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    Pamela Hayden, the Voice of Bart’s Friend Milhouse, Retires From ‘The Simpsons’

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    Ms. Hayden voiced many “Simpsons” characters since the show started in 1989. She’s most famously the voice of Bart’s awkward 10-year-old best friend.Pamela Hayden, who has voiced characters on “The Simpsons” since it began in 1989 and famously played Bart’s nerdy best friend Milhouse Van Houten, announced on Wednesday that she was retiring from the show.Ms. Hayden, 70, said on her Facebook page that after 35 years she would stop performing on “The Simpsons” and would “pursue other creative outlets.” Episode seven of season 36, scheduled to air on Nov. 24, will be her final episode.“One thing that I love about Milhouse is he’s always getting knocked down but he keeps getting up,” Ms. Hayden said in a tribute video posted on “The Simpsons” social media pages. “I love the little guy.”Credited with voicing dozens of Simpson’s characters, including one of Milhouse’s bullies, Jimbo Jones, Ms. Hayden’s most famous character is Milhouse. His blue hair and big eyes are accentuated with large, round glasses. The clumsy, shy 10-year-old is one of the most endearing characters in Springfield, thanks in part to his halting, sheepish voice and his stubborn resilience.Milhouse, named after former President Richard Milhous Nixon, often finds himself following his best friend, Bart, into trouble as a gullible sidekick. Throughout the show, Milhouse often cites his mother’s concerns for his safety as an excuse to not go on adventures. In one instance, Milhouse relayed that his mother “says solving riddles is an asthma trigger.”Hayden, left, has voiced the character of Milhouse and others for 35 years.FOXOne adventure he does agree to is playing “Fallout Boy” to Bart’s “Radioactive Man.” The band Fallout Boy took its name from the character.In addition to her role in “The Simpsons” universe — which includes parts in a movie, the television show and video games — Ms. Hayden has several credits outside the series. She voiced a character for a 2015 Lego video game and was a main voice in “Lloyd in Space,” a Disney cartoon centered on a child alien that ran for four seasons from 2001-2004. “Pamela gave us tons of laughs with Milhouse, the hapless kid with the biggest nose in Springfield,” Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” said in a statement. “She made Milhouse hilarious and real, and we will miss her.”A spokesman for Fox Television did not immediately respond on Wednesday to an email seeking comment.It was not immediately clear what the future holds for Milhouse or Ms. Hayden’s other characters for the rest of its 36th season. Tim Curtis, a representative for Ms. Hayden, said in an email that the network would “start exploring recasting soon.”“The Simpsons” has not yet been renewed for a 37th season, Variety Magazine reported.In the tribute video to Ms. Hayden that was posted on “The Simpsons” social media accounts, Ms. Hayden said that Milhouse provides a great life lesson in perseverance and optimism.“Everything’s coming up Milhouse!” the boy shouts with glee in one scene while water floods his room. More

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      A ‘Simpsons’ Joke Comes True for Cypress Hill

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      The famed California hip-hop group played with the London Symphony Orchestra — 28 years after “The Simpsons” dreamed up the collaboration.There is now an answer to at least one chicken-or-egg “Simpsons” prophesy: The episode did come first.But then, 28 years later, came the concert.“Simpsons” fans mixed with Cypress Hill fans on Wednesday at the Royal Albert Hall, a stately concert venue in the English capital, for a one-night-only collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and the American hip-hop group. Some were there for beats. Others had come to see a joke become a reality.“We came for the meme,” said Nick Brady, 30, who was with his brother. “We stayed for the music.”The evening had been foretold by a 1996 episode of “The Simpsons,” called “Homerpalooza,” in which Homer Simpson takes his family to a festival and then falls in with the stars.In the TV show, a festival employee arrives in a backstage area flanked by tuxedo-clad musicians. “Who is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra?” he calls out. “Somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra … possibly while high? Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction.”The hip-hop group huddles, whispering. Then, thinking fast, one says: “Uh, yeah, yeah, we think we did. Uh, do you know ‘Insane In The Brain’?”“We mostly know classical,” one orchestra member says, in a posh British accent. “But we could give it a shot.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is Homer Simpson a Good Dad Now?

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      In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” Homer suggested he would abandon one of his best-known bits: throttling his son. It is the latest example of the show tailoring itself to evolving tastes.Homer Simpson may be maturing, or so he says.The character, voiced by Dan Castellaneta, hinted that he would no longer choke his son, Bart, appearing to acknowledge that one of the oldest recurring bits on “The Simpsons” was a clear form of animated child abuse that was played for laughs.In the third episode of the current season, the show’s 35th, titled “McMansion & Wife,” Homer meets a neighbor who compliments the grip on his handshake.“See Marge? Strangling the boy has paid off,” Homer says to his wife in the episode, which aired on Oct. 22. “Just kidding. I don’t do that anymore. Times have changed.”It was not clear whether this signaled a lasting shift in the show, which was renewed for a 36th season this year. A spokesman for Fox, the network that has long aired “The Simpsons,” declined to comment.“The Simpsons,” created by Matt Groening, has made moves in recent years to update its humor to fit with evolving standards. In 2020, Hank Azaria said he would no longer voice the character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian convenience store owner who became known for his catchphrase, “Thank you! Come again.”Apu had long been a sore point among viewers of Indian descent, many of whom viewed the character, which Azaria had voiced since 1990, as nothing more than a racist caricature. Azaria has said the voice was inspired by South Asian clerks he heard growing up in New York, as well as Peter Sellers in the 1968 film “The Party.”The discussion took off in the public sphere after the release of the 2017 documentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu spoke to other Indian American actors and performers who said the character had become emblematic of the marginalization they faced in the entertainment industry.But there isn’t a consensus among people of South Asian descent, as evidenced by the Indian American comedian Akaash Singh, who argued in a 2022 YouTube special titled “Bring Back Apu” that the character was a positive portrayal of an immigrant story. Apu has not been seen since Season 33.The “Simpsons” creative team responded to Kondabolu’s documentary through the show, then in its 29th season, in a 2018 episode titled “No Good Read Goes Unpunished.” In the episode, Lisa Simpson breaks the fourth wall and says: “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?”The shot immediately pans to a framed picture of Apu. Marge chimes in and says, “Some things will be dealt with at a later date,” to which Lisa replies, “If at all.”The show has long been self-referential, and has been so with the choking bit on several occasions. One episode — “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing,” from Season 22 — examines the roots of Homer’s choking impulses, with the help of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (as himself) and Paul Rudd (as a therapist). A newly empathetic Homer swears to never choke Bart again, which then sends Bart on a spree of bad behavior, as he is no longer afraid of his father’s rage.The Season 11 finale, titled “Behind the Laughter,” was a parody of the VH1 documentary series “Behind the Music.” After Homer is shown choking Bart, he says, “And that horrible act of child abuse became one of our beloved running gags!” More

