Reception
In its original broadcast, "Natural Born Kissers" finished 29th in ratings for the week of May 11-18, 1998, with a Nielsen rating of 8.8, equivalent to approximately 8.6 million viewing households. It was the fourth highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, following The X-Files, King of the Hill, and Ally McBeal.
Matt Groening listed the episode as being his eighth favorite episode, and the aroused cow is one of his all-time favorite act break jokes. The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, called it "a superb episode which actually makes Marge and Homer's love life seem very real; everyone needs a bit of spice now and again, and they find theirs. The balloon trip is hysterical, and the attempts to explain their behaviour to a very worldly-wise Bart and Lisa are magnificent." The episode was part of a DVD boxed set release called: The Simpsons Kiss and Tell: The Story of Their Love, and in his review of the release Andy Dougan of the Evening Times characterized the episode along with "Large Marge", "Three Gays of the Condo", and "The Way We Weren't" as "four of the funniest episodes of recent series." The DVD release was also reviewed favorably by Louis R. Carlozo in the Chicago Tribune, where the episode was seen as "more ridiculous" than "Large Marge".
Read more about this topic: Natural Born Kissers
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)