Comedy: Bestcast: Julie Klausner of How Was Your Week picks her favorite episodes

Bestcast asks podcasters to discuss the three most memorable episodes of their podcast. Note: Ties are allowed/encouraged.

The podcaster: Writer, author, performer, cat-owner, and redhead Julie Klausner was a mainstay of the New York comedy scene well before the 2010 release of her well-received memoir, I Don’t Care About Your Band, which chronicled with wry, self-deprecating humor the romantic travails of her 20s. In early 2011, Klausner launched her kibbitzy, addictive podcast How Was Your Week, a venture that combines interviews, intimate monologues, and plenty of dish. Think of it as coffee talk with your wittiest, most delightful girlfriend. 

Episode #5: “The One With Joan Rivers” 
Julie Klausner: Joan Rivers is someone that I had written for a couple of times in the past, someone who is so completely generous and kind and comfortable when you first meet her. You really do say, “Oh my God, there is this living legend,” which I’m sure she hates being called because it implies age. In her documentary, she says something like, “Don’t say ‘legend’ or ‘icon’ or anything that insinuates that you might be on your way out.” When I first met her, I remember just being obviously impressed with the fact that you’re in the same room with someone who is so wildly important and famous. And those two things are so very different, but she’s both. Beyond that, I just remember my job at the time was to write for her, and I had to get over that as quickly as possible.

The A.V. Club: What kind of writing did you do for her?

JK: I was to, like, throw her jokes, on the set of her reality show. She likes to have a writer there to kind of toss her lines, even though she usually does all that herself. Most of the time you’re just there to stand by. Then you’ll throw her something, and she’ll say, “Oh, that’s very funny,” and she’ll use it. That was on one of her reality shows, and then I wrote for her on another occasion. I think I did two of her reality shows, one for Joan And Melissa and one for How’d You Get So Rich? And then she took me with her to her Letterman appearance. I was in a limo with her. It was her first Letterman appearance after years, too. I just remember her being really honest after the interview about how David didn’t like her, and everyone around her said, “Oh, no, he liked you, he liked you.” And I was the only one who said, “Yeah, I could see that.” [Laughs.] She’s nobody’s fool. No one is resistant to flattery, but at the same time she’s been doing this for long enough you don’t need to mince words.

I think Joan Rivers is such an untapped legend that people just don’t appreciate, because they grew up with her on QVC, or they grew up with her on E!, or they grew up watching her do the things that in their minds the more prestigious comics wouldn’t have taken or done. It’s so unfair, because the longevity, the span, and the range of her career is so impressive, and she is so good at what she does that I admire her to no end. 

So I had that relationship with her. Also, she’s a big fan of my friend Billy Eichner. She’s a big supporter of Billy. In fact, I remember when I was in the room she did her pre-show interview on Letterman, and she didn’t end the phone call without saying, “There’s this kid named Billy Eichner, and I’m going to bring his DVD.” And the producer’s like, “Yeah, right, great, thanks.”

But she was willing to do an interview with me. I sent her assistant the questions in advance, and I went up to her house and she met me in her living room. She had just finished exercising; she had just come off the treadmill. She only had eye makeup on, and she had her sneakers and her black workout clothes. So great, honestly. I have nothing snarky to say about Joan Rivers’ appearance. We should all be that happy with how we look on camera, frankly.

She just sat with me. She gave me a half-hour of her time, I asked her the questions, and she was completely honest and funny and a combination of the two. I felt kind of like Terry Gross. She really does go back and forth between, like, “Oh here’s a shticky answer, and here’s the real answer.” She’s really generous with both. She’s not going to bore anybody, but at the same time she is going to be honest. So, yeah, it was just another one of the generous things that she’s done for me, to sit down with me and talk on my podcast.

AVC: What was it like to be in a limousine with Joan Rivers headed to The Late Show With David Letterman? 

JK: I felt so lucky that I was in the catbird seat for what I had acknowledged at the time was a real comedy milestone, her return to late night. She’d brought some of Edgar’s [her late husband’s] ashes with her in a compact. She smeared [them] under [Letterman’s] desk as soon as we got there and said “Edgar, we’re back.” She made a couple of jokes about how she was banned. And he was like, “You weren’t banned,” and she said, “I wasn’t asked. You didn’t call me. You didn’t ask me to come.” She talked about Johnny [Carson].

After, when we were done with the appearance, I asked, “What was it like being back here?” and she said something like, “Oh, you mean at the Ed Sullivan Theater? Oh, I was on Sullivan.” Oh, fuck, that’s right. Letterman Schmetterman. She did stand-up when the Ed Sullivan Theater actually had The Ed Sullivan Show. When you think about the span of her career, she’s seen everybody come and go, and she wouldn’t still be standing if she weren’t really good. Because everything she has against her, being female blah, blah, blah, she’s still here despite all the odds and she’s sharper, smarter, more with it than people I know who are a fraction of her age. Age has nothing to do with it.

