True to its reputation, the fourth season is shockingly consistent. Some of the episodes are more memorable than the others and some of them I need to read a quick plot review to remember, but I definitely didn't finish any of the episodes thinking it was bad.
The season begins with the students led by Principal Skinner destroying Springfield Elementary after school ends. Granted, it was Bart's dream, but that pretty much indicates what to expect from this season - anything and everything. The show then proceeds to have episodes dedicated to making fun of religion, beauty pageants, 80s action movies, labor disputes, cartoon television writers, long-standing practices in the name of tradition, and the phenomenon of mobs. It also parodies such classic movies as "A Streetcar Named Desire," "The Great Escape," "A Clockwork Orange," "The Music Man," and many other movies I've never seen.
In previous seasons, my lone complaint was that the show wasn't as funny as I was expecting given its reputation. While it still kind of falls short in that department honestly, it made me laugh considerably more than in previous seasons. But really I've learned not to watch this show to laugh as odd as that may sound. I do know there are people who exist - a good number of them in fact - who find this show gut-bustingly hilarious. I'm not one of those people. That's not to say I don't laugh a lot at these episodes - and probably more on subsequent visits - it's just that if I find myself in the mood to laugh, I'm probably not going to be watching The Simpsons. I hope you can understand the distinction.
The first four episodes set the standard for the season. "Kamp Krusty" particularly stands out for me. The show has kids destructing a school, followed by child abuse by camp counselors, and the implication that Homer and Marge are being dragged down by having kids. Even by today's standards, that's daring. The second episode makes me want to go watch "The Great Escape" and "A Streetcar Named Desire." I mean even if the episode was bad, that's definitely a good thing. The third episode just absolutely destroys organized religion. I'm not going to say my opinions on this one way or the other, but everything it says is absolutely spot-on. The fourth does a spectacular job on the admittedly easy target that is a beauty pageant, more relevant today than then I'd argue.
The Treehouse of Horror underwhelmed me. It's not that it was bad, but I actually like the previous two better which surprised me. I don't want to go through every episode, so I'll just name a few that stood out to me. "Marge vs the Monorail" was one of my favorites of the season with a random appearance from Leonard Nimoy (and hilarious). "Selma's Choice" provides me with the funniest laughs of the season when Lisa trips out at Duff Gardens. "I Love Lisa" is a showcase for Ralph Wiggums and Bart's willingness to do just about anything to get to a Krusty show. "Last Exit to Springfield" of course which is considered the greatest of the series by many. Lastly, I really liked "Whacking Day" for how it shows how stupid certain traditions are (and apparently this specific tradition is actually based on a real life tradition similar to this amazingly).
Hell, in the mandatory clip show, the writers poke fun at at the fact that it's a clip show (my favorite bit is Bart talking about that one Itchy & Scratchy episode completely unrelated to anything). This was before anybody even had the audacity to do this.
Overall, the fourth season doesn't quite live up to its reputation for me, you know, because its reputation is greatest of all-time of any show ever. But I liked it a lot and will definitely re-watch a few times before I move on to the fifth season at an undetermined date.
Since I'm a newbie to this show, I wanted to give the perspective of a veteran. So I asked twitter friend John to write his opinion on this season as well. Here is what he had to say.
The fourth season of The Simpsons is the make or break season as far as fandom goes. If at some point in the fourth season (or before) you have not enjoyed the show, it probably won’t happen. Season 4 is the point at which the show most sublimely combines its more heartfelt elements (most noticeable and perhaps most over-done in the first two seasons, in which it shouldn’t be that hard to believe that the guy who wrote and directed Terms of Endearment was the de facto show runner) and its most asinine (the show becomes sillier, for better or worse, under David Mirkin for Seasons 5-6).
This was a season in which episodes about Homer’s mortality (Homer’s Triple Bypass) and Marge’s sister’s loneliness and general lack of life fulfillment (Selma’s Choice) were sandwiched by Marge vs. the Monorail—a goofy, hilarious episode filled with countless, oft-repeated lines and gags which has become legendary as one of three episodes written by Conan O’Brien, certainly the most famous Simpsons staff writer. The stranger episodes and the most earnest episodes alternate with seemingly no pattern, but this is never really a problem—it’s not like the show has linear storytelling anyway.