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      Best TV Episodes of 2022

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      TV in the streaming era is an endless feast. This year, series like “Barry,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Pachinko,” “Station Eleven” and “This Fool” offered some of the best bites.TV can be a lot of different things these days. So can a TV episode: It can be a “chapter” of a visual novel, a revelatory stand-up special or a straight-up sitcom installment.You’ll find all of those and more in our choices of some of the best individual pieces we’ve sampled this year. Television in 2022 may have been all about the binge, but sometimes what you remember most about a feast is simply that one perfect bite. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Amber Brown’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 3: ‘No Place Like Two Homes’Aw man, I loved this light tween drama about a sixth grader whose parents are newly divorced. In the show’s third episode, Amber (Carsyn Rose) is trying to build up the courage to audition for the school play — she hopes to follow in her father’s drama-club footsteps so they can bond more now that he’s moved back to town. “Do you think he likes me?” she asks her best friend. Of course, her friend says. He’s your father; he loves you. “Well, I know he loves me,” Amber replies. “I just wonder if he likes me.” It’s this kind of brutal, beautiful poignancy that makes the show so special. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) MARGARET LYONS“710N,” from the third season of “Barry,” included some of the year’s most thrilling action sequences.HBO‘Barry’ (HBO)Season 3, Episode 6: ‘710N’More than one scene from this stunner — a high-speed motorcycle chase through a traffic jam, a high-firepower shootout at a car dealership — would have been the high point of any other series. But there was more to “710N” than simply showing off Bill Hader’s directing chops. The action sequences, simultaneously thrilling, slapstick and bathetic, served the larger purpose of “Barry,” to tell the story of an antihero without celebrating his antiheroism. (Streaming on HBO Max.) PONIEWOZIK‘Black Bird’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 4: ‘WhatsHerName’Dennis Lehane’s mini-series was a showcase for the fine and distinctive actor Paul Walter Hauser, who plays Larry Hall, a convicted kidnapper and suspected serial killer who is close to having his convictions overturned and walking free. It is nominally the story (based on an autobiographical novel) of another convict, played by Taron Egerton, who makes a deal to befriend Hall and compromise him. But Hauser’s soft, sibilant, weirdly sexy performance is all that matters. In the fourth episode, Hall is put in charge of cleaning up after a prison riot (itself a shocking yet poetic spasm of violence, as directed by Jim McKay), and Hauser conveys a deep, narcissistic satisfaction that puts cleanliness next to beastliness. (Streaming on Apple TV+) MIKE HALEShauna Higgins, left, and Dearbhaile McKinney in “Derry Girls.” An episode this season flashed back to when the parents on the show were rebellious teens.Netflix‘Derry Girls’ (Netflix)Season 3, Episode 5Lisa McGee’s rowdy Northern Irish comedy used a high school reunion to turn its clock back from the 1990s to the 1970s, visiting the adolescence of its Derry Mums. The half-hour brought in a new cast to play its adult characters as punk-era teens, but McGee established such a voice and sense of character over three short seasons that you could instantly recognize the elders in their younger versions (and see their daughters in them as well). The tart, heartfelt episode underscored how teenage rebellions, like some political ones, cut across generations. PONIEWOZIK‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ (FX on Hulu)Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Me-Time’This limited series worked hard to re-create the pyrotechnics of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel, from the upside-down shots that mimicked the topsy-turvy imagery of the book cover to a copious use of voice-over. (Brodesser-Akner, who created the series and wrote this episode, is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.) Here, it pulled off the novel’s signature reversal — telling the title character’s divorce story from the perspective of his wife — using the tools of the screen, in particular a wrenching performance by Claire Danes, an emotional volcano who has rarely erupted better. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal’ (Adult Swim)Season 2, Episodes 7-9: ‘The Colossaeus’ (parts I, II and III)In its second season, “Primal” expanded its scope and time frame, dipping into 19th-century England for an episode and introducing various other clans to our cave man and dinosaur protagonists. But it was this three-part blood bath, culminating in a triumphant slave rebellion at sea, that exemplified the show’s tender nuance and also its unrelenting savagery. It was a reminder that while cartoon violence can be exhausting and meaningless in live-action shows, it can still be mesmerizing and meaningful when done where it belongs. “Primal” is almost entirely wordless, and its characters rarely rely on gesture; instead, their ideas are communicated through expression, breath and attention. And yet, few other shows are able to capture passion and pain with such precision, an entire life story told through one furrowed brow. (Streaming on HBO Max.) LYONSIman Vellani, right, with Aramis Knight, plays a teenager with superpowers in “Ms. Marvel.”Disney+‘Ms. Marvel’ (Disney+)Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Time and Again’This “Spider-Man”-like series about Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a Jersey City 16-year-old in a working-class immigrant family who discovers that she has superpowers, is the most charming and likable of the Marvel shows for Disney+ so far. The obligatory flashback episode revealing how Kamala came by her powers was set during the partition of India and Pakistan; the incorporation of that fraught history could easily have led to something labored and stiff, but in the hands of the writer Fatimah Asghar and the director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy it was ingenious and surprisingly moving. (Streaming on Disney+) HALE‘Pachinko’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 7The penultimate episode of this Min Jin Lee novel adaptation, set in and around the 1923 Yokohama earthquake, is staggering in its scope and rendering of cataclysm. But it’s equally, quietly devastating in how its expands the depiction of a key character: Koh Hansu (Lee Minho), introduced in the series as a menacing, charismatic gangster. Laying out how he began as a young math tutor with hopes for a legitimate life, then fell onto his path through disaster and circumstance, “Chapter 7” connects him to the series’s other Korean exiles making hard choices in an unwelcoming Japan. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) PONIEWOZIK‘Rothaniel’ (HBO)A lot of “confessional” comedy has ground itself into a rut in recent years. But the comedian Jerrod Carmichael breathes new life into the paradigm with this lyrical and restrained special, in which he comes out as gay and explores his fraught relationship with his family. Carmichael weaves together sorrow and humor, insight and fear, love and disappointment, unraveling family secrets and allowing for messy and unresolved truths to all exist at once. (Streaming on HBO Max.) LYONSAn episode of “The Simpsons,” seemingly about Lisa and Bart in the scouts, gave way to a rapid-fire series of gags.Fox‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)Season 34, Episode 3: ‘Lisa the Boy Scout’A seemingly routine episode of “The Simpsons” is hijacked by hackers (wearing masks that are a frightening combination of Guy Fawkes and Homer Simpson) who demand a $20 million ransom; until it is paid, they will broadcast a stream of “Simpsons” outtakes “so ill-conceived, so idiotic that their exposure would destroy the value of the very I.P. itself.” Luckily, no one pays, and we get to see a lovingly assembled panoply of blackout sketches, written by Dan Greaney and directed by Timothy Bailey, ranging across 34 seasons of characters and animation styles. One highlight: a two-hander for the Sea Captain and Groundskeeper Willie whose dialogue consists entirely of “Yar” and “Aye.” (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Slow Horses’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Bad Tradecraft’Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, “Slow Horses” — set in a fictional MI5 office where out-of-favor agents pass their time doing busy work — is in one sense a sendup of John le Carré’s moody, cerebral tales of the postwar British intelligence services. But it’s also a completely credible spy thriller, with complicated, believable twists and well executed action. The first season’s third episode, written by Will Smith and directed by James Hawes, best encapsulated the show’s seesawing mix of sardonic humor, deft characterization and sometimes brutal suspense. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) HALE‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max)Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Dr. Chaudhary’TV’s sweetest apocalypse story began just before the holidays last year, so it was the gift that kept on giving in early 2022. The penultimate episode, which found Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) impersonating a doctor in a big-box-store-turned-birthing-center, was an inventive expression of the show’s oddly hopeful vision: the first sparks of humanity’s future being kindled amid the mundane ruins of its past. Like the traveling actors who make the backbone of this story, Jeevan puts on a performance that ends up becoming real and restorative. (Streaming on HBO Max.) PONIEWOZIKAn episode of “This Fool” used “Austin Powers” references to make a point about the importance of change.Hulu‘This Fool’ (Hulu)Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Sandy Says’The closing seconds of this episode-long homage to “Austin Powers” were perhaps the most satisfying payoff I saw this year. “Sandy Says” exemplifies the tricky tone “This Fool” is able to strike, combining the structure of traditional sitcoms with the style of auteur comedies, hitting a sweet spot of goofy and clever. Luis (Frankie Quinones), newly out of prison, is in annoying-eighth-grader mode with his constant “Austin Powers” references, and the episode is packed with shagadelic Easter eggs before Luis explains part of why the movie means so much to him. “I’m tired of wasting time living in the past,” he says. “Ideally, we’ll change. The world is ever-changing, homey. I gotta change with it. That’s what ‘Austin Powers’ is all about. You know, I used to think that movie was a comedy. But now I know, it’s a tragedy.” (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONS‘This Is Us’ (NBC)Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Don’t Let Me Keep You’“This Is Us” did a lot of traveling over its six-season run — through multiple family trees, across the divide of death, from the future to the deep past. But it was often at its best when focused on one story, here Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) trip to Ohio to attend his mother’s funeral and reckon with the legacy of his abusive father. It’s a showcase for Ventimiglia, who anchored a big-feeling show through his reserved portrayal of a father, husband and son driven to fix things. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK More