AVC: She’s seen so much tragedy. Louis C.K. pointed out that in her documentary, whenever she faces a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, she doesn’t despair, she just says, “That was really difficult.”

JK: Also, she used it. I mean she made a Lifetime movie with her daughter about her husband’s suicide. That’s not what most people do. But thank God she did. Thank God there’s somebody that uses film and television to go through what she’s going through publicly. There’s an honesty to that. There’s an honesty to the advertising work that she does, to her commerce, to her taking every job because you never know when the next one is going to come. You can look at that as desperation or you could look at that as the pragmatic way to exist as a minority in this business. She’s absolutely remarkable, and I do hope people give her more respect. 

Episode #56: “Jam Ghetto”: Sharon Needles, Whitney Jefferson
JK: Oh, Sharon Needles. As soon as we saw the première episode of that season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which I think has been the best season to date, she popped out as being this star in a way that you had never seen on TV in a mainstream way. Her drag really was the new drag. She talked to me about growing up with Marilyn Manson. And that was really interesting to me, because I’m about 10 years older than her—oh, who the hell knows how old the drag queen really is?—I’m about 10 years older than she claims to be. I met Sharon after someone at Logo approached me and said, “I love your show, and if you ever want to interview one of the queens, just ask.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, absolutely. I would love to talk to Sharon.” And so they had me come to a photo shoot that she was doing, and I spoke to her in between takes. She got very real very quickly, which was something I did not anticipate. She was really quite… I want to say “earnest,” but she was comfortable being honest.

I asked her about her fame, and I was a little reluctant to do so because fame is such a slippery, subjective thing. But she interrupted me, and she was like, “I’m really famous.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.” [Laughs.] She talked about how fame isn’t an emotion, which Patton [Oswalt] later said, “That was really profound. I wouldn’t normally listen to a Sharon Needles interview, but I thought that was really interesting that she identified that.”

AVC: What does that mean? That fame is not an emotion?

JK: Well, just that once you reach it, it doesn’t control how you feel. I think it was interesting that Patton came to that, because he’s famous and I’m not.

AVC: You’re not un-famous.

JK: Well, thank you. I’m going to high-five my cat. Pardon me. [Pause.] Aaaand, I’m back. I imagine that what that means is once you reach a certain level of success and you’re known, it doesn’t fix everything. There’s not a direct route to your feelings once you’ve reached that level, I suppose.

Then she started crying, and I thought she was doing a bit at first. She talked about how so many kids come up to her and say, “You mean a lot to me.” She began to talk about it in the context of being overwhelmed by it, but she ended up being really touched by it and then the next thing you know she was drying her eyes. I remember thinking she was joking at first and realizing she wasn’t. Then [I was] just sort of staying with her and listening to her and hearing her and waiting for that moment to lead to another. But I was really moved that she let me in as much as she did.

AVC: On the show it seems like you’re attracted to these larger-than-life, self-constructed figures, and with Sharon Needles, her whole persona is completely constructed. She’s totally self-created.

JK: Yeah, I’m fascinated by that. That’s incredibly appealing to me. Whatever that says about my own aspirations, femininity-wise, I’ll leave to the completion, sentence-wise, of anybody listening. But I do think that there are over-the-top types that are attractive to me, and to be able to connect with them the way that you’d ideally want to be able to connect to any person once they stop performing for you, or if they actually express a desire to be there in the moment instead of asking, “What’s this for? Let’s get this over with,” is something I definitely aspire to. Let’s find the humanity behind the performance. [Those are] my favorite celebrities. Frances McDormand is my favorite actor. I don’t know if that’s relevant. [Laughs.] But she’s a person who plays people. In other words, not everything has to be an over-the-top Broadway musical to get my attention, but it certainly helps.

Special Minisode: David Rakoff
JK: I miss David every day. I was blessed with the dumb luck to have known him briefly and to have worked with him. He was one of my dear friends, but I can’t imagine that I was one of his, because he has so many friends and so much love in his heart. He was just able to be close to many people. I don’t want to invoke The Giving Tree because I think that’s so sappy and nobody wants to be the stump. And he wasn’t. He stood alone, but he never tired of being generous. He never said no. He would read your screenplay and give you feedback. He would meet you any time for food. He would always pick up the phone. It was a friendship that is patently irreplaceable. 

I went to a wedding a couple of weekends ago, and this really remarkable man married two of my friends, and I remember thinking, “God, the only person I would ever entrust to marry me, to impart wisdom in front of a crowd, would be David.” He was near rabbinical in his wisdom and heart. And he was just funny. A lot of people say, “It’s so rare to find someone as kind as they are smart.” I know a couple of people like that, but none of them are even a fraction as funny as David.

[For the podcast episode], David had me over to his apartment after he had gotten his surgery, and his arm was not working. He would never complain. He would just sort of work around it, and he and I just had a conversation on the couch. It was almost like that would be what we would do if there were no microphones, but, actually, that’s not true. It wouldn’t be what we would do if the mics weren’t on, because he would have asked about me. It wouldn’t have been a one-sided conversation about his book.

