FXX Launches Its Simpsons Era with A Marathon of All 552 Episodes
If you like The Simpsons, prepare to lose a very large chunk of your life to FXX starting in August. The network, which last year won a fierce bidding war for the rights to every Simpsons episode, is airing every episode back-to-back from August 21st through September 1st, 24 hours a day for 12 days, including The Simpsons Movie, which falls between the 18th and 19th season. At a half-hour per episode, that's 48 episodes a day, although the marathon starts at 10 a.m. on August 21st in case it's been a while since you saw the opening season.
So when's the best time to tune in? Really, anywhere in those opening ten seasons is good, but if you really want to maximize quality while not leaving your couch, you should probably settle in around 4 p.m. on August 22nd, when season four will begin, and just hold tight as long as you can, although season ten will wrap up around August 25th, and we don't advise taking any days off work anytime after that. FXX is touting this as the longest marathon in TV history, and given that no one's itching for a marathon of Gunsmoke, that statistic seems pretty unbeatable.
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Following the marathon, which concludes on Labor Day, FXX will basically be a Simpsons rerun channel with a little bit of original programming at prime-time. Much more interesting, though, is the launch of "Simpsons World," an online portal that will provide streaming access to every episode, every scene, every silly line or dumb visual gag. As long as you have a cable subscription, you can make playlists, read scripts, launch missile attacks on other countries, and knit together the very space-time fabric with this thing. It's hard to envision a world in which this is not plagued with bugs, at least initially, but initial reports out of the Television Critics Association panel are very strong.
This should finally solve the internet's most burning problem: the fact that you cannot summon a Simpsons gag to your fingertips within seconds to punctuate a joke or blog post. Long has the world struggled without this service. If FXX has truly found a way around this problem, then godspeed to them.
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This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/entertainment/2014/07/fxx-launches-its-simpsons-rights-with-a-marathon-of-all-552-episodes/374788/
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