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      A Thanksgiving Binge Menu: 7 Fall Shows You Might Have Slept On

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      If your holiday plans don’t include passing out in front of a football game.My childhood Thanksgivings involved television in a very specific sense: After the big meal, all the men in the family would retire to the living room and promptly fall asleep in front of a football game.The ratings for the National Football League being what they are, there are clearly still plenty of people who will spend Thursday with the Lions and Vikings and Bills, oh my, whether conscious or not. But if your taste in entertainment runs toward something less concussive, you could use those free hours to catch up on shows you missed during the frantic fall months. Here is a holiday menu of recent series worth discovering or returning to.‘Entrapped’The single season of the Icelandic crime drama “Entrapped” that you’ll find on Netflix is actually the third season of a series better known as “Trapped,” created by the filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur; the first two installments, from 2016 and 2019, are available from Amazon Prime Video. But “Entrapped,” whose story begins in a clash between a biker gang and an Icelandic religious sect, can be enjoyed on its own. The mystery is free-standing, and in any case the series has always been less about the particulars of murder than about the cranky, dour nobility of Andri, the cop played with exquisite stolidity by Olafur Darri Olafsson. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Little Demon’The creators of this animated coming-of-age comedy on FXX — Darcy Fowler, Seth Kirschner and Kieran Valla — are all actors as well as writers, and that shows in the believability of the characters who populate its casually raunchy, hex-positive universe. Chrissy (Lucy DeVito) is the angry, alienated teenage daughter of a single mom, Laura (Aubrey Plaza); the twist is that her family is broken because her dad (Lucy DeVito’s real-life father, Danny) is literally Satan. The show was a little unfocused and ordinary at first, but around the middle of its 10-episode season, it morphed into a tough and genuinely touching family saga that just happened to involve a lot of interdimensional sex and liquefying of souls. (Streaming on Hulu.)“Pantheon” is a somewhat “Matrix”-like story about uploading human consciousness to the cloud.Titmouse Inc/AMC‘Pantheon’Based on short stories by the rising science fiction star Ken Liu, “Pantheon” is a story about the consequences of uploading human consciousness to the cloud that has a family resemblance to “The Matrix.” But its effectiveness comes from its modesty and seriousness of purpose — the way it stays close to the earth while imagining limitless digital worlds. (It’s also a corporate-conspiracy thriller in which the corporation isn’t always the worst actor on the stage.) The investigations and battles in this animated drama on AMC+ take place mostly in virtual-reality landscapes while the non-virtual characters — including a feisty, heroic teenager (Katie Chang) and her sometime ally, a preternaturally gifted hacker (Paul Dano) — pace around their living rooms wearing headsets. There’s still time to binge the eight episodes of the first season before the second and final season arrives next year. (Streaming on AMC+ and Amazon Prime Video.)‘The Serpent Queen’Starz has always made room for costume dramas that are as much about shedding costumes as they are about fidelity to any recorded history. (See “Spartacus,” “The White Princess,” “The Spanish Princess,” “Black Sails,” “Outlander,” et al.) “The Serpent Queen,” starring Samantha Morton as Catherine de Medici, is in this tradition; it’s a rock ’n’ roll historical drama that puts period dress on characters who move and talk with thoroughly modern sensibilities (sometimes straight into the camera), and matches a 16th-century look with a contemporary pop sound. And it manages to not only avoid being outright irritating, but to be surprisingly entertaining, largely because of Morton’s shrewd, steely performance as the overachieving Catherine. Already the queen of France in the show’s present, she schemes and politicks while recounting her colorful history to a servant girl she takes on as her personal maid (Sennia Nanua). (Streaming on Starz.)Charlie Hunnam, left, and Shubham Saraf in a scene from “Shantaram,” based on the autobiographical novel from Gregory David Roberts. Roland Neveu/Apple TV+‘Shantaram’In his first TV series since his seven-season run on “Sons of Anarchy,” Charlie Hunnam plays an escaped Australian convict who lands in 1980s Bombay — a few steps ahead of the police, embroiled with local criminals and bewitched by a mysterious Swiss beauty (Antonia Desplat). Based on an autobiographical novel by Gregory David Roberts, this Apple TV+ series presents the familiar elements of bohemian adventure and peril in warm climates with style and some genuine tension. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)‘The Simpsons’Is there life after 30? There is for “The Simpsons,” which has felt rejuvenated in its 34th year on Fox. The episode that has received all the attention is “Lisa the Boy Scout” from Oct. 9, a hugely enjoyable exercise in metafoolery. But the season has been sharp week in and week out. “The King of Nice,” in which Krusty the Clown reinvents himself as a cuddly, dancing daytime talk show host — and Marge discovers her true calling as his producer — is a tightly assembled, perfectly pitched satire; “From Beer to Paternity,” in which Homer and Lisa go on a road trip with Duffman to help repair his relationship with his daughter, is unexpectedly moving. High hopes for Sunday’s episode, the season’s ninth, which bears the promising title “When Nelson Met Lisa.” (Streaming on Hulu.)A scene from the Netflix reboot of “Unsolved Mysteries.”Netflix‘Unsolved Mysteries’When Netflix and the “Stranger Things” executive producer Shawn Levy rebooted this venerable true-crime series in 2020, they classed it up, giving it an overhaul that moved it in a more documentary direction — a deliberate pace, a calm demeanor, no reliance on narration. (Robert Stack, the show’s longtime host, is a shadowy presence in the opening credits.) You suspect that someone involved is a big fan of Errol Morris; the investigations may not be any more thorough or balanced than those in lower-rent cable shows, but there’s an elegance to the presentation that sucks you in. The third season, which has grown to nine episodes, continues the practice of mixing in the occasional U.F.O. sighting among the steady diet of unsolved deaths. (Streaming on Netflix.) More

