I'm only about 70 pages into Chris Turner's Planet Simpson but am already wondering if I'll finish it. So far Turner hasn't turned out to be much of a journalist or a critic. The background story behind The Simpsons' genesis and production is Sunday-feature breezy, lacking a lot of substantive details (there's no mention of Brad Bird so far). It's one thing to claim that the show was hugely popular across various demographics and in various countries but in a book like this (ie a book purporting to be serious and one that has the space) some documentation is needed. Elsewhere, Turner keeps repeating that the show is satirical and irreverant but that's about the extent of his perceptions; admittedly the rest of the book seems to be an expansion on that concept but if the overture is dull and unimaginative why should we expect the following movements to be any different? Though I would have expected anybody writing at length on satire to have tossed in names like Swift and Juvenal purely on reflex Turner didn't bother. That's not a bit omission if they were purely coloring but when he's discussing the idea of "riffing" and mentions a specific episode's dream sequence but fails to note that this sequence refers to Little Nemo and the Beatles then he's also failing to make his own argument about the riffing creating a web of references. Again maybe this is more fully explored later but hey there's no index!
One little fannish stupidity is that he refers to episodes by production number which as he cheerfully admits reveal pretty much nothing about the episode or its place in the chronology. Turner claims that this is more convenient than repeating lengthy episode titles constantly and while I think (or hope) that he's being tongue-in-cheek because a few pages later he reduces a title to its first couple of words during repetition as nearly all critics do, this is still a needless barrier to reading the book.
By the way, I'm about fed up with the placement of footnotes. With computerized typesetting and page layout, it should be an easy task to put any notes of commentary at the bottom of the page where they're needed. I actually think even simple reference notes should go there but what the heck leave them at the back. Planet Simpson has the worst of all worlds because the notes are at the end of each chapter. Do people that design books (or judging from what he's written apparently Turner as well) not actually read books? Do they have no idea how inconvenient it is to hunt for the end of a chapter to read a comment?