That '90s Show (The Simpsons)

"That '90s Show"
The Simpsons episode
The episode's promotional image, featuring Kurt Loder
Episode no.Season 19
Episode 11
Directed byMark Kirkland
Written byMatt Selman
Production codeKABF04
Original air dateJanuary 27, 2008 (2008-01-27)
Guest appearances
Kurt Loder as himself
"Weird Al" Yankovic as himself
Episode features
Couch gagThe family is sitting on the couch. The screen zooms out to show them as a painting in a museum with the handwritten caption "Ceci n'est pas une couch gag." ("This is not a couch gag."), a reference to The Treachery of Images.
CommentaryMatt Groening
Al Jean
Matt Selman
Tim Long
Tom Gammill
Max Pross
Raymond S. Persi
Yeardley Smith
Episode chronology
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"E Pluribus Wiggum"
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"Love, Springfieldian Style"
The Simpsons season 19
List of episodes

"That '90s Show" is the eleventh episode of the nineteenth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 27, 2008. Kurt Loder and "Weird Al" Yankovic both guest star as themselves, this being the second time for Yankovic.[1] The episode was written by Matt Selman, and directed by Mark Kirkland. The episode's title is a parody of That '70s Show, a television program that also aired on Fox.

After Bart and Lisa discover Marge's degree from Springfield University, Homer and Marge recount one of the darkest points of their relationship, in which Marge has an affair with a pretentious history professor and a dejected, self-destructive Homer achieves brief fame as the frontman of a grunge band.

The show parodies the floating timeline utilized in The Simpsons, in which characters remain the same age even though every episode is set in the present. While previous episodes, such as the 1992 episode "The Way We Was", depicted Homer and Marge's early romance in the 1970s, this episode portrays their lives as a young couple in the mid-'90s, paradoxically the same time period in which the early seasons of the show were produced and set.

  1. ^ "Primetime Listings". FoxFlash. January 27, 2008. Archived from the original on January 31, 2008. Retrieved January 4, 2008.