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      ‘Fall TV’ Is Dead. But Buzz Will Always Be With Us.

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      Two television critics ponder what fall TV even means in the streaming era and discuss the series they’re most looking forward to this season.Each fall brings an onslaught of new television shows, but now so does every other season of the year. As another autumn approaches, James Poniewozik and Margaret Lyons, television critics at The New York Times, discussed what “fall TV” even means in the streaming era, along with the new and returning series they’re most looking forward to.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Remember fall TV? I do!I am old enough to remember when there was not just fall TV season, but fall-TV-season season. Come summer’s end, the big networks would roll out splashy prime-time TV preview specials that had the fresh, promising smell of new school supplies. My pop-cultural Christmas was the Saturday-morning preview special, when Kristy McNichol or Kaptain Kool and the Kongs would unveil the latest junk food for preteen eyeballs.Now, what even is fall? This year, big premieres like HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” on Amazon, will have landed before Labor Day. I’m not even talking about the eternal “death of broadcast TV” here — it’s still around and even has a few decent shows — but just the general shift in how and when people watch new TV. In the streaming era, premiere season (which really is all year round) is less about what you’re going to watch immediately, and more about adding to your to-do list of shows to watch eventually.I mean, it still feels like fall, by the rhythm of the sidereal calendar I had imprinted in me by Sid and Marty Krofft. But if fall falls in a forest of year-round content, does it make a sound?Sheryl Lee Ralph, left, and Janelle James in “Abbot Elementary.” The acclaimed ABC sitcom returns in September for its second season.Gilles Mingasson/ABCMARGARET LYONS In addition to the year-round scheduling and overall increase in the number of new shows each year, new series aren’t just competing against one another — they’re up against the entire streaming catalog. The buffet has gotten bigger and more elaborate, but also the kitchen is open and the pantry is stocked, and you know how to cook.Do we lose anything when we “lose” “fall TV”? Pour one out for the people who for some reason relish being marketed to en masse, but from where I sit (on the couch), year-round scheduling is good! I want to be delighted by a show that comes out the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day; I want intense summer fare for muggy nights. Buzz knows no season, and schedule diffusion enables smaller shows that might have been buried during glut times to break through during more fallow weeks.Reboot culture has given us the end of endings. I wonder if streaming and year-round scheduling contribute to the end of beginnings.PONIEWOZIK Yes, chef! (Sorry. Kitchen metaphor = obligatory “The Bear” reference. I don’t make the rules.)The networks’ traditional approach of premiering dang near everything on TV the week after the Emmys was not great either for TV watchers or TV makers. So much material at once! So many cancellations! And then vast periods of nothing. Now there is always TV. But also, There. Is. Always. TV. If I’m nostalgic for anything, it’s that rare seasonal sugar rush of “My shows are coming back!”Yet I still feel a tiny bit of that. “Abbott Elementary” — a straight-up, joke-packed broadcast sitcom that makes a bunch of episodes a year and is actually good — is coming back on ABC in September, just as the framers of the Constitution intended. I’m glad we now have cable and streaming shows of all lengths and styles (again, I watched “The Bear”), but it’s nice to see the old machine can still occasionally work.Anything you’re looking forward to? Or is “forward” meaningless in the eternal present of streaming?A new season of “The White Lotus,” premiering in October, is set in Italy. With, from left, Michael Imperioli, Adam DiMarco and F. Murray Abraham.Fabio Lovino/HBOLYONS I think “Abbott Elementary” is a good example of an ambiguous beginning: ABC aired a preview of “Abbott Elementary” in December, after which the episode was available on Hulu, and then the pilot re-aired in January — a one-off on a Monday before the show moved to its Tuesday time slot for the remainder of its run. Now it’s getting a well-deserved fancier rollout, segueing from sleeper hit to crown jewel; a reintroduction of sorts.In terms of looking forward, I’m counting the days for the returns of Apple TV+’s “Mythic Quest,” IFC’s “Sherman’s Showcase” and “Los Espookys” on HBO. The final seasons of “Atlanta” on FX and “The Good Fight” on Paramount+ are nigh.I’m also wondering if we’re about to go through another vampire moment, with “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire,” on AMC, and Showtime’s series adaptation of “Let the Right One In” both coming out this fall. And I am curious about Susan Sarandon and Hilary Swank both starring in network dramas, of all things (Fox’s “Monarch” and ABC’s “Alaska Daily,” respectively). My guess is our tastes overlap pretty heavily here.PONIEWOZIK Indeed, “Atlanta” and “The Good Fight” are two of the shows I’m most anticipating this season. Both captured, in very different ways, the surrealness of life in America this past six years or so.I’m hoping “The White Lotus,” on HBO, can be as strong as an ongoing anthology as it was when I thought it would be a one-off limited series. And as a former ’80s fantasy nerd, I’m at least … curious about the Disney+ series version of “Willow.” The Ron Howard movie, which opened in theaters in 1988, was not the blockbuster its producers hoped it would be. (Its current TV legacy is lending a name to a character, Elora Danan, on FX’s “Reservation Dogs.”) Now that fantasy is almost as ubiquitous a genre as cop shows, maybe its time has finally come.As always, I also just want to laugh. So I agree about “Sherman’s Showcase” — welcome back, it has been too long!Warwick Davis returns for a series version of “Willow,” premiering in November on Disney+. (With Graham Hughes, right.)Lucasfilm/Disney+LYONS Yes, “Willow” is very high on my “hmmm” list, as well. Is this a title people have been clamoring for? Perhaps!Another thing I wonder about is whether the diminished primacy of the fall season is part of television becoming less standardized in general. How many episodes are in a “season”? How long do shows go between seasons? How many seasons do we consider a good run? Are there still prestigious time slots or needle-moving lead-ins? What are the rules?PONIEWOZIK Things were simpler when the rule was, “You make TV from September to May, and you keep doing it until the ratings give out.” It’s better, in theory, that shows can now be the length that a story requires. In practice, TV isn’t always sure what size it should be anymore.Some invisible standards committee recently decided that eight to 10 episodes is the optimal length for a streaming series. Often, it is! (I was one of those critics who used to praise British TV for making two six-episode, no-filler seasons and calling it a day.) But sometimes a show feels compressed. I really liked Jason Katims’s “As We See It” for eight episodes on Amazon, but it felt like it once would have been a 22-episode Jason Katims dramedy on NBC.On the more-is-not-always-more front, this fall we’ll get the finale of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which began in the first Obama administration, when Netflix was somewhere you watched old movies. I don’t know how many marathon runs like that we’ll see again.Christine Baranski in “The Good Fight,” back for its final season in September.Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+LYONS And of course “The Walking Dead” can’t actually die: There are already two current spinoffs and a few more in the works.I doubt we will see another show with that kind of ratings success. But I think the long-running series is a hallmark of network and cable now, which both sometimes feel like they’re mostly forever shows. “The Simpsons” is going into its 34th season, “Law & Order: SVU” into its 24th, “NCIS” into its 20th and “Grey’s Anatomy” into its 19th. “The Challenge” debuted in 1998 and was recently renewed for a 38th and 39th season.“South Park” is in its 25th season. “Bob’s Burgers” is going into its 13th and “The Goldbergs” into its 10th. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has been airing on and off since 2000. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” started in 2005. “The Real Housewives of Orange County” started in 2006 and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2007. These are all still prime-time mainstays!Streaming platforms haven’t been around long enough to have any truly long-running shows, but I wonder if their models are designed to ever generate or support one. Is “Love Is Blind” going to follow a “Bachelor”/“Bachelorette” model and outlive us all? Stranger things have happened … but also, “Stranger Things” has happened, and it’s hard to picture that show running for 10 seasons.PONIEWOZIK I don’t know, those last “Stranger Things” episodes sure felt 10 seasons long.But yeah, there’s a divide between your deathless animated sitcoms, procedurals and game/reality shows — I’ll be there for “Survivor” Season 43 — and highly serial shows, which have started to tend toward shorter runs or one-season limited series. Maybe “L.O.T.R.” could bring back the long-running serial. Elves are immortal!And then there’s … well, whatever Disney’s Marvel and “Star Wars” shows are. They’re sort of anthological, often running a single season each. But they’re also chapters in these interconnected, multiplatform, decades-spanning intellectual-property blobs, which are both sprawling and static. You know what to expect from the brand, and that’s what they give you. I had hoped these mega franchises might be freer to be weird and experimental on TV, but now “WandaVision” seems like the exception.Film critics wonder whether movies in the streaming era are becoming TV. Maybe — at least when it comes to recycling big-ticket I.P. — TV is becoming the movies. More

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      Review: In ‘Mr. Burns,’ Apocalypse Now, With ‘The Simpsons’ and Songs

