For some reason I bought an Apple TV today, their latest doowacky that lets you attach a TV to your iTunes like you would an iPod, playing your video and music and what have you. The people I know are about evenly split on whether it will be cool to be able to buy TV shows a la carte and watch them on this, or whether it is the most useless Apple invention ever. I may have an opinion on that later, but right now I just want to yell about this one thing:

There is no Simpsons on iTunes. That is a major, possibly fatal, failure that might get the Apple Tv returned to the Apple Store. Apparently Fox considers iTunes to be a place to dump its garbage shows that aren't making money any other way, judging from the fact that they don't sell their most popular and longest running show of all time, but they do offer every episode of Stacked.

Ok. But here's what's worse: I searched for Simpsons, found only the "Simpsons Foxcast" under Podcasts. For about a minute I thought they had every recent episode in podcast form, for free. Then I noticed that the podcast "episodes" are only a couple minutes long. So I figured it was at least a Simpsons clip? Wrong again. It is an audio-only ad, where some smarmy LA-radio-clown voice describes an episode of The Simpsons:

It would actually be better if it stopped there. Because it goes on to explain the entire episode in 109 seconds, which is about as funny as explaining a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. When it is over, I want to punch the voice actor right in his Botoxed Ryan Seacrest face, but I never, ever want to watch that episode of The Simpsons. Well done, Fox. Bravo.

Wow, that really made me mad just now, and I haven't even opened it yet. Maybe it was for the best that I had no way of being exposed to TV. More news as it develops.

29 Apr 2007 22:41 PT - persistent link - trackback - 3 comments