert
Einstein would have been if he'd lost half his
brainpower. Here, in honor of Season 16, are 16
reasons to love "The Simpsons."

[...]

3. The guest voices. Highbrow author Thomas Pynchon
plays himself in Sunday's 16th-season opener. Being a
guest voice on "The Simpsons" remains so cool that
Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury wants to do it.
Everybody from James Earl Jones to Mark McGwire
already has.

[...]

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/columnists.nsf/gailpennington/story/DFA820BF373D62F786256F4A0082F208?OpenDocument&Headline=How+do+we+love+%22The+Simpsons%22%3F




		
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