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      Anne Washburn’s 2012 play about a post-pandemic society reckoning with loss has not aged at all, our critic writes.Stories, like viruses, are transmissible. In the brain, in the blood, they mutate and change. Tragedies become comedies; dramas become myths. And in Anne Washburn’s visionary and wackadoo “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” revived by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, an episode of “The Simpsons” becomes an opera and that opera becomes a way for a post-apocalyptic society to reckon with all it has lost.After a devastating contagion and concomitant nuclear meltdowns, the American population has shrunk to maybe a million, maybe half that. In the first act, set in the very near future, somewhere in the northeast, a few survivors have gathered around what should be a campfire (did the fire marshal not allow it?) to tell stories. Or as on this night, one particular story. Collectively, they piece together the events and jokes of “Cape Feare,” a Season 5 episode of “The Simpsons.”Recalling Sideshow Bob’s flourishes and Homer’s doofus behavior connects them to a lost world in a way that feels bearable. Real memories are too painful. Memories of a television show — in a time when televisions no longer work — are what they can manage. In the second act, these scattershot remembrances have been refashioned into a revue. The third act, set decades later and entirely sung through, with music from the composer Michael Friedman, transmutes them further.“Mr. Burns” debuted in May 2012 at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, and then moved to Playwrights Horizons. Sept. 11 was more vivid in the cultural memory a decade ago. One passage includes a haunting reference to twin towers of light. But with the pandemic, we have a new cataclysm to absorb, which makes “Mr. Burns,” directed by the festival’s artistic director, Davis McCallum, a timely selection. (Will there always be some new disaster? Will this play always seem of the moment? Yes. Probably. Ugh.) In its invention, its cool ruthlessness, its interrogation of why and how we use narrative, it has not aged at all.Sean McNall, Merritt Janson, Quintero, Karaman, Ota, and Zack Fine. With three-quarter seating, the director and his designers sometimes struggle to make the action visible to all.T. Charles EricksonIn some ways, the festival, with its sandy floor and jaunty tent, provides an ideal location. The opening at the back of the tent looks out into some old-growth trees. Even considering the mowed lawn — a concession to picnickers and the tick-averse — it suggests what the landscape might look like if nature made a comeback. (If the vista had shown the recently decommissioned Indian Point nuclear plant, located just down the Hudson, that might have been even more evocative.) But the play was built for a proscenium stage, not three-quarter seating, and McCallum and his designers sometimes struggle to make the action visible to all, particularly in the final act.The acting is uneven here, the rhythms sometimes off, though Sean McNall, a festival veteran, has a terrific turn as a newcomer in the first act, and Merritt Janson, a welcome Off-Broadway presence, does pointed and specific work as an actor-manager in the second. Zachary Fine, who operates on a very low-key in the first two acts, triumphs in the third. During that act, a chorus member banged a drum straight into my ear, which I could have done without.And yet, if you are in the area, and you can book a seat away from that drum, you should see “Mr. Burns.” Here’s why: It seems to me that no new work of art — theater, television, film, fiction — produced in these past few years has really represented the pandemic, at least as I’ve experienced it. Sometimes the more on the nose they were (“Station Eleven,” say) the further away they felt.“Mr. Burns” doesn’t exactly capture it either, but it captures something else. In these past two years, when I have had a moment of downtime, I have turned to comedies and procedurals, shows that made the world feel regular and knowable. “Mr. Burns” explores the ways that we use stories, even seemingly irrelevant stories, to make sense of our lives. “Mr. Burns” is a play about where we find comfort and it is also, more chillingly, about the limits of that comfort, about how reality can intrude even before the credits roll.Reality sometimes intruded, even here, out of the city, out of doors. The show’s opening had been delayed owing to coronavirus cases among the cast. The spectators closest to the actors were asked to wear masks; most did. Still, we could lose ourselves for a while, in imagining how a society much like ours might handle a disaster much worse than this one, how we might or might not come through it. To watch this feels pleasurable and painful and mysterious and weird. Or to put it another way: D’Oh.Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric PlayThrough Sept. 17 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Garrison, N.Y.; hvshakespeare.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      The Best TV Episodes of 2021