But, it was a good opportunity for me to talk to him in depth about his book—his most recent book, not the novel I have yet to read, and I kind of don’t want to read it for another year, because then that means that he’s gone, you know? But Half Empty was, I thought, not only the greatest book that he had written, but just the most incredible book that I had read in a really long time. And I was able to talk to him about it because it had just come out in paperback. I was just really lucky to have that opportunity.

AVC: Putting out the episode was a way of capturing a part of him for posterity.

JK: I hope so. It was just a fraction. It’s so imperfect. I wish that he hadn’t been cut short. He had so much more to say. He was just getting started. I published the entirety of it just to make it seem like we still had more time left, but we don’t. I miss him every day. I really, really loved him, and I never met anybody like him. And I think… To avoid being overly sappy, I think God wanted him back for some reason that we don’t understand. He just needed him for something beyond our grasp.

He was also the only person who made me understand the old Beatles lyric, “The love you take is equal to the love you make,” because that guy had as much love as he gave. I just have never, ever seen another instance of that.

View the original article here

TV: TV Club 10: Summarize The Simpsons in 10 episodes? That’s unpossible! (But we try anyway)

With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. If you watch those 10, you’ll have a better idea of what that series was about, without having to watch the whole thing. These are not meant to be the 10 best episodes, but rather the 10 most representative episodes.

As it was with Saturday Night Live, choosing the 10 most “representative” episodes of The Simpsons is a fool’s errand. How can one of history’s most acclaimed and feverishly adored TV shows—and the longest-running American scripted primetime series ever—be distilled into five hours? 

It can be, many times over, and that’s unique to The Simpsons: My fellow Simpsons expert Nathan Rabin could pick 10 different episodes that could be just as valid as the ones below. TV Club editor Todd VanDerWerff could come up with a completely different list that could also work. The scale of The Simpsons supports many interpretations, all of them yelling at each other, “How could you have left [episode title] off your list?! Like Jimmy Carter, you’re history’s greatest monster!”

Or maybe it’s best to subdivide TV Club 10 for The Simpsons by category—family life, parenting, childhood, politics, celebrities, education, work—and see how the show treated each. Across 24 seasons and more than 500 episodes (and counting), The Simpsons has covered a lot of ground.

It has spent its twilight mostly re-covering the same ground. As much as that’s an indicator of creative bankruptcy, it’s also a necessity of The Simpsons’ unprecedented longevity. The Simpsons visited New York in season nine, and hey, there’s nothing saying they can’t go back during the season 24 première. What if Moe redid his bar again, but this time as a gay bar, as he did in “Flaming Moe,” from season 22 (its title a nod to the season three classic “Flaming Moe’s,” the first time the bar underwent big changes)? Back in the 13th season, Bart created a popular web series called Angry Dad based on Homer, which became a movie in season 22, “Angry Dad: The Movie.” The strained-but-loving relationship between Lisa and Homer has propelled at least half a dozen episodes at this point. (Ditto the occasionally tumultuous relationship between Homer and Marge.) The series has flashed forward to show its characters’ futures a handful of times. There have been 12 episodes about Sideshow Bob. As Bart said in the season five classic “Bart Gets Famous,” “It’s my job to be repetitive. My job. My job. Repetitiveness is my job.”

When repetitiveness became too much a part of The Simpsons’ job remains the subject of fierce debate. Although season 23 earned some surprising praise (itself kind of sad—“Hey, that episode about the novel was actually good!”), the consensus is that the show has been on a downhill slide for years. How many? That depends. No one would bat an eye at 10 years. Twelve? Ever since that episode when Principal Skinner turned out not to be the real Principal Skinner? For the record, “The Principal And The Pauper” aired all the way back in 1997, a low point in the otherwise solid ninth season. It’s definitely a miss, but many subpar Simpsons episodes improve with subsequent viewings. (No such promises for last year’s dreadful “Moe’s bar rag tells its origin story” episode, though.) 

But TV Club 10 isn’t here to fall into the trap that ensnares every discussion of The Simpsons, where ostensible fans end up debating when the show “started to suck.” It has a far more utilitarian purpose: to pare down to 10 episodes a show whose entirety would take nearly two weeks of 24-hour-a-day viewing to watch. 

“The Way We Was” (season two, episode 12): The relationship between Homer and Marge Simpson forms the core of The Simpsons. The mythology around how the couple met begins with this episode, written by a trio of Simpsons all-stars: Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and Sam Simon. When a broken TV forces the Simpsons to entertain themselves, Marge tells the story of her and Homer’s relationship, which began when they were seniors in high school in 1974, providing some critical background information on characters viewers had only known for 24 episodes at this point. Homer was lackadaisical even then, content to shirk his responsibilities and not worry about the future until meeting Marge, whose conservatism and naïveté stretch back to her high school days. She gave his life direction, and proved that when he wanted to, Homer could be incredibly focused. Viewers also learn that Barney was basically the same in high school, and that Abe Simpson had been lowering his son’s life expectations from an early age. (“Oh son, don’t overreach. Go for the dented car, the dead-end job, the less attractive girl.”) All of it would heavily inform The Simpsons as it continued, from the character of Artie Ziff, who would have two subsequent episodes dedicated to him, to the format of telling these origin stories, as The Simpsons would do later with Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. It’s also the first appearance by Jon Lovitz (as Ziff), who has voiced six different characters over the years. 

