But as with all episodes of The Simpsons, this one has a very sweet ending that restores your hope in humanity. You get old and realize that your whole life is essentially pointless and meaningless and insubstantial. What is friendship? It’s as heartbreaking as the message of T2 Trainspotting. They just hang around the bar together and live out their days, but they’re not true friends. When they do track down Carl, he says those guys aren’t even friends. The episode even delves deep into the relationships between all those characters. We didn’t know that Carl had this side to him – or that he was from Iceland! So, the guys chase him there, wondering why he would do this to them. Homer, Lenny, Moe, and Carl all go in on lottery tickets and end up winning big on the jackpot, but then Carl takes off with their winnings and disappears off to Iceland, where his family is originally from. There are many periphery Simpsons characters who the writers have never properly explored, but there are few characters that have remained as two dimensional and unexplored for so many years as Carl Carlson. Not only do I like Van Halen, but I think they keep getting better.” Considering the whole episode is just a lampoon of an American subculture, “The Day the Earth Stood Cool” has a surprisingly focused plot, with barely any detours into throwaway gags, and it makes for a classic episode of the show – much better than any season 24 episode has any business being. I can’t pronounce ‘artisanal.’ I only know David Cross from the Chipmunks movie.

Homer’s realization that he’s not cool is one of the highlights of the episode: “I’m not cool. Armisen and Brownstein guest star as the Simpson family’s hip new neighbors. Instead, they had Portlandia come to them. However, then Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s brilliant Portlandia debuted and defined the city in a satirical way and became a big hit (and hired Oakley as a writer), so the episode was scrapped. This episode was originally conceived when former Simpsons writer Bill Oakley moved to Oregon and had the idea for the Simpson family to visit the hipster-infested city of Portland. Here are 10 episodes from recent seasons of The Simpsons that are as good as the show ever was. The show is sadly no longer as great as it once was and it probably never will be.

But it’s been going for almost thirty years now, so it’s only natural that the high benchmark of quality the show set for itself has started to dip. It had all the best jokes, the best characters, the best storytelling – it was just the best thing on the box, period. There used to be no question that The Simpsons was the greatest show on television.

The simpsons season 30 episode 10