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      Among the thousands of hours of television that came out this year, episodes of “Call My Agent,” “For All Mankind,” “Mythic Quest,” “Pose” and “WandaVision,” among others, stood out.From left, “Dave,” PEN15” and “Genius: Aretha” put out some of TV’s best episodes of the year.From left: Byron Cohen/FX; Hulu; Richard DuCree/National GeographicTelevision today comes in big portions, as anyone who spent seven-plus hours with the Beatles over Thanksgiving weekend can attest. But just as a marathon jam session can yield a few tight singles, the most memorable TV is still often the well-crafted individual episode. As Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I end another year’s binge as TV critics for The New York Times, here are a few of the installments from 2021 that topped our personal hit parades. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Call My Agent!’ (Netflix)‘Sigourney’More than 30 European actors — including stars like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno — have graciously and often mercilessly lampooned themselves in this French dramedy, playing clients or prospective clients or angry former clients of the fictional talent agency ASK. In this Season 4 episode, an American stepped in, and Sigourney Weaver, speaking more than passable French and playing herself as an utterly charming manipulator, was flawless. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘City of Ghosts’‘Bob & Nancy’Plenty of children’s shows are cute but “City of Ghosts” is also beautiful, and its poetic wistfulness about Los Angeles would be at home on a premium cable drama. Instead it’s in this plucky, naturalistic cartoon about ghost-hunting kids who have a podcast. I loved every episode of this show. But I picked “Bob & Nancy” because it’s about a marionette theater, and thus it toys with ideas of animating the inanimate — rich ground for a show in touch with the spirit realm. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSHarley Quinn Smith in the finale of “Cruel Summer,” which offered both a happy ending and a surprising twist.Freeform/Bill Matlock‘Cruel Summer’‘Hostile Witness’This teen kidnapping mystery took all the hallmarks of prestige-y crime shows — split timelines, dark lighting, tangential secrets — and repackaged them with a kicky ’90s YA flare. It was one of the juicy highlights of the summer. But shows like this are only as good as their finales, and “Cruel Summer” managed the trick of both a happy ending and a thrilling, dark twist. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Dave’ (FXX)‘Somebody Date Me’Texting can be a crutch for TV shows, a way to use pop-up bubbles to give characters phone-enabled telepathy. Not so in this playful, smart half-hour, in which Dave Burd’s up-and-coming rapper made (and lost) a date with Doja Cat. As the two musicians courted with their thumbs, “Somebody Date Me” showed how context and time can change the meaning and reading of the smallest online (mis)communication. Thumbs-up emoji! (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKThe Season 2 finale of “For All Mankind,” with Krys Marshall, revolved around multiple white-knuckle missions.Apple TV+‘For All Mankind’ (Apple TV+)‘The Grey’Each season of this space-race alternative history is a multistage booster rocket. The slow-moving early episodes expend a lot of fuel, building energy and narrative force until the show reaches escape velocity. (My aerospace engineer readers, I beg you not to fact-check my metaphors.) The white-knuckle Season 2 finale moved with the deftness of a docking maneuver, as a U.S.-Soviet conflict on the moon and a threatened war on Earth required risk and sacrifice on two celestial bodies and points in between. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Genius: Aretha’ (National Geographic)‘Amazing Grace’‘Pose’ (FX)‘Take Me to Church’The music and community of the Black church co-starred in two praiseworthy hours of TV. The Aretha Franklin bio-series peaked as it focused on the recording of the 1972 “Amazing Grace” live album at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, fusing the artist’s past and present in a crucible of soul. In “Pose,” a grim diagnosis led Pray Tell (Billy Porter) back to his hometown and church community, both to confront the homophobia that drove him from it and give voice to the music that sustained him. (Stream “Genius: Aretha” on Hulu; buy “Pose” on Amazon.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKPerry Mattfeld, left, and David Webster, in the “Somewhere Over the Border” episode of “In the Dark.” CW‘In the Dark’ (CW)‘Somewhere Over the Border’This CW drama about a blind woman and her buddies, who run a rescue-dog agency and get involved in drug dealing and murder, is no more than a serviceable thriller. But the rapport among its central characters, Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), Jess (Brooke Markham) and Felix (Morgan Krantz), has developed into one of the more believable and moving portrayals of friendship on TV. When Murphy found herself stranded in a strange country, the strength of those ties was the foundation of a taut and agonizing hour. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘Line of Duty’ (BritBox)Season 6, Episode 5Tension and deception pump through the veins of this breakneck procedural about a British internal-affairs unit, and no show does cliffhangers better. You could point to just about any episode; this one, with one of the heroes following a possibly dirty cop into an abandoned industrial park because that’s what the job called for, was off the charts. