The Gay Nineties

I finally got around to checking out Hulu. It's pretty cool and all, but that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I wound up watching a recent episode of The Simpsons that essentially rewrote the entire history of the series. It was kind of shocking, though I've been paying so little attention to The Simpsons lately that perhaps this kind of stuff is happening on weekly basis now. In case you don't feel like watching the episode, it's a flashback to Homer and Marge's post-high school courtship, during the early 1990s. The Simpsons has often taken a fairly laid-back approach to geography and the passage of time, and the show has even pointed out its own inconsistencies for a laugh a few times, but as far as I know, the show had always treated the past as a fixed point a time. I guess that's no longer the case. I'm not angry or anything, the Simpsons is still one of the all-time great TV shows, even if it's gotten a bit long in the tooth as of late. Still, it is a little disappointing that they felt the need to upend the entire Simpsons space-time continuum just to cram in a few lame jokes about grunge rock, political correctness, and Bill Clinton.