Tag Archives: The Simpsons S13E21

Spare me your jockey elves. Forget your spring break alligators. Cast aside your amorous pandas and bar rags and even your Gagas. My poor lost souls, I beseech you to look upon thy screamapillar and weep — weep for us all.

Because “The Frying Game” may very well be The Simpsons’s worst episode ever.

As I discussed on The Simpsons Show podcast, I don’t make that pronouncement lightly. It’s hard to call “The Frying Game” overrated exactly — forgotten is probably more accurate — but it’s rarely brought up in discussions of the series’s nadir. And yet it deserves to be ground into the dirt like the fetid excuse for televised refuse that it is. What the episode lacks in the casual cruelty of other contemporary Simpsons outings, or the aimless racism of the show’s more regrettable international jaunts, it makes up for in being emblematic of everything wrong with the series at this point in its run. It is a nonsensical, irritating, embarrassing blight upon the face of what was once the greatest show on television.

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