“Lisa’s Substitute” (season two, episode 19): The closest thing to an audience surrogate on The Simpsons is Lisa Simpson, typically the most rational and intelligent person in the family and, possibly, all of Springfield. That puts her at the opposite end of the spectrum from her father, who is aggressively uncurious, lazy, and prone to irrational thinking and ill-advised crusades. The clashes between Lisa and Homer have provided the basis for numerous episodes over the course of 24 seasons, but “Lisa’s Substitute” is the first episode that fully explores the disconnect between Lisa and Homer. When Lisa finds an intellectual peer in charismatic substitute teacher Mr. Bergstrom (played by “Sam Etic,” a.k.a. Dustin Hoffman), it throws Homer’s limitations into stark relief—which he sees and resents. Unsurprisingly, he’s delighted when Mr. Bergstrom inevitably moves on, dismissing Lisa’s sadness with a classic Homer line, “Hey! Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand!” But he does care and loves Lisa unconditionally, and no matter how boorish of an oaf he is, she loves him too. The Simpsons was still relatively controversial when this episode aired in April of 1991, but for all the rhetoric about the show’s cynicism and supposed threat to the nation’s children, “Lisa’s Substitute” ably displayed the beating heart underneath the satire. It’s in the sweet goodbye scene between Lisa and Mr. Bergstrom, and it’s there at the end, when Homer makes up with Lisa, successfully consoles Bart on losing the class-president election, and comforts a fussy Maggie. The Simpsons are, fundamentally, a family whose members love each other greatly, and the writers frequently use the relationship between Homer and Lisa to show the extent of that. 

“Marge Vs. The Monorail” (season four, episode 12): Easily on the short list of all-time Simpsons classics, “Marge Vs. The Monorail” is a stellar episode in the show’s bulletproof fourth season. Where episodes like “Lisa’s Substitute” advanced the core themes of The Simpsons, “Marge Vs. The Monorail” wins by doing nothing of the sort. Although it provides one of many examples of Springfield’s susceptibility to con men, it’s really a standalone episode, and a perfect one at that. In a nod to The Music Man, a shyster from out of town convinces the city to spend a monetary windfall on an unnecessary (and incredibly dangerous) monorail. There’s a song, a Leonard Nimoy cameo, Mr. Burns shackled like Hannibal Lecter, a hilarious file photo of Homer, and an important message about the utility of donuts. That all of this sprang from the mind of Conan O’Brien—then an unknown former SNL writer—should come as no surprise to people familiar with his subsequent late-night career. O’Brien is credited as a writer on four Simpsons episodes, all of them great—and in the case of “Marge Vs. The Monorail,” iconic. 

“Last Exit To Springfield” (season four, episode 17): “‘Last Exit To Springfield’ is a popular candidate for the single greatest episode of The Simpsons, the greatest television show of all time,” wrote Nathan Rabin in his review for TV Club Classic. What makes it so special? Joy. It “positively radiates an unlikely but pervasive sense of joy,” a particularly notable accomplishment considering it centers on the seemingly disparate but intertwined subjects of Lisa needing braces and Homer leading a strike at the nuclear power plant. For all the places the series has traveled—thematically and geographically—The Simpsons has only a handful of sets that appear regularly: the Simpson home, the nuclear plant, the First Church Of Springfield, Springfield Elementary, the Kwik-E-Mart, and Moe’s. Of the non-home locations, the plant plays the biggest role: Although Homer has taken many odd jobs over the years, he works at the plant, and much of his identity—and unhappiness—stems from his job. The plant has played a pivotal role in numerous episodes, but most importantly, it provides the show’s biggest secondary character, Charles Montgomery Burns, the evil man who owns and runs it. Mr. Burns is a frequent foil for the Simpson family (and Springfield at large), which “Last Exit To Springfield” shows, along with the environment of the nuclear plant and the family’s relationship to all of it. It also lands some knockout jokes, including a hilarious, sepia-toned flashback to Mr. Burns’ childhood, a “Yellow Submarine” riff, a funny nod to How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and the classic line “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.” A running theme throughout The Simpsons is how Homer stumbles through life, yet somehow thrives thanks to an endless series of lucky breaks. In “Last Exit To Springfield,” he accidentally leads Mr. Burns to believe he’s a brilliant tactician, unwittingly breaking the old tyrant’s will through sheer dumb luck. 

