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Tag Archives: The Simpsons Season 22
The Andrew Review: The Simpsons – The Great Simpsina (s22e18)
Lisa befriends an old magician voiced by Martin Landau in Season 22's "The Great Simpsina"
The Simpsons have tangled with magic and magicians a few times before. Bart took it up as a hobby in “The Great Money Caper.” Milhouse was attacked by cats in an ill-fated attempt to pull one of his hat in “$pringfield.” Even Homer interrupted a show by Penn and Teller in in “Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder,” leaving Teller worse for wear. Now, it’s Lisa’s turn to get in on the act in Season 22’s “The Great Simpsina.”
In this episode, The Simpsons take home a boatload of peaches, and in the kids’ desperate attempt to get rid of the excess, Lisa runs into an old magician. This graying illusionist named The Great Raymondo (voiced by Martin Landau) takes a shine to her, and eventually takes Lisa on as his apprentice. After he teaches Lisa the secret to his greatest trick, one passed down to him from Houdini himself, she unwittingly reveals it to his greatest rival. – Craig Demon, a thinly veiled parody of Criss Angel. From there, Lisa tries her best to make it up to her magical mentor, and stop his impetuous young rival.
I really enjoyed this episode, and it stands out as one of the finest that Season 22 has had to offer. It had an engaging story, a great use of guest stars, and laughs galore. The show was really firing on a cylinders here, and the end result is not only a funny, but a well-rounded episode that kept me laughing and invested the whole way.
Posted in Television, The Simpsons
Tagged Lisa Simpson, Magic, Magicians, Martin Landau, Penn and Teller, The Simpsons Season 22
9 Comments
The Andrew Review: The Simpsons – The Blue and the Gray (s22e13)
In Season 22's "The Blue and the Gray" Marge decides to stop dyeing her hair and stick to ner natural gray.
In the most recent episode of The Simpsons, entitled “The Blue and the Gray,” Marge takes the bold step of forgoing her usual hair dye and deciding to sport her natural gray hair color. I really enjoyed this main story. It was fresh and original without feeling forced or contrived. It’s hard to come up with a situation the Simpson family has not already dealt with, and Marge-centric episodes in particular tend to cover already well-trodden ground. Who would have thought that a pack of middle-aged male comedy writers would have a hard time coming up with interesting material about a wife and mother? That barb aside, this episode bucked the trend. The basic plotline of Marge deciding to embrace her self confidence by going gray soared. The central conflict of Marge balancing her commitment to being “empowering” against the town’s reaction, not to mention her concerns about whether Homer’s support for the new-do is genuine, carried this episode home.
Of course, my fellow Simpsons nerds and I have known since Season 5’s episode “Secrets of a Successful Marriage” that Marge has been as “gray as a mule since she was seventeen.” In that same vein, I have no doubt that this blip in continuity will be cause for much consternation for my fellow diehards, but I’m willing to overlook it. I am a firm believer in Matt Groening’s “waistband continuity” where the continuity can stretch to fit the joke. I did take some issue with the fact that they hand-waved the issue with the hairdresser that the fumes from the dye wipe Marge’s memory that she’s actually gray. It would be better just to play it off as though the hairdresser was keeping it from her, or just reframe it as Marge knowing about the dyeing all along, but choosing to stop. Still, that’s a quibble in what was otherwise a strong and unique storyline.
Posted in Television, The Simpsons
Tagged James Bond, Marge Simpson, Meta Humor, Moe Szyzlak, The Simpsons Season 22
2 Comments
The Andrew Review: The Simpsons – Elementary School Musical (s22e01)
The Season Premiere of The Simpsons features Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords as counselors at Lisa's Arts Camp.
The Simpsons is a television show that will forever be chasing its own shadow. I firmly believe that if your average viewer were to watch the episodes produced over the last five seasons or so, the general consensus would be that it’s generally a pretty good show. Unfortunately for showrunner Al Jean and the rest of the current Simpsons’ staff, their modern day output will always be measured against the seven or eight years when The Simpsons was one of the best shows on television, or to go one step further, if the good people at Time Magazine and your humble narrator are to be believed, the best show of all time. It can be a difficult task to live up to your own legacy.
Despite this challenge, Season 21 of The Simpsons produced a number of very good episodes, some of which even stack up pretty well against the episodes of the “Classic Era.” As has become customary, the latest season of The Simpsons consisted of a few big hits, a few big misses, and a large quantity of solidly enjoyable if unspectacular episodes in between. First and foremost, “O Brother, Where Bart Thou?” a tale of Bart’s quest for a younger brother, attained a level of quality that I did not believe the modern day Simpsons staff could reach anymore. Even with the proliferation of guest stars, usually a telltale sign of a weak episode, the story and the comedy fired on all cylinders the whole way through. It was touching, it was funny, it was well-constructed, and most of all it was entertaining from start to finish. Though Season 21’s hits managed to be a notch above those of prior recent seasons, this episode in particular stands apart as the best of the bunch.
