Season four is widely hailed as the greatest Simpsons season ever. I disagree; I think the show achieved its zenith in season eight. But season four was a watershed for the series, the moment when our love and admiration for the show turned into awe and worship.

In its first couple of seasons, The Simpsons was plotted and paced much more like a conventional sitcom, but by season four it had achieved something unique. By season four, the plots get told with lightning-swift efficiency, leaving lots of room for flashbacks, fantasy sequences, non sequitur hilarity, and just a general level of goofiness unprecedented in commercial TV. The Simpsons makes everything else on TV look pedestrian, sluggish, and dull.

I think one big reason The Simpsons got so good so quickly is its annual Halloween episodes. Those episodes are great in themselves, but, more importantly, I think they showed the creative team just how much was really possible, just how far they could really go. The “Treehouse of Horror” segments are just 7 minutes long, so they had to learn to tell stories more quickly than is normal in TV. Also, the Halloween episodes encouraged a whole new level of surreality and an anything-goes attitude.

In some ways, these are just intensifications of regular Simpsons episodes, but that’s precisely my point. By pushing at the limits of their medium, the creators of this show discovered that they were able to transcend them.

Every episode of the show is packed, overflowing with smart and funny ideas. And most of its funniest moments have nothing to do with telling the story; that’s part of their charm, they feel extra, superfluous, the icing on the cake. The Simpsons is more icing than cake, and it’s that richness and density that makes it so great. Moment for moment, it remains the most rewarding experience the medium of television has yet produced.

Here are 10 of my favorite moments from season four:

• HOMER: [when the pull tab breaks off] Now my pudding is trapped forever!
• “Steamboat Itchy” (The very first Itchy and Scratchy cartoon)
• HOMER:[on the family of possums living in the monorail] I call the big one “Bitey.”
• BART: Didn’t you wonder why you were getting checks for doing nothing?
  GRANDPA: I figured, because the Democrats were in power again.
• “Malaise Forever” (Inscription on Jimmy Carter’s statue)
• TROY McCLURE: You may remember me from such films as P is for Psycho and The President’s Neck is Missing.
• The Big British Book of Smiles
• TV ANNOUNCER: The following is a public service announcement. Excessive alcohol consumption can cause liver damage and cancer of the rectum.
  HOMER: Mmmm, beer!
• WIGUM: I’ve got pictures of you Quimby.
  QUIMBY: You don’t scare me, that could be anyone’s ass.

And my favorite Simpsons line of all time:

SMITHERS: I think women and sea men don’t mix.

The Simpsons, season 4 (1992-93)
GRADE: A

It’s amazing how good this show is, and I’d forgotten how great Tony’s domineering mother Livia Soprano was. She’s so effortlessly and unconsciously cruel and manipulative and also laugh-out-loud funny at the same time. And she’s a great example of how complex and interesting the characters on the show are.

She gives Tony a constant guilt trip about putting her in a “nursing home,” yet everything she does (from setting her kitchen on fire to running over a friend with her car) makes placing her in a home the only possible solution. She clearly takes a perverse pleasure in making everyone’s life miserable, including her own.

One thing that distinguishes The Sopranos is that it forces its audience to figure out what going on, it draws us in because we have to pay attention to make the crucial connections. Moreover, much of the energy of the show comes from the discrepancies it creates between what we know and what the characters know. This leads to rich situational ironies.

Take for example the fifth episode of the series “College.” Here we see Tony taking Meadow on an interview tour of several colleges she’s applied to; along the way, Tony spots a former mobster who turned state’s evidence. Near the end of the show, Tony strangles him. Now most shows would end there, but then we see Tony and Meadow riding home. Meadow becomes suspicious and is just on the verge of realizing what Tony has done. So Tony pulls a guilt trip worthy of his mother, telling Meadow how his feelings are hurt that she doesn’t trust him. This emotional black mail is every bit as vicious as the execution, but only we are in a position to realize that.

One of the things that really makes the show work is that Tony is always on the verge of self-knowledge but constantly shys away from it. This turns a structural problem for any TV series into a dramatic strength. TV characters can’t change too drastically, they can’t have the turning points or epiphanies that are crucial for most dramatic characters. But this show focuses on the conflict between Tony the mob boss and Tony the middle-class guy; the two fight to a stand still, and so while Tony never quite achieves the kind of insight that would lead to genuine change (either to reject evil or to embrace it), we, the audience, do. A neat dramatic trick that.

The Sopranos, season 1 (1999)
GRADE: A

It’s handicapped from the getgo because Rob Lowe plays the lead (David Soul played the lead in the 1979 version and was just as wooden as Lowe). Worse, they let Lowe narrate, and his voice-overs are coma inducing even when they focus on murders and childhood traumas. Richard Burton could read the phone book and make it sound dramatic; Rob Lowe reads Stephen King and makes it sound boring.

Much of the supporting cast is superb. Andre Braugher and James Cromwell are reliably brilliant actors, and when they’ve got the screen, they manage to pull us into story. Similarly, Dan Byrd gives a stand-out performance as 10 year old Mark Petrie. None of these actors is given as much screen time as Lowe, and the film suffers greatly for it.

The villains in the piece are badly miscast. Donald Sutherland is too old to be a convincing physical menace. Moreover, he overacts badly and without any enthusiam. He gnaws the scenery rather than chewing it. Rutger Hauer’s portrayal of the vampire Barlow is too low key to generate any terror. Hauer plays his first scene wearing eyeglasses, which undercuts his image and leads to distracting questions like how do vampires get fitted for a prescription? Hitchcock used to say, “The better the villain, the better the picture.” These weak bad guys are the center piece of a weak film.

The effects are competent, but the horror scenes are too poorly staged to be frightening. And when they depart from King’s originals, they invariably loose the narrative and logical coherence so crucial to making horror horrifying. So, in the novel, when Braugher’s character confronts a vampire in his bedroom, he revokes his invitation to it in the name of God and the vampire flys off in a rage. In the TV version, Braugher tells the vamp to leave, he doesn’t, then later flys off for no apparent reason.

What most filmmakers don’t get about horror, and about fantasy in general, is that it has to play by the rules. Any deviation from the internal logic of the story is fatal. Fantasy has to be MORE, not less, logical than straightforward drama.

What makes Stephen King such an effective horror novelist is that he meticulously develops the reality of the world and the characters. It’s not till after you’ve become totally invovled with story that the supernatural elements kick in, and you believe them implicitly, largely because you have so much already invested in the characters by that point. A miniseries ought to provide the room to explore the intricate plot lines and character developments that distinguish King’s work. But, like the ’79 version, this miniseries is in just two parts, barely three hours of screen time.

Someday, someone may turn Salem’s Lot into an 8 or 10 hour miniseries with all the impact and creeping terror of the original. Let’s hope it doesn’t star Rob Lowe or David Soul.

Salem’s Lot (2004)
GRADE: C