“Bart Vs. Australia” (season six, episode 16): “The Simpsons are going to ____________!” Twenty-four seasons in, that’s become a familiar trope on The Simpsons, as the family has traveled to Japan (season 10), Tanzania (season 12), Brazil (season 13), England (season 15), Sweden (season 15), China (season 16), Italy (season 17), India (season 17), Peru (season 20), Ireland (season 20), and Israel (season 21). That trope began—and was done best—in season six, when a dispute over a collect call Bart makes to Australia causes an international incident. In the DVD commentary track for this episode, executive producer/showrunner David Mirkin notes that “Bart Vs. Australia” has a “great combination of nastiness and inaccuracy” in its portrayal of Australia, which the writers selected because the country is famous for its sense of humor. The episode may have tested the limits of that, as it portrays Australia as a backward nation populated by roughnecks. But “Bart Vs. Australia” also reveals the real targets of The Simpsons: “The reason we can be nasty to any country, any person, any race or creed, is because we are always the most nasty toward the United States, toward our main characters,” Mirkin says in the commentary track. Perhaps that’s what unsettled the show’s early critics more than anything: Some of the show’s sharpest satire was directed at us, not them. 

“Much Apu About Nothing” (season seven, episode 23): “The Simpsons really has more angry mobs than any comedy on television,” jokes episode writer David X. Cohen—or David S. Cohen, as he was credited at the time—on the “Much Apu About Nothing” commentary track. As executive producer Bill Oakley notes, this may be the angriest, mobbiest of them all: “This whole episode is kind of about mob hysteria and how it affects politics, and innocent people can be swept up in that.” As stand-ins for average Americans, Springfieldians are especially susceptible to mob hysteria, so it’s not surprising that a bear harmlessly wandering into town prompts an overzealous bear patrol. But when the costs of the bear patrol spark an outcry, inveterate politician Mayor Quimby deftly shifts the blame to illegal immigrants. That includes Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who stayed in the country illegally after his student visa expired. “Much Apu About Nothing” works well on a couple of levels—as a portrait of Springfield mob hysteria and as a healthy origin story for a character who began as a one-dimensional stereotype. It also contains possibly the greatest Simpsons joke ever written: When Apu’s plight forces Homer to rethink his anti-immigrant fervor, he says, “You must love this country more than I love a cold beer on a hot Christmas morning.” The episode also shows how smartly The Simpsons can comment on current affairs, even with the year-long lead time its episodes require: Its Proposition 24 was based on California’s Prop. 187, which denied health care and education to illegal immigrants and their children.

“El Viaje Misterioso De Nuestro Jomer” (season eight, episode nine): Executive producer/showrunner Josh Weinstein notes in the commentary track for “El Viaje Misterioso De Nuestro Jomer” (“The Mysterious Voyage Of Our Homer”) that the show aimed to do one weird episode every season. At the time, none topped “El Viaje” for weirdness: Hot peppers in chili send Homer on a hallucination-induced vision quest led by his coyote spirit animal (voiced by the inimitable Johnny Cash). The first and third acts of the episode are relatively conventional, but the hallucination-fueled second act took the show to new places thematically and visually, with whimsical, psychedelic animation overseen by director Jim Reardon. During his quest, Homer comes to question whether Marge really is his soulmate, even though meeting her was the defining moment of his life. (Comparing their record collections, he says, “Look at these records! Jim Nabors, Glen Campbell, the Doodletown Pipers! Now look at her records—they stink!”) The rest of the episode follows Homer’s Are You My Mother?-style attempts to find his soulmate, though it naturally all comes back to his wife. “El Viaje” nicely mixes a de rigueur storyline for The Simpsons—the occasionally shaky relationship between Homer and Marge—with an ambitious, envelope-pushing second act no one would have expected when the show debuted in 1989. 

“The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” (season eight, episode 14): Why was The Simpsons so willing to take the kind of risks that produced “El Viaje”? Because nobody on staff thought the show would last more than 10 seasons, at least according to the commentary track on “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.” Few shows make it to eight seasons, and those that do have usually passed their prime. After eight seasons, The Simpsons had gone from stoking hysterical hand-wringing to being one of the most acclaimed series of the ’90s. What was once feared was now a television institution. Simultaneously, Internet culture began taking shape, providing a forum for fans of the show to discuss (and criticize) The Simpsons in ways easily accessible to the people who created the show. “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show,” another excellent episode by David S. Cohen, is partially a ham-handed rejoinder to the Comic Book Guys of the world, but it’s mostly a funny, razor-sharp satire of show business. When the venerable cartoon duo of Itchy & Scratchy faces declining ratings, the network (and Krusty The Clown) pressures its producers to add a third character: Poochie, a “dog with attitude,” says a network executive. “He’s edgy. He’s in-your-face. You’ve heard the expression ‘Let’s get busy’? Well, this is a dog who gets biz-zay. Consistently and thoroughly… We’re talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.” As showrunner Josh Weinstein notes, the writers would often use Itchy & Scratchy as a way to comment on The Simpsons, and “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” comes from a real place: The Itchy & Scratchy writers are drawn to resemble Simpsons writers (as is the animator, who’s based on Simpsons director David Silverman), and a Fox executive had actually suggested The Simpsons add a character, like a cousin, who would live with the Simpsons. As a preemptive satirical strike, the writers created Roy, a sassy cool guy who inexplicably lives with the family. Poochie is fantastically terrible, and the fan outcry is swift and passionate, leading to Comic Book Guy coining the phrase “Worst. Episode. Ever.” When he says he feels like the show owes him something for being a loyal viewer, Bart serves as the writers’ surrogate. “What? They’ve given you thousands of hours of entertainment for free! What could they possibly owe you? I mean, if anything, you owe them!” The episode stumbles when it hits that preposterous last line, which Lisa echoes later: “We should thank our lucky stars they’re putting out a program of this caliber after so many years.” “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” reveals the strain that had begun to develop between the show and the passionate fans that had made it a hit, but The Simpsons would take its biggest swipe at those fans the following season.

