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The 100 Best Simpsons Episodes
The only guide you’ll ever need.
Whether it is Gore Vidal revealing he got the title for Burr by seeing it on an advertisement for Eskimo Pie, Thomas Wolfe requesting everyone’s leftover garlic mashed potatoes, or the violent rivalry between Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen (all four authors provided their own voices), the show succeeds at somehow turning these literary heavyweights into buffoons. The daycare sequences reorchestrate Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Great Escape, and the musical’s brazenly silly earworms include “You Can Always Depend on the Kindness of Strangers” and “New Orleans.” The latter’s hyperbolically grim lyrics describing the Big Easy as “stinking, rotten, vomity, vile” caused an outcry in the city; the series apologized the following week by having Bart write “I will not defame New Orleans” on the opening credits’ chalkboard. It’s a poison-pen letter to commerce interfering with art (Homer, who eventually voices the character, destroys his new gig by offering dim-witted notes of his own), but the dose goes down easy thanks to the sweetness of Lisa and Bart, who point out that every great TV show starts to seem tired if it’s around long enough, and that it’s not a bad idea to remember that their creators are giving fans hundreds of hours of entertainment for free.
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