The usual

Oh.

I was gonna bust you for taking the Bueller bit from Metafilter, but that wasn’t the popular bit, it was the question about “what crimes could Buelle. Be charged with.”

Gee, I hope that link works, instead of just sitting there, looking ugly.

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Don’t remember the episdoe this happens in, but at one point Lisa is telling her new cat that we’ll refer to you as Snowball 2 for simplicity’s sake. Skinner overhears this and calls out Lisa on it being a cheap way to keep the status quo, and Lisa calls him Temzarian. To which he replys Touche. No real point to this other than they did get a good joke out of it in a later episode. Sorry for rambling.

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MGK,

I am curious. What do you think of Warehourse 13 and the Season premiere of Eureka?

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I thought we didn’t talk about The Principal and The Pauper, on penalty of torture.

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Ha! I knew you couldn’t end that paragraph without making a “Steve Paikin is a robot” joke. I’m hip to your tricks, Bird! Besides, everyone knows Paikin is actually a Vulcan.

I don’t think “The Principal and the Pauper” is by any means a bad episode, it’s just one of two episodes from that season (the other being the Frank Grimes episode) that pushed the Simpsons over the cliff, conceptually. Those were both legitimately daring, envelope-pushing comedic conceits which more or less represented the culmination of the creative drive that had powered The Simpsons for so long. But they basically broke the show, because we couldn’t go back to the usual Springfield hijinks after something that crazy. It would be like Seinfeld trying to have another season after they were all carted off to jail at the finale–the tone, and our perspective on the characters, had just changed too much to continue on as before.

So it’s basically a rare case of “jumping the shark” coming from something that was actually good, but too much of a game-changer.

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Home run derby = terrible. I really wanted to watch some baseball last night, and that did not freaking count.

And thanks for showing Better Off Ted some love. Man, I wish mine was a Nielsen household.

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The one with Grimey had good set-up and the best, most subtle use of genre awareness I can recall, but man, that ending was some dark friggin’ humor. I think there was also a good one later with Frank Grimes Jr.?

Anyway, we all know the show really jumped the shark with Who Shot Mr. Burns?.

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Rob- No, Oakley/Weinstein’s last two episodes (Grimes, Tamzarian) were the Shark Jumping. Jumping the shark is not so much the point at which something started to suck, it’s when it hit a certain note that signified that THINGS ARE DIFFERENT, and that THERE IS NO TURNING BACK.

Now, this often coincides with the end of quality in a series, but sometimes it’s just that it’s the event/episode/story that marks the derailment of the show from what it was before the shark jumping.

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