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE‘Love, Death & Robots’‘The Drowned Giant’In just 13 minutes, this elegant short about a giant’s corpse that washes up on a beach one day captures, in a perfect snapshot, humanity’s tendency to desecrate marvels, to behold a world-changing event and decide simply to carry on. Based on a short story by J.G. Ballard, “The Drowned Giant” is rendered here in mostly realistic animation, with the giant’s clean-shaven cheeks, tidy fingernails and muscular chest shown in aching detail. In an era when so many shows just blend together, this episode stands out for its light touch and sad imagination. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSIn a memorable episode of “Making It,” contestants like Jessie Lamworth, (right, with the host Amy Poehler) made Halloween costumes.Evans Vestal Ward/NBC‘Making It’‘All the Holidays at Once’Post “Great British Baking Show,” lots of reality competition series have gone away from the cutthroat in favor of the warm and fuzzy, and perhaps no show is warmer and fuzzier than the craft competition “Making It.” Each episode has its charms but “All the Holidays at Once” was especially thrilling, because unlike some of the show’s grander projects, crafting your own Halloween costume is pretty standard fare, even for layfolk. The contestants’ giddy joy in presenting their creations to the judges was matched only by my own giddy joy at seeing their silly and spectacular costumes. Jess won with her superb alien-abduction costume but when everything is this fun, don’t we all win? As a bonus, this episode also included Melañio telling a story about a bat in a toilet, a tale that will haunt me for the rest of my days. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Mythic Quest’ (Apple TV+)‘Backstory!’Having come up with one of the best pandemic-inspired episodes of 2020, this video game-industry comedy is gunning for TV’s high score in stand-alones. This installment gave the back story-obsessed game writer C.W. Longbottom (a wonderfully blustery F. Murray Abraham) his own flashback as a struggling sci-fi author in the 1970s — a funny and poignant tale of irony, professional jealousy and success at a cost. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Nuclear Family’ (HBO)Episode 3Ry Russo-Young’s three-part documentary about her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights, threatening to pull apart her family, built to a powerful and eloquent conclusion. It both affirmed the importance of the battle her mothers fought and questioned the assumptions of everyone involved. (Streaming on HBO Max.) MIKE HALEIn a March interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle discussed their separation from the royal family.Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese‘Oprah with Meghan and Harry’One so rarely gets to receive or send a “turn on your TV right now” text, especially in my line of work. So for that dual thrill alone this interview earned a place in my heart. It was the kind of programming that barely exists anymore: a tell-all network special in which celebrities share genuine new information with Oprah, the patron saint of soul-baring. There were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, aglow in the California sun, decrying racism and candidly discussing mental health crises. Which would have been enough, but they also reset the royal narrative, gave Oprah eggs, fought back tears and gazed lovingly at one another — all while sitting in chairs sold by Christopher Knight from “The Brady Bunch.” Television, baby! I love you! MARGARET LYONS‘PEN15’ (Hulu)‘Yuki’Mutsuko Erskine had never acted before her daughter, Maya, cast her to play Maya’s mother in Hulu’s brutally funny teen comedy. Sometimes daughter knows best. This showpiece episode, in which a chance meeting with an ex-husband led Yuki to look down a road not taken, was a rich vignette of an immigrant’s experience and a subtle performance to cap off the role, literally, of a lifetime. (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)‘The Dad-Feelings Limited’Who would have thought that the origin story of Comic Book Guy, done partly as an affectionate sendup of a Wes Anderson film, would be so lovely? (Streaming on Disney+.) MIKE HALE‘Snowfall’ (FX)‘All the Way Down’This brutal and only-as-sentimental-as-it-needs-to-be drama about a rogue C.I.A. agent and a young Black entrepreneur, partners in the crack wars in early 1980s Los Angeles, still does not get enough attention. That’s especially true of the stories written by the novelist Walter Mosley, like this chilling, tightly packed episode about rage, revenge, gentrification and wanting to go straight. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALEIn “WandaVision,” Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen channeled multiple eras of TV including, in the premiere, 1950s sitcoms.Marvel Studios‘WandaVision’ (Disney+)‘Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience’Several installments of this superhero psychodrama, set in a bizarro-world version of classic sitcom formats, could have made this list. But might as well start at the beginning, in which Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) played house on a 1950s stage set whose made-for-TV perfection turned horrifyingly (and ingeniously) wrong. (Streaming on Disney+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘What We Do in the Shadows’‘Casino’“Shadows” is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and “Casino,” where the gang heads to Atlantic City, was my favorite episode this season. Nandor (Kayvan Novak) becomes entranced by a “Big Bang Theory” slot machine — “‘bazinga’ is the war cry of Sheldon,” he explains — and in perfect, cascading horror, this leads to the total dissolution of his understanding of the universe. “Shadows” is its best when the vampires’ grandiosity clashes with their vulnerabilities, especially their excitability, and I’ll never see another in-house ad on a hotel TV without thinking that it’s Colin Robinson’s favorite show. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS More

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      Homer Simpson Was Made for Fashion

