David Bowie on Saturday Night Live with back-up singers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias. Back when, you know, crazy shit like this was allowed to air on broadcast television.



"OK," you're saying, "a little weird maybe, but so what?" Ah, let's check out the second performance from that evening, shall we?



I know the Internet has largely supplanted TV as a format for weirdness and creativity, but it's so much more fragmented an experience I think something's really been lost.

This year was the year I officially decided to stop watching The Simpsons. I haven't watched more than maybe two or three new episodes per season for, oh, the last 5-7 years, but this year I formally quit. This is a moment of quiet sadness for me. I don't know what The Simpsons means to those of you who were too young to appreciate the earlier seasons, for whom the show has always existed, but I was right on the cusp of that generation that came of age with the show, where every Thursday night between September and May promised a new revelation, a new barrage of hitherto-undreamed-of hilarity. You could tell who the cool kids were at school by who was talking about last night's episode the next day.

I'm glad I quit while I was ahead. Apparently the show has a new opening now, made to coincide with the switch to high-definition TV:



That's two minutes and one second of pure affrontery. But in some ways, it's also a perfect encapsulation of what the show has become: far more concerned with prettifying the animation while simultaneously hurling a huge volume of lame jokes at us in the vain hope that a few will stick. Not to mention the continued grilling of sacred cows, or in this case crows. For the entire course of the show's run, we've never seen the "nuclear power plant crow" that caws every time a scene opens on the plant. Now you'll see it every week. I won't. For me, I'll just pretend The Simpsons went off the air ten years ago, when it should have, and continue to enjoy my DVD collections of the first ten seasons. I won't be buying any more.

If nothing else, I suppose the show can now serve as some sort of massive counter-example for the ages, a demonstration of the wisdom of the choice to quit while one is ahead (viz. the British Office...and hopefully the American one too). Of course, no one can say we didn't see this coming. Right, Troy McClure?

"Who knows what adventures they'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable?" --"The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" (Original airdate December 3rd, 1995.)