The Simpsons Review

The Simpsons is two shows. The first, roughly seasons three to nine, is as close to a perfect comic machine as television has built: a town of hundreds of fully drawn residents, jokes stacked three deep in every scene, and an emotional core that lands because the writing never sneers at the family holding it together. Critics have spent decades calling that run one of the great achievements in the medium, and the voice cast, Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Hank Azaria and Yeardley Smith, do work no other ensemble has matched for range.

The second show is everything after, a long comfortable decline into celebrity cameos, plots that reset by the credits and a Homer who has drifted from oaf to cartoon. That decline is the standard complaint, along with the argument that the series has outlived its own reasons for existing. None of it dislodges the first show. Springfield remains the most densely populated comic world on television, the satire still lands more often than it has any right to, and the golden run is untouchable.