There are no truly bad episodes in the season (even the clip show is pretty good in comparison to your typical TV clip show). One of my favorite elements of the season is that the movie references go from common to borderline overwhelming. As somebody who doesn’t really watch a ton of TV that isn’t sports or news—it’s probably not a coincidence that my two favorite series post-Simpsons were King of the Hill and The Office, which were both co-created by a former Simpsons writer—I compensate with film. And the references are EVERYWHERE here. There are the overwhelmingly obvious (with an episode named A Streetcar Named Marge, even people who haven’t seen A Streetcar Named Desire probably have a decent idea of what’s going on); there are the old favorites (I don’t quite like Duffless’s parody of A Clockwork Orange as much as the extensive parody in Season 3’s Dog of Death, but I still laughed); and there are the smaller references that not everybody’s going to remember (Lisa the Beauty Queen has a scene which parodies Apocalypse Now that I had no idea was parodying it until years after having seen both the episode and the movie; the “Eureka!” moment was rather satisfying).
There are too many terrific episodes to focus on every single one so I’ll go to the greatest-episode-by-acclamation-of-the-internet: Last Exit to Springfield. I have never compiled a list of my favorite episodes because my opinions change too frequently, though there is little question that Last Exit would be near, if not at, the top of my list, as it tends to rank very highly on fan and critic lists. It was the final episode written by the underrated team of Jay Kogen and Wally Wolodarsky and one of the final episodes run by Al Jean and Mike Reiss, and it comes across as an episode constructed by people who were bored and felt like going for broke. There are a number of classic scenes that I think about/reference a lot in my life. The classic “Lisa needs braces/dental plan” exchange in Homer’s head might as well be the password to Simpsons fandom initiation—it would be impossible to explain to somebody who hasn’t seen the episode, yet it’ll bring a smile (or loud laugh) to the face of anyone who has. Homer’s bizarre Don Fanucci in The Godfather Part II fantasy of his union leadership leading to ties to organized crime (which, because it’s The Simpsons, seems to have transported him to 1920s New York). Lisa’s Beatles-esque dream while under anesthesia. The entire segment in which Homer meets with Mr. Burns at the latter’s mansion—ALL of it. The montage of Mr. Burns and Smithers running the plant by themselves. A truly great Simpsons episode needs not to have an air-tight plot (I would actually probably just sum up this episode as “Lisa needs braces/dental plan”); it just needs to make you laugh. And it does, even after having seen it countless times.
In Season 5, things get weird. This isn’t to say that they get worse (or better, really)—they just get…different. It’s not that the show becomes utterly vacant emotionally (Family Guy, a show which I don’t hate, is to some extent what The Simpsons probably would have been had they abandoned any sense of decency or emotion—often funny, sporadically intelligent, but nowhere near as good as peak-era Simpsons), but it isn’t the same type of show as it was during Seasons 1-4. Season 2 represented a noticeable jump in quality over Season 1, and Season 3 represented a quantum leap over Season 2. Season 4 represents a much milder jump in quality—this is a show which had hit its stride around the midpoint of Season 3 and at this point was just reveling in it. The rise of the show is almost like that of The Beatles—the Beatles probably needed to go through its “Love Me Do” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” phase in order to pave the way for its great mid-to-late 60s work. And Season 4 is its Rubber Soul—a terrific sign of the frantic experimentation to come, but still very much grounded in the genius which had come before.
So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed both perspectives. The weight of writing about this season is finally going to be removed. I wanted to share the writing duties to someone who could appropriately compliment the show that The Simpsons fanatics would desire and my words just couldn't do that.
Playlist (Part of Top 50 tracks of 2013; 1-10; 11-20; 21-30)
31. "Nuclear Seasons" - Charli XCX (Not 2013, but in was in her 2013-released album)
32. "Savagely Attack" - CZARFACE ft. Ghostface Killah
33. "Latch" - Disclosure ft. Sam Smith
34. "While I'm Alive" - STRFKR
35. "This Ladder is Ours" - The Joy Formidable
36. "Ab-Soul's Intro" - Terrace Martin ft. Ab-Soul
37. "Fast in My Car" - Paramore
38. "John Doe" - B.O.B. ft. Priscilla
39. "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)" - David Bowie
40. "Villuminati" - J. Cole
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