The incredible thing about “The Simpsons” is the opportunity to quit looking for, gracious, three or four years and return to find everything precisely where you left it. The most recent yearly Halloween-themed episode opens with an impressive (and as of now broadly coursed) political race eve gag about manipulated casting a ballot, yet that is only the tip of a contemptuous, now and again dreamlike ice shelf that spoofs “Transformers,” the “Peanuts” specials and AMC’s “Psychos,” while carving out opportunity to address Abe Lincoln’s sexuality. There joyfully stay no untouchable relics (or even lipsticked pigs) in “Simpsons”- land — which is no mean accomplishment 20-some-odd years later.Clever all things considered, the cycle in which Homer attempts to decide in favor of Barack Obama — just to have the machine continue to ring up voting forms for “President John McCain” — sums to an expendable before the three “Treehouse” portions: Transformer-like robots devastating to Springfield; Homer being selected to kill superstars so promoters can boldly take advantage of their resemblances; and a “Incredible Pumpkin” accolade, complete with (in the show’s single best gag) a gesture to why those Charlie Brown guardians generally seemed like a muffled trumpet.
As has forever been the situation, the greater part of the material in the center sending up expired illuminators like John Wayne and Edward G. Robinson will fly over the heads of kids and goes straightforwardly toward their folks — a large portion of whom were kids, eminently, back when the show debuted during the main Bush organization. Only sometimes has a series helped more from depending upon the scholars’ senses that assuming the jokes are entertaining to them, that will some way or another associate with a crowd of people.
Honestly, the series has a method of rapidly deteriorating from ironical into senseless, in a less-misrepresented form of the abundances to which “South Park” frequently succumbs. That happens in a couple of spots here, particularly as the episode’s ruined bodies (astonishing what you can pull off in activity) start to stack up.
Generally, however, this most recent “Treehouse” is one more update that “The Simpsons” has figured out how to remain surprisingly new, if not quite as imperishable as its enlivened stars — and along these lines deserving of the epic, Super Bowl-like Roman numeral assignment that “XIX” means.