“The Principal And The Pauper” (season nine, episode two)
“I can’t remember who came up with the idea of destroying the series,” says writer Ken Keeler on the commentary track for this episode. He and showrunners Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley—also on the commentary track—decide to call it a “group effort,” because they were all leaving The Simpsons and wanting to do as much damage as possible on their way out. The irony comes fast and furious on the “Principal And The Pauper” commentary track, and with good reason: When it aired in the fall of 1997, the episode drew a swift, overwhelmingly negative reaction. Nine seasons in, The Simpsons experienced its jump-the-shark moment, at least in the eyes of some viewers. Fifteen years later, other episodes have vied for that title, but “The Principal And The Pauper” wounded the faithful first and hurt the most. Why? Because it told them everything they knew about a key character was wrong: During an event to celebrate his 20 years as an educator, Principal Skinner is revealed to be a fraud, a troubled youth named Armin Tamzarian who assumed the identity of his mentor, Seymour Skinner, who went missing and was presumed dead in Vietnam. The real Seymour Skinner (voiced by Martin Sheen) turns up and assumes the life his imposter had built, while Tamzarian attempts to return to his troubled past. In the end, the town rejects the real Skinner, and Judge Snyder confers the name, “past, present, future, and mother” of Seymour Skinner onto Tamzarian. According to Keeler, “The Principal And The Pauper” is about a community of people who like things just the way they are—only it never dawned on those people that the episode was about them. It was an amplified version of the themes in “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show,” though this time fans didn’t get it (or rejected it). Keeler confesses on the noticeably defensive commentary track that the point was “much clearer” in his original draft, which had two speeches that were cut for time. Regardless, he maintains that he’s prouder of “The Principal And The Pauper” than anything else he’s written for television. (He also wrote the similarly ire-inducing season eight episode “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase.”) He’s probably the only person whose favorite episode is “The Principal And The Pauper,” but even if the half-hour doesn’t succeed, it’s representative of where The Simpsons was headed at the end of its first decade, and it’s indicative of the types of stumbles it would make down the road. For years, The Simpsons had enjoyed an enviable hit-to-miss ratio; “The Principal And The Pauper” heralded an era of more misses and established a precedent for dramatically changing characters’ storylines. 

“Behind The Laughter” (season 11, episode 22): The Simpsons has a long tradition of stunt episodes, dating back to the second season with the original “Treehouse Of Horror,” which used the Simpsons as characters in three different horror-themed segments. “Treehouse Of Horror” has become an annual tradition on The Simpsons, just as stunt episodes have become commonplace, from using the world of The Simpsons as a setting for Bible stories to episodes that parody TV shows like 24 and films like Run Lola Run. When these episodes miss the mark, it shows the strain of the writers grasping for something different. When they work, they seem like natural extensions of the Simpsons world. No stunt episode suited The Simpsons' predilection for meta-references better than “Behind The Laughter,” which copied the format and graphics of VH1’s popular Behind The Music series—with that series’ full cooperation—to tell the salacious story of the Simpsons’ rise and fall. Behind The Music was immensely popular in the late ’90s, and by the time “Behind The Laughter” aired in May of 2000, its setup and themes were well-known to the kind of people who watched The Simpsons. “Behind The Laughter” even used Jim Forbes, who narrated Behind The Music, to turn out histrionic assessments like, “The Simpsons’ TV show started out on a wing and a prayer, but now the wing was on fire, and the prayer had been answered—by Satan.” “Behind The Laughter” nails Behind The Music, and it smartly comments on The Simpsons’ place in a media landscape that had shifted considerably over 11 years. There’s a dig at “The Principal And The Pauper,” a clip of which plays as Forbes describes how the show came to rely on “gimmicky premises and nonsensical plots,” and it also mocks the “The Simpsons are going to…” trope in the final scene, when Homer announces “The Simpsons are going to Delaware!” (One season later, they did—in the stunt episode “Simpsons Tall Tales”). “This’ll be the last season,” Homer says to the editor who’s assembling the episode. In reality, The Simpsons was just reaching its halfway point.

