Sunday night's new episode of The Simpsons titled 'Catch Me If You Can' managed slightly better figures than last week but still remains lower than the episodes that aired this time last year. Just over 10 million viewers tuned in to watch Bart and Lisa chase Homer and Marge on a wacky and erotic adventure around the world.

CBS took #1 overall for the night as usual, while ABC snuck in with a rare win in the adults 18-49 demographic. FOX and NBC came in equal second in the same category. At 8:00pm, Cold Case beat our favourite family for first place, while Extreme Makeover and Dateline got resonably even results behind The Simpsons.

"The Simpsons has a long, grand tradition of sending Homer, Marge and the kids to exotic locales in order to make fun of them. Sunday night, the show got around to Dayton, Ohio, which is definitely a locale, but hardly exotic. Dayton is about as middle as Middle America gets, which made it a pretty nice place to grow up. Companies routinely test-market products there to gauge the reaction of "everyday" consumers. Although the word "boring" is used several times to describe the city, my fellow Daytonians -- who, by the way, include poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Wright brothers (who, admittedly, probably didn't see the show), Olympic champion Edwin Moses and "West Wing" cast members Allison Janney and Martin Sheen -- seem to have taken the joke well. The local FOX affiliate, WRGT-TV, says it hasn't received any complaints about Sunday's episode." Read More >>>

After a slow week in news, it's time again to tell you about the newest episode airing tonight on Fox. The episode titled "Catch 'Em If You Can" will air at 8pm, followed by a rerun of an episode from earlier in the season, "Today I Am A Clown". A rundown of "Catch 'Em If You Can" follows, thanks to snpp.com. "When Homer and Marge get caught having a rendezvous in Miami, Bart, Lisa and Grampa Simpson take off on a cross-country journey, a la "Catch Me if You Can," to foil their romantic getaway. Once in Miami, the kids ditch Grampa, who befriends Raoul, a gay Miami swinger who enjoys Grampa's stories." There's only a month remaining in this season so make sure you don't miss all the action tonight on Fox.

Matt Groening's heavily promoted appearance in The Simpsons failed to attract a larger-than-normal audience on Sunday night. The new episode titled My Big Fat Geek Wedding was watched by 9.1 million viewers, falling short of many of this season's episodes. The rerun of The President Wore Pearls at 8:30pm attracted the same amount of viewers as the new episode, keeping Fox #1 for the hour in the 18-49 demographic.

All around for the night, it was a close battle between NBC and CBS, while Fox were no where to be seen in a distant 4th position finish. In the 18-49 demographic, NBC came out on top with Fox a close second. New episodes of The Simpsons will air every week from now on until the season finale on May 23rd.

With the cast of The Simpsons holding out for more money, Fox is beginning to map strategies for doing without prime-time's top 'toon, including moving some of its best performers into the breach. The six actors haven't shown up to work for a month, stalling production of the 16th season. They have completed work on six episodes for next season, including the annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode. With postseason baseball delaying The Simpsons' start until November, Fox should have enough episodes until January. But each week that passes puts the rest of the season further in the hole. Because it takes nine months after recording voices to send the tracks overseas and have scenes animated, the next season likely will be shortened from the usual 22 episodes. None of the alternatives are particularly attractive to Fox:

• Move American Idol or That '70s Show to Sunday at 8 pm. Idol is set to start its next season in January, so the timing would work well.

Losing The Simpsons, even temporarily, would leave a huge hole in Fox's schedule. Despite a 15% ratings decline this season, The Simpsons ranks second only to Idol in the network's lineup. Ending the show "would essentially be saying the young-adult audience is up for grabs on Sunday night."

• Replace lead voices. Producers killed off Maude Flanders when actress Maggie Roswell demanded more money in 1999. Yet it's highly unlikely that Fox would seek to replace the lead roles, because new voices would seem jarring to fans.

Few in the TV business expect the impasse to last long enough to call any of these contingencies into play, or to lead the studio to shelve the series entirely. The Simpsons, Fox TV's most valuable asset, brings in $2.5 billion each year.

New episodes return to Fox tonight, with an episode previously scheduled for earlier this month titled My Big Fat Geek Wedding. The episode has been in the media since it will mark a voiced appearance by creator Matt Groening. Here's a rundown of what to expect from the episode. "When Principal Skinner gets cold feet before pending nuptials, his fiancé, Edna Krabappel, calls off the wedding. Determined to win her back, Skinner enlists Homer's help. Meanwhile, Marge is convinced Edna can do better. Edna rebounds into the arms of Comic Book Guy, who whisks her off to a comic book convention, where they run into Matt Groening (guest-starring as himself) signing autographs. Skinner shows up at the convention in a last, desperate attempt to fight Comic Book Guy for Edna's heart." The episode is followed by a rerun of The President Wore Pearls. Don't miss it.

