TV: “Simpsons” last night was hilarious–the funniest the show has been in a long, long time. The Rat has blogged one of the best parts, the parody of the FoxNews “news crawl.” (She also links to this must-read site: real rejected lines from Zagat’s reviews.)

“King of the Hill” and “Malcolm in the Middle” were OK, funny but not great; the best part of “MITM” was definitely Willy, the German cousin, tormenting Francis via judicious piano playing.

The series premiere of “Oliver Beene” was hideously, atrociously awful. Really. An endless, intrusive voiceover; cliched characters; cliched situations (did you know that in the early Sixties, rich people were shallow and drank a lot?). Shamed pointed out that 1) the Carson show debuted at least a couple months after the Beene family is shown watching it; and, more importantly, 2) the parents never interact with their kids! What? Isn’t the biggest part of the fun of family shows watching the parent-child clashes? So, I plan to stay away from this one.