The Vapid End of Season 20

“Alright, three whole months of spaghetti-Os and daytime TV.” – Otto

I realized two things watching “Coming to Homerica” last night.

1.  It is nearly impossible to neatly summarize many of these episodes.  The promotional stuff for last night’s talked about Homer forming his little vigilante group, but that tired idea was barely on screen for two minutes.  In actuality the episode was a shop worn and timid take on immigration with Norwegians substituted in for Latinos, but how do you write a coherent summary of that?  The plot is an inch deep and a mile wide, it amounts to little more than a loose connection of disjointed sketches.  Summaries are supposed to tell you what’s going to happen in a show, but writing something like, “Norwegians come to Springfield, wackiness ensues, everyone hugs, the end.” just doesn’t cut it.

2.  I watched last night’s meandering episode live, not on TiVo, not downloaded from some torrent site, and I think I’ve come to a new understanding of why it is people continue to watch this shit and call it gold.  When you see it interspersed with promos for Fox’s other shows, including the other Sunday night cartoons, the mediocrity of Zombie Simpsons is vastly better concealed.  It blends right in with “King of the Hill”, “American Dad” or any of the other garbage Fox was promoting last night.  When The Simpsons was still The Simpsons it stood out from everything else on television; now, not so much.

Anyway, it’s time to set the over/under on the ratings.  Last night had big time cross promotional support from Eminem and it was a night of season finales, on the other hand recent years haven’t seen much of a ratings bump for season finales.  We’ll call it 6.6 million and as always I’m hoping for the under.

Update: The numbers and in and they’re terrible.  Huzzah.  Last night’s Zombie Simpsons season finale managed to attract just 5.86 million viewers.  Eminem and Stewie hosting the night couldn’t save them.  

I’m planning a more detailed and hopefully not completely stupid ratings post for later in the week, but for right now just know that Season 20 averaged only 7.12 million viewers.  That’s down more than a million viewers from Season 19, which was itself down almost a million viewers from Season 18.  Yeah yeah, the internal demographic numbers aren’t as grim, but it’s still a pretty stunning decline.  

One other housekeeping note, since we’re free from new Zombie Simpsons until September (at the earliest) we’ll be doing some different things around here.  The quotes of the day will still go up every morning, but we’re also going to hate on some classic Zombie Simpsons (Season 12 should come out on DVD sometime this summer), take a closer look at the transition from Simpsons to Zombie Simpsons and generally continue to spew truth from every orifice.