Vatican Paper Praises 'Simpsons' on 20th Anniversary

The official Vatican newspaper, L'Ossservatore Romano, may have just issued the greatest quote of the year. In recognizing The Simpsons on its 20th anniversary, the paper heaped praise on the first family of Springfield, even taking note of the show's on-again off-again relationship with religion.

"Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," the paper noted hilariously. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well." Jebus was officially unavailable for comment.

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Spurlock Supersizes 'Simpsons' For 20th Anniversary

A year-long celebration of the longest-running comedy in TV history will culminate in January when Fox airs the documentary, The Simpsons 20th Anniversay Special in 3-D on Ice. In a press release, Fox announced that documentarian and Oscar nominee Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) will direct and produce the special that will"document how the world sees The Simpsons and how the Simpson family has seen the world for two decades."

Said Spurlock of the opportunity, "When they first called me about this, I thought it was a prank and I hung up. And then my agent called back and said, ‘No, no, this is for real,’ at which point I fainted."

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'Simpsons' Renewed for Two More Seasons

We don't know when The Simpsons will go off the air for good, but we know by the time it does, it will set a new record for the longest-running scripted prime time series in history. Fox has renewed the animated hit for two more seasons, which will push it past Gunsmoke and The Red Skelton Show for the total number of episodes at 493. The Ed Sullivan Show will still have the endurance record among all prime time programs with 24 seasons on CBS. The Simpsons, while perhaps not the appointment viewing it was six or seven years ago, is still among Fox's top shows even though it debuted during the first Iraq War in January 1990. The 2007 Simpsons Movie was an enormous hit worldwide, earning over half a billion dollars. Certainly, then, Fox can afford to keep Homer around for a couple more years.

'The Simpsons' Kick Off HD With New Opening

Tonight, for the very first time, The Simpsons will be broadcast in HD. It's hard to believe that when this show began, we didn't even have DVD players, and now even that technology is slowly losing ground to Blu-Ray.

To celebrate the switch to high definition, there's a brand new opening to the show, which is a little long to be the one we see every week, but it's a nice change of pace.

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Matt Groening Wants 'Simpsons Movie' Sequel...Eventually

When the subject of a Simpsons Movie sequel was broached this week during the Television Critics Association Press Tour, Matt Groening said, "We'll get to it, I'm sure." And that's about as much confirmation as you'll get, and it's also probably all you need, but according to IGN, Groening did, in fact, confirm that his intentions are to follow up last year's enormously successful animated film. When will we see it? That's a different story. "It will happen at some point, but I have no idea when. The first one took us four years - mainly because we don't like to work any harder than we usually do." This is great news for fans of the longest-running comedy on television - the characters have been around 20 years - because it probably means we'll have original Simpsons content for a quarter century and maybe close to 30 years, depending on when the ball gets rolling. Groening is not talking like a man who has any idea what the plan will be, but of course, he's in a rare position, especially for someone who's talking about a sequel, because fans are pretty used to waiting at this point. One of my big misgivings about The Simpsons Movie was that there was an effort made to show every character we've ever come to know on the show, and in the process, some of its best creations, like Ralphie Wiggum, got less than a minute of screen time. Had they known going in they would want to do a sequel, you could have distributed the regulars more evenly. I mean, since when is less Ralphie Wiggum a good thing? Maybe they can rectify that the second time around.