The Yellow Family Goes There and Back Again

The Simpsons couch gag has outlasted most of the show’s actual appeal, and at this point it functions as its own genre—a short experimental film that happens to air before a sitcom. The Hobbit edition sends the Springfield family on a full Peter Jackson-scale epic quest to find their sofa: sweeping vistas, a fellowship of yellow dwarves, a gruesomely earned ending. The show itself has been coasting for years, but the couch gags keep finding reasons to exist. There’s something almost moving about that—the frame surviving the picture.