Behind Us Forever: Homerland

"Anybody lose their glasses?Last chance.Woo-hoo!The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side." - Homer Simpson

"That's a right triangle, you idiot." - Guy on Toilet

"D'oh!" - Homer Simpson




Season 25, here we go:



* They start the year with their first joke of the season about how lame it is to be on after all these years.That didn't take long.

* But the couch gag makes the same joke and does take too long.

* The Homeland opening credits are well done, but remaking other people's credit sequences has become something of a time filling specialty for them.

* Bart's first line of the year is a direct repeat of Homer's triangle joke from Season 5, so that REALLY didn't take long.

* Between Homer's suitcase flying open and them all chanting the word "convention" they've eaten up a remarkable amount of time with nothing when we get to the hotel.

* "Good Riddance Shriners" is pretty good, but the signs are about the only part that can retain even a little bit of the character of The Simpsons.

* As per usual, the show likes to lock itself into a cheap joke and just ride it into the ground: swag, Marge not wanting Patty and Selma (or Wiggum) to say frightful things, Kristen Wiig not being able to go more than one line without switching her behavior completely.

* Lotta heavy handed musical cues in this one, and that's before you count the flashbacks.



* And a lot of MacFarlane style unconnected cutaway jokes:

Lisa: This is worse than when he went to New Orleans and came back with a southern accent.

[Cut to Lisa remembering Homer in hillbilly clothes and a straw hat while he talks in a drawl.] * This scene with Lisa spying on Homer and then, ugh, imitating a cat, is just atrocious.All of her dialogue is unneeded exposition which for some reason Homer can't hear.

* Lunatrix - "For Bipolar Disorder" - A goofy drug that makes bipolar people act out isn't a completely terrible idea, but Zombie Simpsons handling of it is so poor that it's just insulting, not for what they're trying to make fun of, but for being that cheap and unimaginative at doing so.

* I get that they're working from a spy thriller type show, but the combination of drawn out tension and unbelievably stupid jokes and dialogue (Kristen Wiig's Claire Danes character can't get through one line of dialogue without saying something pandering and dumb) is really off putting.

* I'm sure glad they have a scene where Homer explains everything we've already had explained three times so we can relive the hilarity of him passing on beer and kneeling down on a rug.

* The sitcom-y nature of the writing didn't improve any over the summer: "There isn't a prison made that can hold me!Prisons are still made of mud and wattles, right?"[Canned laughter]

* And we end on Burns getting a security x-ray to reveal that he has a hamster in his chest.When an episode runs short these days, it really runs short.



Season 25 is here, and it landed with Zombie Simpsons' customary whimper.There's plenty of unnecessary exposition, scenes that make no sense, and a story "parody" so dumb that you'd barely be able to follow it if you weren't at least a little familiar with the original material.For added zany effect, they spent some time changing Homer's character, tacked on a bizarre ending where the plant is closed and Burns is arrested, and had a post-script scene that also made no sense to the point that the sign at security has Burns peering up someone's ass right as we see Burns step into the machine.Even in one off scenes Zombie Simpsons can't tell a consistent story.



Anyway, the , and they are bad.Just 6.29 million people wished they were actually watching Homeland last night.Not only is that down from last year's premier, it's the kind of number that would've been considered anomalously bad just three seasons ago.Now they're standard.
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