"Do The Bartman" has been named by VH1 UK as one of the top 40 worst #1 singles of all time. The song which peaked at #11 on the US charts spent three weeks at #1 in the UK in February 1991. In the special which aired on VH1 over the weekend, Do The Bartman was selected as #36 on the novelty chart. Charting before it were Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby," Chef's "Chocolate Salty Balls," while songs considered worse than Bartman included "Tragedy" by Steps, "Barbie Girl" by Aqua, "Star Trekkin" by The Firm, and "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" by Bombalurina. It's a little known fact that Michael Jackson penned the Bart classic which remains a favourite with Simpsons fans worldwide. Thanks to George Cauldron at the No Homers Club for the news in an otherwise slow news week.

Marge Simpson, the covergirl for the April issue of mens magazine Maxim, has revealled all the juicy details in her interview which is now available to read online. All the saucy information as well as two revealing photographs are on the website. In 15 questions you'll discover what Marge finds sexy in a man, gossip about Springfield and her husband Homer, and tips for cleaning as well as getting a hairstyle as tall as hers. The magazine is still available on newsstands for another week or two, but if you don't have the cash, Read The Interview >>>

Work has now started on a Simpsons feature film, but fans of the cartoon creations will have to wait years before it hits the big screen. Yeardley Smith, voice to Lisa Simpson, said writing was already under way, but recording would not start until after the present TV series was completed. And even then it would be three years before the film reached cinemas because the animation process took so long. "Animation takes forever," she said. "My wish for the show is that we go out with a bang not a pimple. "If we can do a movie and it can be as good as our best episodes, I'm thrilled. I think that would be wonderful." Her only fear was that fans of the cartoon classic may have grown bored of the show, which is now in its 15th season. She told Associated Press radio in the United States: "I just hope that at this point... people aren't like 'Oh, a movie, we're over it'." Read More >>>

Bart Simpson has found his way onto the cover of this week's Entertainment Weekly magazine (9th April 2004 edition). The magazine itself doesn't include a Simpsons feature, but he appears on the cover to promote their Great American Pop Culture Quiz for the 90s. The quiz includes 100 entertainment related questions to test your knowlege of the 90s. The Simpsons are only mentioned in two of the questions, but Bart makes a great coverboy for the quiz in general, having got an A+ himself. The answers are jotted on his hands, legs and arms. The magazine is available to buy right now.

It doesn't sound all that exciting: another college student writing about Homer's odyssey - until you realize this trip ends not with Penelope in Ithaca, but with Apu at the Kwik-E-Mart. Credit Steven Keslowitz, a Brooklyn College sophomore who turned his Sunday night obsession with The Simpsons into a scholarly study of the Springfield scene, ruminating on subjects from Bart's bad boy persona to Marge's towering 'do. In The Simpsons and Society, Keslowitz fixes a serious eye on America's favourite dysfunctional cartoon crew, looking for deeper meaning in the antics of Krusty, Chief Wiggum and the rest of the townsfolk. He actually finds some, too. "I've been watching the show for years," said Keslowitz, a Simpsons geek who never misses an episode of the Emmy-award winning show. "In college, I realized the show had academic issues that merited serious attention." Read More >>>

A festering stalemate in contract negotiations between the stars of "The Simpsons" and Rupert Murdoch's Fox Television is threatening to kill the 16th season of the wildly successful animated sitcom. The six top actors who voice the characters of "The Simpsons" - Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith and Harry Shearer have joined in a united front to demand a huge raise from the network. Fox has flatly refused their demands - which Azaria rep Stan Rosenfield yesterday said was simply "to be paid their fair share." The six (who have been earning less than $1 million each per season) want in excess of $8 million per season to stay on the show - which has conservatively earned Fox hundreds of millions of dollars. The six actors have not shown up for two script readings in the past few weeks, holding up production on the upcoming 16th season.

The cast has been working without a contract since November. If they don't get their price, Fox might find itself in the embarrassing predicament at next month's network "upfronts" (where the prime schedules are announced) of being unable to count on "The Simpsons," which long has been the crown jewel of Fox's prime-time schedule. It's huge news indeed, and familiar to The Simpsons Channel which broke a similar story in March 1998. We'll let you know of further developments.