Treehouses of Horror

Every Halloween, I enjoy watching reruns of the many, many, many Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes from the last 30+ years of the show. I was a Simpsons fan and watching when the very first one aired on October 25, 1990, and until the last dozen years or so watched them as they first aired. If you're not familiar, each episode is comprised of three self-contained story segments, originally almost all horror or sci-fi based, that aren't part of the actual show's canon, allowing the writers to tell any stories they want.

Now that Disney+ offers all the episodes, this year I decided to watch every single Treehouse episode in order. It's generally considered that the first half dozen episodes or so are classics, but I wanted to see how far I could watch before I hit a Treehouse episode that doesn't have a single good segment.

Before I reveal my conclusion, my two favorite years are IV and V, which include the segments Bart Simpson's Dracula, The Shinning, and Time and Punishment. But really, all six segments from those two years are great. And while the series is known to have fallen in quality over time, there are still some really good segments up through the first 20 seasons and a few beyond.

So how far did I get before I found an episode of no redeemable segments?

Treehouse of Horror XXII.

I was actually shocked that I went so far, but every previous episode had at least one good segment. XXII had zero. The Diving Bell and the Butterball (Homer is paralyzed and becomes a Spider-man who shoots webs out of his butt), Dial D for Diddily (wherein Ned becomes a serial killer) and In the Na'vi (a pathetic parody of Avatar), are absolutely terrible. Not the worst individual segments, but collectively making up the first episode with three awful segments.

On a final note, there are plenty of boring and terrible segments, but episode XXVIII's segment MMM… Homer actually starts with a well-deserved, Lisa-delivered warning about disgusting content. In this segment, Homer, staying alone as the family is out of town, discovers that he's delicious and eats himself (autosarcophagy) piece by piece. It's as terrible as it sounds. I won't watch this one again. Ugh.