Photo: Fox
The internet was abuzz yesterday with reports of the "epic" couch gag coming this Sunday to The Simpsons in an episode titled "Four Regrettings And A Funeral" -- not that the episode has anything to do with the couch gag, which is inspired by The Hobbit. And here it is. No, your eyes don't deceive you: it is over a minute long.
Here's one problem with the above-linked EW.com post: it claims that the the length of the Simpsons couch gag "is normally a few seconds" long. That's "is," a.k.a. the present tense. But if you've watched The Simpsons at any point in the past five years or so, you know that's not true. Some couch gags are still short goofs, but now it's like every other couch gag is some endless, overwrought affair like this Hobbit one -- you'll note that the EW.com post doesn't even say that, at ninety seconds, it's definitely the longest one ever; it's merely among the longest. And as post after post about the Hobbit clip rolled by in my RSS reader yesterday, I had a terrifying thought.
They're going to do an episode-length couch gag, aren't they.
The fun of the couch gag used to be its non sequitur-ness -- the way it allowed producers to play with the elastic reality possible in an animated show, but kept it the craziness contained, away from the (mostly) recognizable human situations the family would find itself in. And if the rise of the fantastical couch gag hadn't coincided exactly but exactly with the decline in storytelling as evinced by the rest of any given episode, maybe I wouldn't resent a bummer like (for instance) this one as much as I did. Eh, if I'm being honest, I still do.
It seems clear to me that producers of The Simpsons have lost their judgment in terms of what resources they should direct where: the fact that the length of this Hobbit business is being treated as a selling point for Sunday's episode would seem to bear that out. So what's the next logical step for producers who think their audience loooooves waiting a long time to watch the Simpsons family overcome obstacles in order to sit down on a couch? Stretching the quest out for a whole episode!
There's no reason for The Simpsons still to be on; no narrative TV show -- certainly not a sitcom -- should make it to anything like a Season 25. The constantly metastasizing couch gags suggest that the show's writers are bored. So far, they haven't been bored enough to waste an entire half-hour of your time with one, but if they do -- and I truly think it might actually be when -- you'll know they've completely given up.