Reception
In its original broadcast, "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson" finished 18th in ratings for the week of September 15–21, 1997, with a Nielsen rating of 10.7, equivalent to approximately 10.5 million viewing households. It was the highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, beating King of the Hill.
The episode was mostly well received. The song "You're Checkin' In" won a 1998 Primetime Emmy Award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music and Lyrics", and an Annie Award for "Outstanding Music in an Animated Television Production" in the same year. In honor of The Simpsons′ 300th episode milestone in 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked the episode at number 13 on the list of their favorite 25 episodes, and AskMen.com ranked the episode at number seven on their top ten; in both cases it was the second-most-recent installment chosen to co-inhabit the lists. IGN named the episode the best of the ninth season, claiming "this is a very funny episode that started season nine off on a strong note". Since the release of the season nine DVD box set, the episode has been highlighted by newspaper reviewers to show excellence of the season.
Ian Jones and Steve Williams, writers for British review website Off the Telly claimed that the episode "ditched all pretence of a plot and went flat out for individual, unconnected sight gags and vignettes". The two noted that it was their least favorite debut episode for a Simpsons season. In a separate article in Off the Telly, Jones and Williams write that the episode "... wasn't shown for reasons of taste and has never appeared on terrestrial television in Britain," referring to a BBC Two schedule of the ninth season, which began October 2001. It has since been shown on British television, on Channel 4 and Sky One.
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