‘Simpsons’ at 35: quick and the dead
Facing a fall television schedule unlike any we’ve seen, it’s comforting to note that “The Simpsons” (8 p.m., Sunday, Fox, TV-14) is back. For its 35th season, no less.
In the season premiere, “Homer’s Crossing,” the doughnut-scarfing nuclear safety manager faces a midlife crisis. He discovers that his co-workers have turned off his work console to save the plant from his incompetence. His failure to satisfy Marge in bed underscores his feelings of age and inadequacy.
By chance, Homer inadvertently volunteers to become a school crossing guard. They are in special need since all the children are forced to walk to school after the disappearance of Otto, the perpetually stoned bus driver.
Homer stumbles through his new job, earning the disrespect of children, until he impulsively saves dimwit Ralph Wiggum from a distracted driver. In the logic of a “Simpsons” episode, his bravery earns him local celebrity status and media adulation. The Kennedy soundalike Mayor Quimby takes time out from his louche lifestyle and baroque corruption to lavish the crossing guard with money from the town’s budget.
This allows Homer to buy his squad all kinds of high-tech gadgetry, and he quickly turns his modest team into a dangerous paramilitary force.
It’s nice to see “The Simpsons” still on its game. While deliriously silly, the episode contends with such hot-button issues as the Defund the Police movement and the underdiscussed Freudian links between male sexual inadequacy and impotence and the need to amass a gun collection.
While any show that’s been around for 35 years is an institution in itself, “The Simpsons” still manages to trade in bad taste. The show has seen the death of fictional characters (Maude Flanders and Bleeding Gums Murphy) as well as the real-life departures of notable voices (Phil Hartman and Marcia Wallace). But it still exhumes characters seemingly based on dead celebrities. One of Homer’s fellow crossing guards is series regular Gil Gunderson, a shattered and nervous middle-aged man clearly based on Jack Lemmon’s character Shelley Levene from the drama “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Lemmon died in 2001.
In tonight’s episode, Mayor Quimby is invited to an orgy by a character who is the spitting image of James Lipton, host of “Inside the Actors Studio.” Lipton once appeared on the show, playing himself, hosting a botched interview with series regular and Schwarzenegger soundalike Rainier Wolfcastle. Lipton died in 2020.
May “The Simpsons” live forever!
› Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt star in the 2021 adventure comedy “Jungle Cruise” (8 p.m. Sunday, ABC, TV-14). While it would be nice to call this a mashup of “Romancing the Stone” and “The African Queen,” it’s actually based on the Disney theme park ride.
That worked for “Pirates of the Caribbean”, but not, apparently for this. It’s considered one of The Rock’s more notable bombs.
Some believe its modest box office was the result of the COVID closure of movie theaters. A sequel is in the works.
SATURDAY HIGHLIGHTS
› College football action includes LSU at Ole Miss (6 p.m., ESPN); Michigan State at Iowa (7:30 p.m., NBC/Peacock); Notre Dame at Duke (7:30 p.m., ABC) and West Virginia at TCU (8 p.m., ESPN2).
› Check local listings for regional coverage of MLB action (7 p.m., Fox).
› A love triangle results in a murder plot in the 2023 shocker “Amish Stud: The Eli Weaver Story” (8 p.m., Lifetime, TV-14).