The Simpsons S4 ★★★★★

Rewatching something so familiar there’s still lots of jokes and little lines that seem unfamiliar, and cursing that caught me off guard. I certainly didn’t remember Apu calling Marge a bitch in Marge in Chains. A lot of that is probably the fallibility of memory, but when I started to see unfamiliar intro couch gags it reminded me how often I would see one particular couch gag a lot when the episodes aired on television over here: The long with with the circus performance. Episodes got censored for broadcast and to refill the scheduled block for the seconds that were cut here and there the couch gag would get replaced with the longest one. What I watched back then was shaped by the realities of television in a particular time and place, slightly different from what I’m watching now, slightly different from what people watching the original broadcast would have experienced. Everything is ephemeral in this way.