The Simpsons has done what very few TV shows (Gunsmoke and Law & Order are the only others I could find) have managed, and rounded their 20th season. Now we could debate all day about whether old, classic Simpsons episodes are funnier than the new ones (of course they are, for the most part), which would inevitably turn into a debate about whether or not the newer episodes are even funny. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve earned the right to be whatever kind of funny they want, even the ‘not’ kind, once in a while. With their 21st season premiere last night, they enlisted scripting extraordinaires Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who have quickly become coveted assets in the comedy world. In fact, Seth Rogen is only the second celebrity ever to both write for and star in a Simpsons episode, after Ricky Gervais (God bless him).

It would seem like this is a dream pairing – two comedy powerhouses coming together for one two-story powerhouse episode, but somehow it fell a bit flat. For a Seth/Evan production, it’s not very Seth/Evan, and it’s almost lacking in Simpsons-ness. Conceptually, it’s a great story — turns out that Comic Book Guy has been writing his own comic book series over the years, in the form of Everyman, a schlub of a superhero who looks like the downtown bus driver, but when he touches a comic book, he absorbs that superhero’s powers. At first, Comic Book Guy is hesitant to go public with it, but when Bart praises the series, he changes his mind, and Everyman becomes a huge success. What does Hollywood do with huge successes? That’s right, make awful, awful, God awful movies about them.

After playing “hardball with Hollywood”, Comic Book Guy is allowed to choose who will play his superhero, and of course, he picks Homer Simpson, the every-est man there is. But when showing a photo of Homer as Everyman to a cross-section of typical movie-goers, they chose instead to stare at the Sun, “against every animal instinct they had”. So, in typical retard-logic Hollywood fashion, they want Everyman to muscle up and get in shape. In Seth’s own words, “The whole joke is Homer is cast to play a guy who’s an everyman and they try to make him into this physically fit guy.” While this irony is funny in concept, it proves a bit more difficult to pull off for a whole episode.

Overall, most of the jokes fell in some sort of weird middle-ground between Seth/Evan’s style and The Simpsons’ humor, resulting in a sense of humor that barely resembles either. A few of them were laugh out loud funny, but most were not. Even Seth Rogen’s character, Lyle McCarthy, the trainer to the stars, will not prove memorable as far as Simpsons celebrity appearances go. The thing about Lyle that I did like is that Seth clearly tried to stray away from his usual gruff voice for the character, and actually ended up sounding a bit different than he usually does. His main character quirk is that he’ll compliment a client of his (Tobey Maguire, to be specific), and then whisper to Homer the opposite of that compliment, which is a gag that has totally been done before. However, it does provide a perfect platform for Seth Rogen to get back at Entourage for that little spat between them a few episodes ago, when Lyle leaves Homer to go train Turtle: “He is a great guy! (He’s an awful guy…)”. But when it really comes down to it, there are probably at least five full seasons worth of episodes of this show that are funnier than this one, unfortunately.