There are some times you watch TV and you realise you’re watching lightning being bottled in front of your eyes. The entire fourth season of the Simpsons was one of them: every week you tuned in, knowing full well that a classic would be unveiled before your eyes. This was the season the Simpsons really hit its stride, and there’s a great run of classic Simpsons episodes: “A Streetcar Named Marge”, “Marge vs the Monorail”, “Lisa’s First Word”, and “Mr Plow”, among others. Part of this was the recognition of that the secondary characters could carry episodes: “Selma’s Choice” focused on Selma babysitting Bart and Lisa and finally deciding she didn’t want kids, settling for Jub-Jub the iguana instead. Part of it was the willingness to throw in huge production numbers - “A Streetcar Named Marge” alone has both the sidesplitting “Oh, Streetcar!” musical number and Maggie’s Great Escape-style flight from the Ayn Rand School for Tots. And the greatest part of it was, quite simply, a writing team that was on fire combined with vocal talent that was settling into its prodigious range.
The DVD commentaries really add to the value of the DVD for Simpsons obsessives. Al Jean and Mike Reiss are running the show (before they left to start The Critic), and their anecdotes are both entertaining and informative about how much thought goes into the Simpsons, particularly visual aspects such as shadows. Conan O’Brien’s presence as the first new writer on the staff leads to lots of amusing anecdotes in the commentaries - apparently (and we can tell this from his show, in part) he’s one of the funniest men around, and even when put in a crappy office he couldn’t stop doing his schtick. James L. Brooks comes across as the great TV guru, coming up, for instance with Homer’s “dying” speech to Bart in “Homer’s Triple Bypass”. And the commentaries make clear just how constantly the Simpsons uses parodies and references - from the obvious references to Citizen Kane and The Godfather, down to Little Nemo. But this was clearly a step forward in the series’ progress, building on Season 3 to create a season in which almost every show was a classic. A