The Top 10 Simpsons Episodes from the Mike Scully Era

I have a confession to make.  In 1998, for my 10th birthday, I wished that The Simpsons would never end.  I'm sorry everybody.  I just loved the show so much.  I didn't realize the implications of my desires.

History textbooks of our ape-governed future will note that the episodes of The Simpsons existed in three distinct eras: Pre-Scully (1989-1997), Scully (1997-2001), and Post-Scully (2002-Present).  Enough time has passed since the Scully-era that most Simpsons scholars will point to it as the years in which the overall episode quality significantly decreased.  For those of you unfamiliar with what these terms mean, they refer to the showrunner of the ninth through twelfth seasons of The Simpsons, Mike Scully.

A showrunner is like the director for an entire season of a television show.  Since multiple episodes are being produced simultaneously, one person can't individually be the direct on each episode, so it is the showrunner's job to make sure the entire season has a consistent tone or "feel."  In serialized television shows like 24 or Lost, the showrunner also keeps track of the overall story, but for episodic shows like The Simpsons, characters and humor styles are the focal points for consistency.

Prior to Season 9, The Simpsons would have one showrunner for every two seasons and then the leadership would switch off.  Usually, this is what prevented the early seasons from getting stale as new showrunners usually meant adding some new writers as well.  This isn't to say that Mike Scully is an uncreative person or leader.  In fact, looking at his resume, he has produced many fine episodes of The Simpsons and other series.  But something (or some things) happened during his unnaturally long stint as showrunner.  Characters became one-dimensional, stories became more erratic, and realism disappeared completely.  What was once a show that balanced heart with amazing wit had somehow become a shell of its former self, focusing on cheap jokes and bland storylines.

There is all sorts of debate about why the show went through this transition, but today I just want to focus on the episodes themselves.  I honestly believe that had Scully's four seasons been trimmed down to two, we would regard him as the last great showrunner, rather than the cause of our misery. So I am focusing on the best he had to offer.  While I've mostly stayed away from the Post-Scully era episodes, I've certainly yet to see any of them that are worse than his worst.  But I've also yet to see any that are better than his best.  He is a man of extremes.

Brief Notes About Each Season:

Season 9 is the last classic Simpsons season.  A handful of great episodes ("The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," "Lisa's Sax," "Lisa the Simpson," and "The Joy of Sect") were holdovers from other showrunners and Scully's own work was pretty consistent.  Even if some episodes weren't as great as the seasons that came before, at least the stories were complete, interesting, thought-provoking and funny.  And the episode from this season that many seem to hate (which I think is still entertaining), "The Principal and the Pauper," isn't a Scully episode so he gets no blame there.

Season 10 is where things take a sharp turn for the lazy.  The episodes seem to struggle to fill the complete 22 minutes.  Many of them have solid stories for the first two-thirds and then fall apart in the final act ("Bart the Mother," "Lisa Gets an 'A,'" "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken," and "Maximum Homerdrive" all follow this pattern).  This is where the ugliness of the show's future really starts to show.

Season 11 is where story has completely fallen by the wayside, as the show seems to place an emphasis on humor first and foremost.  This means we still get some funny episodes ("Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner," "Pygmoelian," and "Last Tap Dance in Springfield" come to mind) but the stories are just bizarre.  I wish this had been the final season, because while there is at least some good to come out of the season, I can't say the same for anything that followed.

Season 12 is just mean-spirited and tacky.  As a 13-year-old, I was still fully engrossed in the show and I didn't see anything wrong with the episodes, but looking back on it now, I feel ashamed for enjoying these as much as I did.  "HOMR" was somewhat heartfelt and "Trilogy of Error" was somewhat clever, but they weren't worth keeping the show alive this long.

(These episodes are selected from the 89 that Scully was personally a showrunner for.  That means production codes that begin with 5F, AABF, BABF, and CABF, minus the David Mirkin episodes 5F23 and 5F24.)

The Top Ten Scully Episodes

Honorable Mention:

"The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons" - 5F04

While many deride the episode for the rushed ending of hosting Apu's arranged marriage in the Simpsons' backyard, I find this episode to be one of the last great secondary character studies that the show had to offer.  Combined with "Homer and Apu" and "Much Apu About Nothing," this completes what I consider to be Apu's arc in the series as he is used as a gateway to discuss a culture that is not always represented on American television.  Eventually he became another joke character with his eight babies, but his hilarious resistance to his arranged marriage is what I'll remember him for.

