NYT film critic A.O. Scott writes: "I hope that little will change about the indomitable four-fingered family that resides in a pink bungalow on Evergreen Terrace. For nothing has summed up the promise and confusion of American life in the post-cold-war era better than "The Simpsons." Nothing else has harnessed the accumulated energies and memory traces of the civilization with so much intelligence and originality."

Why "The Simpsons" always was, is, and always will be better than "South Park." (Not that this was ever in doubt.)