Wes Anderson Royal Tenenbaums" was nominated for an Academy Award and ranked by an "Empire" poll as the 159th greatest film ever made. Anderson's next feature was "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" (2004) about a Jacques Cousteau-esque documentary filmmaker played by Bill Murray. It serves as a classic example of Anderson's style, but its critical reception was less favorable than his previous films, and its box office did not match the heights of "The Royal Tenenbaums". In September 2006, Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen released a tongue-in-cheek "letter of intervention" for Anderson's artistic "malaise" following the disappointing commercial and
The Wife Aquatic are planned to be sent to a paper mill to be made into issues of "Hustler" and "Barely Legal" magazine. This was the highest rated episode since season 16's "Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass", which aired right after Super Bowl XXXIX. Barring that, the ratings were last this high in 2004, with "I, (Annoyed Grunt)-bot" which had 16 million viewers. The Wife Aquatic "The Wife Aquatic" is the tenth episode of "The Simpsons"<nowiki>'</nowiki> eighteenth season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 7, 2007. 13.9 million viewers watched this episode, making it the