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      Behind the painstaking creation of the Balenciaga-Simpsons episode that took nearly a year to make.Clapping, whispering, cameras snapping, questionable music: These are the sounds of a classic fashion show. Bursts of laughter? Those are less common.Yet several were heard last Saturday night, rolling around the 19th-century Parisian theater where the great and storied house of Cristóbal Balenciaga skipped the traditional catwalk and screened a special 10-minute episode of “The Simpsons.”It was a surprise more than a year in the making, and the result of a sometimes grueling collaboration between two exacting creative entities known for their attention to detail. So far it has been viewed more than five million times on YouTube.In the episode, Homer writes to Balenciaga (“Dear Balun, Balloon, Baleen, Balenciaga-ga,” he says as he struggles to pronounce the famous fashion name) for Marge’s birthday, explaining that his wife has always wanted to own something by the brand. He asks for the cheapest item, which the Balenciaga team interprets as “just one of those American gags nobody gets” and sends him a dress that costs 19,000 euros. After wearing it briefly, Marge returns the dress with a note saying she’ll “always remember those 30 minutes of feeling just a little special.”Back in Europe, the Balenciaga artistic director Demna Gvasalia declares her note “the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and I grew up in the Soviet Union. This is exactly the kind of woman I want to reach!” He then travels to Springfield and decides to “rescue” the “style-deprived” by inviting them to model his clothes in Paris, explaining that he wants “the world to see real people in my show.”The 10 minutes are packed with Easter eggs for die-hard fans of both “The Simpsons” and Balenciaga. A private Balenciaga jet has landing gear that looks like the brand’s famous sock sneakers; Waylon Smithers chooses a dress to wear when given his choice of outfit; Lisa at first acknowledges that walking a runway is “superficial” but then enjoys it immensely.The collaboration began in April 2020, when Mr. Gvasalia sent the “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening an email about working together.Marge in the golden ballroom dress from the summer 2020 collection.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationMr. Gvasalia, 40, who was born in Georgia and watched the show when he was growing up, said the idea came to him during the first lockdown of 2020. He has a penchant for inserting Balenciaga into mass-market trends: Under his direction, the brand has collaborated with other American sensations, like Crocs and Fortnite.About “The Simpsons,” he said, “I always loved the tongue-in-cheek humor, the romance and the charming naïveness of it.”Al Jean, an executive producer and writer of “The Simpsons,” said that when he learned of the Balenciaga project in January, “my response was, ‘What’s Balenciaga?’” He turned to Wikipedia for answers.His first pitch to Balenciaga had a similar framing to the one they ended up going with — Marge’s birthday wish — but diverged with Mr. Gvasalia’s character deciding that the brand’s next show would be held in Springfield. When the Balenciaga plane lands there, its models aren’t allowed into the United States because they’re too thin and beautiful. Springfield’s residents become the models, their nuclear plant is the runway, and the ghost of Mr. Balenciaga makes an appearance.But Balenciaga preferred that Springfield be brought to Paris, Mr. Jean said. From there, the story was revised and tweaked — to the point that the writers joked about “Draft 52 of the Balenciaga script” — up until two days before the Paris showing.Mr. Gvasalia made specific contributions to the script, Mr. Jean said. For example, the episode ends with Homer embracing and singing “La Mer” to Marge on a post-show party boat on the Seine. But Mr. Gvasalia wanted one final joke, so he asked that Homer’s jacket be set on fire by a Frenchman smoking a cigar. Mr. Jean then suggested that Anna Wintour, who had appeared in the front row of the fashion show, try to put out the fire with expensive champagne, which Homer tries to drink instead.“She said, ‘Please don’t have me do that,’ so it became Demna,” Mr. Jean said. (Ms. Wintour otherwise approved of her likeness being used but declined to voice her character, he said.) And that earlier line about Mr. Gvasalia growing up in the Soviet Union? The “Simpsons” team had decided to cut it, but Mr. Gvasalia asked for it to be reinstated.He also asked, the day before the show, to change the color of a tear Ms. Wintour sheds while watching Marge model. The tear was too light, and it wouldn’t read onscreen unless it was a darker blue. Mr. Jean and the director David Silverman agreed.“They were definitely our match in terms of, to the last detail, making sure everything is perfect,” Mr. Jean said. “The animation crew, this is the hardest thing they’ve had to do since ‘The Simpsons Movie.’”Maggie and Lisa in Balenciaga crushed velvet jersey gowns from the spring 2021 collection.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationBart in a Balenciaga look from winter 2020, including a Wifi vintage jersey XL T-shirt and black leather Cuissard boots.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationMarge wearing a fictional Balenciaga dress in the “Simpsons” episode.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationSmithers in a one-shoulder pantadress from the winter 2020 collection.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationSherri and Terri wearing turtleneck dresses in bonded velvet from the summer 2020 collection.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationMr. Silverman, who directed that 2007 film, said the biggest challenge was getting the “accuracy needed in the clothing,” which involved inventive post-animation effects to capture the distinct textures and movement of, for example, Marge’s runway look: a gold metallic ball gown.Balenciaga sent the “Simpsons” team 15 looks to choose from for the final show, all based on designs from the last five years. But putting them on the bodies of these universally recognizable cartoon characters wasn’t so straightforward.“It was tricky for us, capturing that balance of caricature and the integrity of the clothing,” Mr. Silverman said. “You’re translating the look of real clothing, real designs on these characters that aren’t exactly human proportions.”Mr. Silverman, who joked-but-not-really that this is how he spent his summer vacation, studied runway footage to figure out what the audience should be wearing and how the lighting should be hitting the catwalk.The script also had to capture the particular absurdity of the luxury fashion world and Balenciaga’s stature in that world — something that can’t be absorbed on Wikipedia. Mr. Jean said that in addition to the crash course in Balenciaga earlier in the year, watching the Netflix series about Halston, who was a great fan of Balenciaga, helped him understand the evergreen excessive culture of fashion.The supporting characters are also based on real people and animals, including Mr. Gvasalia’s husband, Loïk Gomez; their two dogs; the chief creative officer, Martina Tiefenthaler (who voiced herself); and workers from Balenciaga’s atelier who are finishing the collection on the plane while singing, “formidable, formidable.”Selma wearing a 3D double-breasted coat and a stretch velvet top from the winter 2018 collection.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationPatty in a swing doudoune from Demna Gvasalia’s fall 2016 debut collection.The Simpsons 20th TV AnimationThis is one of Mr. Gvasalia’s favorite scenes in the episode, he said: “It just makes me so happy every time I watch it.”As for Mr. Gvasalia’s voice, “we had to try to talk him into playing himself, but he didn’t want to,” Mr. Jean said. He felt that was consistent with Mr. Gvasalia’s recent decision to fully obscure his face and body during public appearances, creating confusion among observers as to whether it was really him.When asked why he wanted to align Balenciaga with “The Simpsons” and whether he felt the brands had any commonalities, Mr. Gvasalia said that “it’s more personal to me.”“I did not want to align anything or make sense of anything. I just wanted to create an iconic visual story.”While the novelty of the collaboration made it feel surprising, the brands share a similar ethos. They have an appreciation for self-referentiality, breaking the rules of presentation (airing an episode with live animation; turning a red carpet into a runway show without telling anyone) and bridging the highbrow and lowbrow. Mr. Jean called Mr. Gvasalia an “excellent collaborator,” and Mr. Gvasalia described the experience as “the highest level of collaboration” and “a dream come true.”“I did not realize how complex it is to create a 10-minute-long episode, so huge respect to that,” he said.Whether the act was meant to challenge fashion’s self-seriousness or the public’s notions of luxury — to bring Balenciaga to the suburban masses or to bring the suburban masses to Balenciaga — is something he will let the critics debate.What did he want out of this? “A smile and a good dose of fun.” More