And if you like those, here are 10 more: “When Flanders Failed” (season three, episode three), “Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk” (season three, episode 11), “Mr. Plow” (season four, episode nine), “Whacking Day” (season four, episode 20), “$pringfield” (season five, episode 10), “Bart Gets Famous” (season five, episode 12), “Itchy & Scratchy Land” (season six, episode four), “Homer The Great” (season six, episode 12), “Wild Barts Can’t Be Broken” (season 10, episode 11), “The Regina Monologues” (season 15, episode four). Or just watch all 22 episodes of season four. For a few standout recent episodes, check out this Inventory.

Availability: Seasons 1-14 are available on DVD (the 15th comes out in December), season 20 (the first in HD) is available on Blu-ray, and seasons 1-3 and 20-24 are available on Amazon Instant. A handful of episodes from the current season are also available on Hulu.

Next week: Laugh your cares away with Myles McNutt, as he heads down to Fraggle Rock.

View the original article here

TV: TV Club 10: Enjoy the sensual delights of cooking with 10 episodes of Julia Child’s The French Chef

With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. If you watch those 10, you’ll have a better idea of what that series was about, without having to watch the whole thing. These are not meant to be the 10 best episodes, but rather the 10 most representative episodes.

It may seem odd for a show called The French Chef to epitomize the British sentiment of “Keep calm and carry on,” but Julia Child’s dogged perseverance is a major reason for her cooking show’s enduring popularity. During its original run, from 1963 to 1973, people with no interest in cooking watched The French Chef just to see Child confidently make her way through a soufflé or bouillabaisse. Child, who died in 2004 and would have turned 100 this year, was as much about bucking up viewers’ courage as she was about specific instruction. Her ability to triumph over burns, spills, and sometimes her own gangly klutziness could inspire those in much higher-pressure situations. 

The French Chef premièred on Boston public TV, when Child was known mostly as co-author of the bestseller Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. The series was a quick success, spreading to other public stations one by one. At that time, public TV was something like today’s public-access stations, airing mostly locally produced educational programs. That made Child arguably public television’s first national star. 

The French Chef was “taped live,” or done in real time, occasionally with interspersed clips of Child at the market or visiting colleagues in France. This meant that Child had to make just about everything at least twice, so she could put a roast in one oven, then pull a finished roast out of another oven to show viewers what the dish looked like after seven or eight hours of cooking. This also gives each episode a narrative quality, showing the preparation of one dish, or all the components of one meal, from start to finish.

Child connected with viewers because her obvious skill was combined with an earthy attitude that hinted at an appreciation for all things sensual. The show is full of close-ups of her hands doing wondrous things, but her age spots and close-cut fingernails (sometimes adorned with no-nonsense polish in the color episodes) emphasize her point that anyone, with some patience, can perform the same tasks. Viewers also see the show’s deliberate lack of glamour whenever Child loses her train of thought, has to mop the sweat off her face, or lets out a tired grunt when she has to open a stubborn bottle. She makes the same sound—“urrrgh”—whenever an action is taxing, which is weirdly reassuring.

Each episode has some memorable tips about, say, the best way to melt chocolate (rum is better than water), but the constant theme is that a cook shouldn’t give into a fear of failure. Much like Johnny Carson became famous for his ability to “save” jokes that didn’t land with his audience, Child became known for her ability to quickly bounce back from a misstep and turn it into a teaching experience. (Perhaps that’s why French Chef “blooper” reels have never become very popular, though Child did get Auto-Tuned earlier this year.)

Child summarizes her philosophy in the episode “Gateau In A Cage,” when she cheerfully rants against the “awful American syndrome of fear of failure” and defines the art of cooking as “one failure after another.” 

“That’s how you finally learn,” she says of kitchen disasters. “I shall overcome, sort of like women’s liberation,” Child adds, before she smiles, apologizes for the lecture, and gets back to showing the audience how to make caramel.

The French Chef ran until 1973, after which Child did occasional series, in which she shared cooking duties with younger colleagues such as Jacques Pépin. Here are 10 episodes from the original series that best demonstrate her appeal.

“French Onion Soup” (season one, episode two): This is possibly the inspiration for the Saturday Night Live sketch in which Dan Aykroyd plays Child bleeding to death from a knife wound. There’s no such mishap here, but Child pays tribute to her sharp, heavy cutlery, which allows her to chop onions without tears (no juice splatters). “If you laid it across your hand and just drew it across, the weight would cut your hand right down to the bone,” she affectionately says of one knife. Later: “You really have to care for them like a baby,” she says, while applying scouring powder as if sprinkling talc on a baby’s bottom. It’s an early lesson on the importance of the right tools in the kitchen.

“Bouillabaisse À La Marseillaise” (season one, episode 17): Child teaches us how to skin an eel and how to trim the gills off fish heads in this salute to the famous French stew. She laments that gourmets have tried to “fancy up” the recipe, thus intimidating “us ordinary people.” But there’s nothing fancy about Child using a cleaver to separate the head from a hake, and the camera offers a close-up of its huge eye and gaping mouth as the knife comes down. As for the smaller butterfish she throws into the mix, she advises, “Leave the heads on… They look much prettier if you do.” For seafood devotees, this episode is pure pornography; for the less aquatic-inclined, it may provide fish-eye-filled nightmares for weeks.

