There is a legitimate live craze going on in television at the moment.
Grease and The Wiz and NBC’s other recent musical productions were broadcast live. The network’s sitcom Undateable is too. And Stephen Colbert went live on Late Show last Sunday night after the Super Bowl. Still, it seems a bit of a reach to have guessed that this current trend might extend to the world of animation.
Not so. And we have The Simpsons to take us there.
The May 15 episode of Fox’s warhorse of an animated comedy series will feature a live segment, with Homer providing his thoughts on the events of the day (to both east and west coast audiences). Variety reports that leading up to the historic event, views of The Simpsons can tweet questions to Homer using the hashtag #HomerLive from Sunday, May 1, through Wednesday, May 4.
The Simpsons is now 27 seasons and 587 episodes into its run, which makes the idea of taking things in such an unusual direction (even if only for three minutes), hold such promise. No word yet on whether Bart will also get his own live segment in which he dutifully fills out the blackboard from the opening credit sequence.
If anything, we can only hope that the final product ends up something like this:
(via Variety)