10) "Lard of the Dance" - 5F20

On paper, this episode is basically a remake of "Lisa's Rival" from Season 6.  Lisa gets jealous of a popular new girl while Homer hatches a get-rich-quick scheme based on discarded foodstuffs.  But it has a lot of strong elements going for it.  Lisa Kudrow guest stars as new kid Alex Whitney and, unlike many guest stars in post-classic Simpsons episodes, she is actually a fully-realized character.  Alex comes from a preppier lifestyle where fashion and social status is paramount to academics, so she is able to easily win over Lisa's classmates.  And while later episodes have a strange desire to put Lisa and Bart into situations usually reserved for teenage characters, this episode highlights why that is a wrong approach to take with these characters.  Lisa actually calls Alex out on her behavior, noting that it isn't necessary for elementary schoolers to be concerned about mature problems like school dances, credit cards, and cell phones.  I also appreciate the focus on the "back-to-school" antics of Bart and Lisa, since we hadn't seen that area of their lives before this point.  And while the Homer-Bart grease story is sub-par, it doesn't affect my overall enjoyment of the episode.  After all, this episode gave us "DMY."

9) "E-I-E-I-D'oh" - AABF19

Even when I was a kid, I never considered The Simpsons to be a cartoon.  It was a comedy that happened to be animated, which would allow for some exaggerations and absurdities.  Matt Groening expressed his desire early on to keep the show grounded in some sort of reality.  By Season 11, the show had become a full-fledged cartoon and it wasn't looking back.  By this point, "E-I-E-I-D'oh" was the only episode funny enough where it didn't matter that realism was gone.  Homer offends Foghorn Leghorn (not exactly, but exactly) who then challenges him to a duel.  Homer escapes to his boyhood home to become a farmer.  When his crops fail, he uses some magical plutonium to grow a tomato-tobacco hybrid called Tomacco.  It is super addictive and when a cigarette company tries to steal the plant from the family, a talking sheep saves the day.  The story doesn't make any sense, but I still enjoy this episode because the jokes are completely solid ("You're right, this does taste like grandma!").  Honestly, it's the whole Mask of Zorro parody that opens this episode that sells it for me.  It crams so many satirical jabs at the Hollywood system into two minutes that I'm impressed.

8) "Simpsons Bible Stories" - AABF14

I know a lot of people dislike this episode, but it holds up well for me.  Since latter-day Simpsons episodes have difficulty keeping a story together for a whole episode, these Treehouse-of-Horror-esque anthology episodes of pre-established literature gave writers an easy task.  Simply retell the stories with jokes peppered in.  At a boring Easter church service, the family falls asleep and envision themselves in the tales that Reverend Lovejoy recounts to them (Marge - "Adam and Eve," Lisa - "Moses," Homer - "King Solomon," and Bart - "David and Goliath").  There is some spot on casting (Flanders as God and Milhouse as Moses, for example) and the short structure keeps things lighthearted.  Even when the episode ends with the Apocalypse and the Rapture, it doesn't feel out of place because the episode is basically a non-canonical Halloween episode anyway.  It's just an excuse for some fun.

7) "This Little Wiggy" - 5F13

Post-classic Simpsons really ran the character of Ralph into the ground (as they did with nearly every character), but this episode came about right at the time when we needed a Ralph-centric episode.  While Season 4's "I Love Lisa" showcased his struggle to make a romantic connection with Lisa, "This Little Wiggy" highlights what it means to be a social outcast at such a young age.  Ralph's mental deficiencies keep him blissfully ignorant most of the time, but the episode still manages to highlight the pathos in the character, without making him a joke machine.  What I really like about this episode is that we get to see things from Bart's point of view this time.  This is one of the last few episodes where Bart is faced with an age-appropriate dilemma, being forced by his mother to spend time with the school's loser.  Bringing in the school bullies to provide dramatic tension reminds us that Bart's social priorities are highly misguided (as we also see in "The Telltale Head" and "Bart the Mother") but they make sense for his 10-year-old character.

6) "Das Bus" - 5F11

Here is another kid-centric episode that many consider to be an all-time classic (thanks in part to it's base, the grade school English class standard, Lord of the Flies).  The students from Springfield Elementary end up on a deserted island and are forced to survive.  But despite Bart and Lisa's best efforts at leading the new civilization, madness and chaos prevails when the last of the food goes missing.  Even Homer's side-story seems to become it's own classic.  Despite coming about at the time when personal Internet usage was just joining the mainstream, Homer's ineptitude about the whole enterprise prevents things from becoming too dated when he tries to start his own Internet company.  I just love the way he sets up his dining room table like a desk with various trinkets and pencils and absolutely no computer.  It reminds me of the computer troubles he had in "King-Sized Homer," and it highlights how The Simpsons just doesn't belong in the post-'90s digital age.

