• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 20, 2024

“The Simpsons” sends up TV this Sunday in a way few, if any, of us have ever considered before.

The show asks the question: What if all stupid TV was banned?

That’s the gist of the third segment of this weekend’s “Simpsons” episode, which is a three-part anthology of unrelated stories.

The episode extends the long-running Fox show’s “Treehouse of Horror” brand -- formerly associated only with Halloween -- to its first-ever out-of-season “Horror” show.

Carrying the official title of “Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes,” the show’s third story takes place in an authoritarian regime that forbids the possession or use of any TV content from the past that the regime considers low-brow.

“Low-brow” is literally the word officially used to categorize the content that the regime prohibits.

When a citizen is found to possess such material, storm troopers swoop in, burn all of it -- both books and videocassettes -- and hustle the offender off to be “reeducated.”

One of the troopers is Homer Simpson, seen in his storm trooper uniform in the photo above watching an approved TV show with his family.

Titled “Robber Barons,” the show is an interminable history series about the corporate giants of the Gilded Age. Homer is bored, but he dare not vocalize his opinion.

“It’s our civic duty to watch the most densely plotted television we can. That’s why low-brow entertainment was outlawed,” says Marge, parroting the authorities. 

Besides “Robber Barons,” other permissible shows include “The Habsburgs” and something called “Mozart in the Jungle.”

The show hilariously identifies a number of real-life TV shows that are banned due to their low-brow nature. 

They encompass all genres and have evidently been chosen simply because they originated in what the regime calls “the before times.”

For example, none other than Reverend Lovejoy is caught watching some of them on VHS, including “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” “King of Queens,” “According to Jim,” “Love Island,” “Dance Moms,” “NCIS: Hawaii” and “Wipeout.”

Later, a storm trooper platoon leader brags about a recent raid. “We took out 32 seasons of ‘Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives’ and the last known episode of ‘Last Man Standing’!” he boasts.

Other shows considered too dumb to watch are “Funniest Home Videos” and “The Golden Bachelor.” 

As for the story’s central question -- what if all stupid TV was banned? -- the TV Blog says no. Without stupid TV, what would a TV critic write about?

Elsewhere in this “Treehouse of Horror Presents” episode, the Simpsons are transported back to the 1950s. 

Among the great touches are cans of three fictional ’50s products: “Canned Cigarettes,” “Sweetened Condensed Margarine” and “Driver’s Choice Beer.”

The other story has Prof. Frink inventing and retailing cloned robots to several of the Springfield residents, most notably Principal Skinner and School Superintendent Chalmers, with tragic yet hilarious results, something I like to call “tragi-larious.”

“Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes” airs Sunday, November 20, at 8 p.m. Eastern on Fox.