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NEWS AND VIEWS - MARCH 2020
WRITING NEWS My big fantasy novel, The Demon in the Metal, came out on March 1st. Thanks to everyone who's bought it so far! And please consider leaving a review, if you bought it and read it and liked it. Currently working on Sneak, the seventh novel in the Signalverse superhero series. I figure I'm about 60% into it at this point, and I've been making pretty good progress, so I don't think I'll have too much trouble finishing it by the end of April. It's not shaping up to be a very long or complicated novel -- I started writing it more to give myself something to do than for any other reason -- but I hope you'll like it anyway. * * * * * * * * CORONAVIRUS!!!!!!!!! So how am I handling the coronavirus pandemic? Pretty well, so far. I live in a rural part of Minnesota, over a hundred miles from the nearest big city and international airport and about thirty miles from the nearest town of any size (pop. 19,000). Living in the country -- and especially in Minnesota, where a sudden snowstorm has the potential to leave you isolated for a week -- turns you into a kind of natural prepper, so we always have plenty of food and supplies on hand. And I'm sort of between jobs right now, so I haven't had to worry about missing work; I've mostly just been sitting around here, reading and writing. I finished reading David Copperfield last week (I should have read this years ago); I also started playing Grandia (the remastered version for the Switch) and started watching At Eighteen, a Korean school drama. I don't know what's going to happen long-term, with the economy in the crapper and all, but I'm pretty comfy here at the moment and not really all that worried about catching the disease myself. I hate crowds and I never go out anyway. * * * * * * * * WHEN DID THE SIMPSONS START TO SUCK? I happened to catch a couple of early Simpsons episodes a few days ago. I'd forgotten just how funny this show used to be in its heyday, and it got me thinking about where and when the series jumped the shark. I think just about every Simpsons fan has their own take on this, so here's mine. Here's how I'd grade the first ten seasons: Season 1: C Season 2: C+ Season 3: B Season 4: A+ Season 5: A+ Season 6: A- Season 7: B+ Season 8: C Season 9: D Season 10: D- The show was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be in the first and second seasons; the third season was a big improvement, with much more sophisticated writing; the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons were classic; the seventh season was good, but not as good as the previous three; the eighth season only had a handful of good episodes; and by the ninth season the show was legitimately starting to suck. (There are some Simpsons fans who think the show was still in its golden age from the ninth to the twelfth seasons; I'm not one of them.) I stopped watching the show regularly after the tenth season. I don't know much about the production of the show, or who or what was responsible for it starting to suck, but I can tell you why I, personally, stopped watching. 1) Jerk-Ass Homer. In the early seasons Homer was crude, lazy, gluttonous, and dimwitted, but he was also a sensitive character whose feelings were easily hurt, and who really did love his family and his friends. Around season eight, and increasingly in seasons nine and ten, he became a much more obnoxious character: stupid, selfish, and unlikable. This change has occasioned much comment. A lot of people love the episode with Frank Grimes, but I hated it, and I especially hated the final scene, where Homer, snoring away in the middle of Grimes's funeral, tells Marge to change the channel (and then everyone laughs). I didn't find that funny at all; I thought it was loathsome. 2) Dumb changes. Killing off Maude Flanders (and making Homer responsible for it, natch), the dumb decision to change Principal Skinner's backstory, Apu getting married...all these things started happening around the same time. It felt to me like the writers were flailing, running out of ideas. 3) Too many celebrity appearances. The guest stars in the earlier seasons tended to be pretty understated: Winona Ryder playing Lisa's rival Allison, Meryl Streep playing Jessica Lovejoy, and so on. By the ninth and tenth seasons the celebrities were usually just appearing as themselves, and these appearances were becoming more and more obnoxious to me, like when Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin basically took over a whole episode in season ten. 4) Politics. The Simpsons had been taking shots at both the right and left from the beginning, but these were usually just one-off jokes. In the eighth, ninth, and tenth seasons we started getting these blatantly political episodes, however, each devoted to a specific issue like gun control, creationism, homosexuality, vegetarianism, and so on. These rubbed me the wrong way; I liked the domestic storylines and the goofy weird storylines (Marge vs. the Monorail, Deep Space Homer) better than these overtly political ones. And again, I got the impression that the writers were running out of ideas, when they resorted to these kinds of episodes. So that's my take. Hey, maybe next month I'll go over what went wrong with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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