5) "The Cartridge Family" - 5F01

Because I was a kid for the first 10 years of The Simpsons, I never noticed when episodes approached socially sensitive topics.  I would just consider them to be another funny episode and it would only be later that I'd notice how much my own morals were based on what the show had taught me.  So, while gun control is still a hotly-debated topic, I feel one need only look to this episode for their argument.  Homer gets a gun to "protect his family," but he ends up using it like a toy and nearly loses his family in the process.  Moral of the story: don't be like Homer.  It's such a realistic idea that clashes with the slightly fantastical world of Springfield, so the writers had to tread carefully with this episode.  They ended up with a balanced episode that has a lot of moments that can speak to both sides of the argument, and I'd consider that a success.  Also, with all of the World Cup shenanigans going on lately, I'm sure I'm not the only one who kept imagining the opening to this episode every day.

4) "Behind the Laughter" - BABF19

This should have been the last episode.  It just feels like it's the last episode.  It's a meta-commentary on the entire history of the show up until that point, and it even acknowledged how much the show had changed by the end of Season 11.  Like "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase," this episode acknowledges that The Simpsons is just a show and it treats the characters as actors struggling with off-screen drama.  It may not provide any closure to any of the characters, but it places a funny cap on the preceding eleven seasons.  No moment of the episode is wasted as the show parodies reality television obsessed with Hollywood drama.  This episode was actually written by four writers and it truly feels like a heartfelt collaborative effort to say goodbye to the series, even if that isn't what ended up happening.

3) "The Trouble with Trillions" - 5F14

We've seen the Simpsons on Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Easter, and Independence Day.  But now it's time for everyone's favorite American holiday: Tax Day!  Every January 1st, I automatically picture Flanders finishing up his taxes with a handful of mints, and every April 15th, I automatically picture Homer wrapping up his taxes into a ball of tape and lobbing it through the post office doors.  Homer and Flanders have become extreme caricatures by now, but these moments are so true to their original characters that I always look fondly on them.  Eventually, Homer gets hired by the FBI to spy on Mr. Burns and locate the trillion dollar bill that he stole from the federal government.  This is the last great Mr. Burns story.  I don't care if people find Mr. Burns's actions a bit too foolish in the episode.  It fits with the high adventure motif of the episode.  It's satisfying to see Burns lose, just this once.

2) "Treehouse of Horror VIII" - 5F02

If there was one thing the Scully Era couldn't ruin, it was the Halloween episodes.  They're all mostly great, but Season 9's offering was the most consistent (and for the record, I really enjoy "Terror of the Tiny Toon," "Desperately Xeeking Xena," "Life's a Glitch, Then You Die," and the Munsters parody of the later seasons' specials).  "The Homega Man" features Homer as the last man alive in Springfield after a nuclear attack, "Fly vs. Fly" features Bart getting his body switched with a fly's, and "Easy Bake Coven" features Marge as an actual witch during the Salem Witch Trials.  Each segment is inspired and mines a lot of humor out of their respective source material.  It seems that it's the little character moments that make the Halloween episodes worth while.  We get to see how the characters we enjoy would react in these supernatural situations (and not just explore the various ways we can gruesomely kill them off, like the post-Scully THOH episodes love to do).  Homer remembering his loved ones after the nuclear attack is a perfect moment of comedy that stands among the best the show has ever had to offer.

1) "Lisa the Skeptic" - 5F05

Lisa's episodes are always special.  Each season from the first 10 years offers at least one great Lisa episode, but then they just became annoying and preachy.  What makes a Lisa episode special is not that she is the only sane-minded/liberal person in Springfield, as later Simpsons episodes portray her.  It's that she is so young and is coming at these heavy, mature ideas from an innocent perspective.  In "Lisa the Iconoclast," she genuinely discovers that the town's history covers up a horrible truth during her research project and tries to do the right thing by telling people about it.  In "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy," she genuinely wants her favorite doll to say inspirational phrases because that's how she imagined the character.  And here, in "Lisa the Skeptic," she is genuinely confused when an angel skeleton turns up and everyone treats it like real scientific proof because, up until this point in her life, angels had always seemed like fantasy.  This is the last Lisa episode that actually strives to make it's audience think and it has actually been discussed and analyzed in various theological settings.

The Simpsons was never the same after the Scully Era.  But looking at these great episodes and the couple of dozen that surrounded these episodes, there was surely no reason to blame Scully for the downfall of the show.  There was still creativity in the staff somewhere.  Fortunately, the lack of quality in current episodes only strengthens the quality of these past ones.  For now, I'll just keep imagining that the show ended after Season 9 and had a couple of great bonus episodes afterwards.