“The Potato Show” (season one, episode 22): This episode is famous for Child’s failed attempt to flip a large potato pancake, pieces of which land on the stovetop. “You can pick it up when you’re alone in the kitchen,” she says, using her hands to put the errant pieces in the pan. “Who is going to see?” The moment became embellished over the years, but Child did not drop an entire chicken on the floor (as the urban legend has it) and put it back on a serving plate, in this or any other episode. Child has two sound pieces of advice here. First, when trying anything difficult, “You must have the courage of your convictions.” And when a mistake is made, “You haven’t lost anything because you can always turn it into something else… We’ll pretend that this was supposed to be a baked potato dish.”

“Veal Prince Orloff” (season four, episode four). Child makes what will become the most famous creation of Sue Ann Nivens (Betty White), the pretentious TV chef on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s a complicated veal dish with a lot of things that can go wrong (don’t let it dry out!), but Child tries to demystify the process. As she does in many episodes, Child offers shortcuts and tips on how to do most of the work a day or two in advance, making the dinner party more enjoyable for the host or hostess. Sue Ann would not approve, nor would she like Child’s definition of haute cuisine: “It just means fancy cooking that takes longer to do than ordinary cooking.” 

“The Spinach Twins” (season six, episode 20): Child goes to France to visit Simone Beck, her good friend and co-author, and lets her finish a lesson on making a spinach turnover. There’s a fun contrast between the gregarious Child and the head-down, no-nonsense Beck, who bristles at Child’s suggestion that a store-bought piecrust would be just fine for this recipe.

“Lasagne À La Française” (season seven, episode five): This is an unusually fast-paced episode, in which Child pretends to make dinner for unexpected guests. Her solution is “an Italiano dish” of the “peasant” variety that accommodates the leftover meat, vegetables, and cheese in her refrigerator. Cottage cheese, for example, subs for ricotta (or “that Italian cheese, I can’t remember the name of it”). Making it in the French style means adding “ a little bit of vermouth.” Child does have time to make more knife jokes, cautioning while slicing onions that, “fingers are not part of this lasagne recipe.”

“Gateau In A Cage” (season seven, episode nine): First watch the making of Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake, then see how Child elegantly approaches the similar task of taking a store-bought cake and making it look festive. The trick is a “cage” made by drizzling caramel over the bottom of a mixing bowl. Don’t rush it!

“To Roast A Chicken” (season seven, episode 14): Thought of in a particular way, this is one of the smuttier episodes, as Child pokes and prods a half-dozen plucked chickens of various sizes and maturity levels. A good candidate for roasting is “beyond the age of consent,” but an old lady hen is “only good for soup.” The lucky one is trussed up with ropes and needles, and there’s a close-up of Child going in deep with her fingers to pull out its wishbone before it goes into the oven. In an aside that might have sounded like science fiction 40 years ago, she cautions against supermarket chickens that have been pumped with growth hormones to make them seem older than they really are.

“To Stuff A Sausage” (season eight, episode 20):  The French Chef is not a vegan-friendly show, nor does it cater to the squeamish. Child shows how viewers can make their own phallic comestibles, reasonably pointing out that it’s the only way to know exactly what’s in them. She prepares viewers for the task of pumping meat into dead farm animals’ intestines by saying, “You’ve been eating sausage casings all your life, and do you know what they actually are? They’re made of pig’s guts and sheep’s guts! So don’t say, ‘Oh, dear’ or, ‘How horrible,’ because you’ve been eating it all along.”

“The Omelette Show” (season nine, episode 18): Looking unusually chic in a scarf and orange blouse, Child is at her giddiest in an episode culminating with a dinner party where she makes omelets for her imaginary guests as if she’s on an assembly line. At 20 seconds per omelet, complete with individualized fillings for each person, Child estimates that five chefs working individual pans could serve 300 people in 20 minutes, or the viewer could handle 60 drop-in guests all by him or herself. This is the episode to watch to get a sense of the pure joy that can come from feeding friends.

And if you like those, here are 10 more: “Beef Bourguignon” (season one, episode one); “Buche De Noël” (season three, episode 17); “Queen Of Sheba Cake” (season five, episode three); “Salad Niçoise” (season seven, episode three); “Apple Desserts” (season seven, episode 12); “The Whole Fish Story” (season eight, episode 10), “The Lobster Show” (season eight, episode 16); “Mousse Au Chocolat” (season eight, episode 18); “Terrines and Pâtés” (season nine, episode six); “Tripes À La Mode (season nine, episode 14).

Availability: Two sets of 18 episodes each, selected from throughout the series’ run, are available on DVD, and all 200-plus episodes are available on Amazon streaming. (A few seem to be duplicates.) Also, WGBH has a blog marking Child’s centennial that includes clips and a few full episodes of the show, and the Archive Of American Television has a lengthy video interview in which Child talks about the making of the series.

Next week: Kyle Ryan attempts to distill The Simpsons down to just 10 episodes. Wish him luck!

View the original article here