When The Simpsons return to television this fall it will be for their twenty-eighth season. We're dangerously close to having three decades of The Simpsons under our belts, and while there are some who wish that the show had gone off the air years ago, it seems there are still plenty of Simpson fans out there keeping Matt Groening's animated saga chugging along.
The upcoming season will bring with it two different milestones, one will be the series' 600th episode, and the other will be its first hour-long episode ever. Even as a big Simpsons fan I had to scratch my head for half a second before I realized "oh yea, they haven't done that yet." The news was revealed at the Television Critics Associations summer press-tour and Simpsons executive producer Matt Selmann said that the upcoming episode, titled "The Great Phatsby", wasn't even intended to anything more than a regular episode, at least at first.
This was just going to be a regular episode, but the table read went so well, in a fit of passion and excitement and ambition and excess, we decided to supersize it. And we haven’t done a huge amount of stories in the world of hip-hop and rap culture, so we just went for it.
"The Great Phatsby" chronicles the destruction of a friendship between Mr. Burns and a hip-hop mogul named Jay G. Selman added that "Burns is an old-school Gatsby and Jay G is a new-school Gatsby and their mutual Gatsbyism brings them together.” After seducing Mr. Burns with the excesses of the hip-hop lifestyle, Burns ends up bankrupt with Jay G taking over the nuclear plant. “It’s a tale of greed, excess, betrayal, revenge, and ruthlessness,” says Selman. “And there’s a hilarious goose in it. The goose is really funny.” Taraji P. Henson and Keegan-Michael Key will lend their voices to the episode.
The hour-long episode, which will air in January, will also feature Lisa being wooed by a wealthy boyfriend and Marge opening a boutique store. I'm still waiting on Marge becoming a robot or maybe even the often rumoured episode in which Moe get's a cell phone!