Tag Archives: John Swartzwelder

Why “The Frying Game” Is a Dark Horse Contender for The Simpsons’s Worst Episode Ever

Posted on November 3, 2019 by Andrew Bloom


Spare me your jockey elves. Forget your spring break alligators. Cast aside your amorous pandas and bar rags and even your Gagas. My poor lost souls, I beseech you to look upon thy screamapillar and weep — weep for us all.

Because “The Frying Game” may very well be The Simpsons’s worst episode ever.

As I discussed on The Simpsons Show podcast, I don’t make that pronouncement lightly. It’s hard to call “The Frying Game” overrated exactly — forgotten is probably more accurate — but it’s rarely brought up in discussions of the series’s nadir. And yet it deserves to be ground into the dirt like the fetid excuse for televised refuse that it is. What the episode lacks in the casual cruelty of other contemporary Simpsons outings, or the aimless racism of the show’s more regrettable international jaunts, it makes up for in being emblematic of everything wrong with the series at this point in its run. It is a nonsensical, irritating, embarrassing blight upon the face of what was once the greatest show on television.

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“Simpsons Safari” Represents the Supreme Laziness of The Simpsons’s Decline

Posted on May 12, 2019 by Andrew Bloom


The greatest sin of Mike Scully’s time in charge of The Simpsons — that period from season 9 to season 12 when the show fell from grace — isn’t what you might think. As I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, it’s not the show’s humor, which became vastly more hit-or-miss in that four year stretch. It’s not the characters, who grew more and more flat and caricatured under Scully’s reign. It’s not the stories, which became ever more disjointed and rambling. And it’s not even the extra zaniness, which frayed whatever remained of the series’s thin tether to reality.

It’s the laziness, the sloppiness, the sense that the people making what had once been the greatest television show of all time had just kind of stopped caring.

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