Definitively, The Best, Worst And Most Controversial Simpsons Episodes

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http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/12/def...sons-episodes/

By James O Malley on 21 Dec 2017 at 4:30AM
There are adults alive today who have only lived in a world when The Simpsons has been bad. To be clear, peak Simpsons is probably the greatest TV show ever created - and is unparalleled in terms of quality and consistency.

But ever since the “real” Seymour Skinner was sent packing on a train, and the Springfield townsfolk agreed to never mention Armin Tamzarian again, the quality of the show has been in decline. That was in 1997. Literally 20 years ago.

Today - amazingly - The Simpsons continues as what fans have dubbed “Zombie Simpsons”. The characters are the same, the show looks the same but… something is wrong. Sure, there are occasional glimpses of what made the show great - but most of the time it is just further trashing its own legacy.



If you want proof that Zombie Simpsons is a very real phenomenon, you only need to look at the IMDB scores. The above chart is a plot showing what happens if you take every episode of The Simpsons’ average user score, and plot the episodes out ordered by score - with the lowest first. Then if you split the list into percentiles representing 10% of the 618 episodes each, we can use the stacked bar chart to see the proportion of pre- and post- season 9 episodes in each percentile.

And as you can see - all of the lower scoring groups are overwhelmingly full of Zombie Simpsons episodes - with all of the pre-Season 9 episodes clustered at the top of the distribution, representing the best episodes.

And this made us wonder: what actually are the best and worst episodes of The Simpsons? And do fans agree? So to find out, we took all of the user scores for each individual episode from IMDB, and aggregated them together to make a big list. We then used a technique borrowed from our analysis of the most controversial films to discover something we don’t think anyone has done before: find out which are the most controversial episodes amongst fans.

And of course, because of the strange phenomenon of Zombie Simpsons, we’ve split things in two - so we’ll be comparing Seasons 1-9, and then all episodes over all, to cover all bases.



A surprise winner as the fan-voted best episode perhaps: Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One is great, we’re not going to argue with that - but best? What’s clear from the rest of the Top 10 is that it is pretty obvious why the writers of the series quickly realised that it is Homer and not Bart who is the real main character - given that Homer dominates the list.