At 28 seasons and counting, The Simpsons need all the new pop culture they can get their four-fingered hands on to keep coming up with fresh jokes. That means occasionally diving into somewhat interesting references, like with this new Itchy And Scratchy cartoon that starts with very overt nods to Netflix’s true crime documentary Making A Murderer and the HBO’s mini-series The Night Of.
This actually isn’t the first time that we’ve seen The Simpsons and Making A Murderer mixed together. Back in February, New York Magazine and Vulture made their own bootleg mash-up of the shows depicting Homer Simpson as the victim of the incompetent Springfield police department. This new official Itchy And Scratchy parody is much more light-handed, which is nice considering, y’know, Making A Murderer is about a real murder.
We have to wonder what the people involved in the Making A Murderer case think of all this. For Steven Avery, Brendan Dassey, and those who believe the two are innocent, the silver lining to any lighthearted ribbing of their situations is the increased awareness of their questionable convictions. But we can’t imagine anyone associated with victim Teresa Halbach is amused when they see this kind of thing. Hopefully, Avery’s crack wrongful-convictions lawyer Kathleen Zellner will definitively get to the bottom of the case, so there’re no more questions as to what really happened, and we can feel good that the phenomena that is Making A Murderer affected positive change.
