Original airdate: January 5, 2020
The premise: Lisa’s new braces leave her with a permanent grin, making her instantly more palatable to her fellow students. She decides to use this to her advantage by running for student body president. Meanwhile, Homer and Marge get invited to Artie Ziff’s wedding, and are shocked to find his bride-to-be is an exact copy of Marge.
The reaction: Things get off to a painful start when Lisa bumps into an old man on the street (“Hey, little lady. You’d be a lot prettier if you smile!” “What? Who are you?” “I’m a man, so I know what I’m talking about!”) Awesome writing right there. So I guess this is their feminist episode? I guess? When Lisa gets the top half of her new braces installed, she’s left with an unflinching smile, making her instantly popular at school, where no one really cares what she’s saying as long as she looks nice doing it. It’s an idea we’ve seen in many other movies and shows, including this one, all the way back to the ending of “Moaning Lisa” where Lisa takes her mother’s advice to bury her feelings and just smile, making her a more amiable presence to be taken advantage of (“Why don’t you come over my house after practice? You can do my homework!”) Here, when it’s this simple idea stretched across to an entire plot, where Lisa’s entire class is enraptured by her book report of Charlotte’s Web, it feels more of a stretch, but thankfully some tell-not-show inner monologue from Lisa helps us out (“Can it really be people are this shallow? And am I shallow enough to enjoy this?”) But we pivot from that to Lisa finding that since she can control the mushy minds of her classmates with her new grin, she can run for student office and use her powers for good. But there’s no specific problem she wants to solve, it’s just stuff we see in Lisa’s quick fantasy, like a unicorn sorting a recycling bin and the bullies as reformed bookish types in a nice new library. The social aspect of Lisa embracing her new shallow popularity feels like it would be a richer vein to tap, but I guess not. Lisa is seemingly a shoe-in to win, but when she gets her bottom half of her braces done, she now has a locked grimace, costing her the election. It would be an unsatisfying ending if I actually cared about what was happening. If only the episode were about something specific Lisa really wanted to change, then we could be along on her crusade and understand it. Or if she found herself really caring about being popular, as fleeting or superficial as it were, and we can feel what she lost. But I guess Lisa was just after power for its own sake, and ended up losing big time. Who does she think she is, Hillary Clinton? (laugh track) This episode was written by Elisabeth Kiernan Averick, a new young writer who previously wrote for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It reminded me of Megan Amram, who wrote the feminist-themed “Bart vs. Itchy & Scratchy,” which I enjoyed for the most part, and I theorized maybe some fresh new blood in the writer’s room could potentially shake things up on the show. But then Amram was credited on the awful “Crystal Blue-Haired Persuasion,” and now we have this garbage mess. The actually good “Thanksgiving of Horror” must have slipped through the cracks, but thankfully, the writer’s room hive mind turning scripts into bland, homogeneous goop is still in full force. So much for that incredibly brief hope spot, I guess.
Three items of note:
– The B-plot is truly bizarre and unsettling. Artie Ziff as a character has never worked beyond “The Way We Was.” The idea of him being incredibly successful but still lamenting his past mistake of letting his high school crush get away is kind of interesting, but the problem is is that’s all there is to his character. He’s a rich jerk who still wants to fuck Marge, and that wears thinner and thinner with each ensuing appearance. Here, it’s ramped to absolutely psychotic territory when it’s revealed Ziff’s bride is actually a robot he built. He then reveals his secret laboratory with his dozens of failed Marge robots, telling the real Marge that the expensive wedding and bachelor party was all just an elaborate ruse to win her over. Instead of running away screaming from this deranged, obsessive lunatic, Marge wastes her breath trying to cheer Artie up (“I think this crazy project actually had some brilliance in it!”) Artie is pleased by this (“I finally give up! …or do I?”) Pretty good summation of this show’s dogged refusal to advance any of these characters forward one single inch. Just like we just saw with Sideshow Bob, these tertiary guest characters are stuck doing the same song and dance every couple years or so, with no new ideas or innovative concepts allowed. The episode ends with Marge trying to cheer Lisa up how things are slowly getting better for women, which I guess is trying to tie the two stories together thematically? But it’s revealed that that was just one of Artie’s Marge robots, who flies off with the old man who kept telling Lisa to smile, prompting Lisa to cheer, rather than scream “HOLY FUCK MY MOM’S A FUCKING FLYING ROBOT.” The last scene is Artie dining with his Marge robots, hoping to have sex with them, so that’s a wonderful mental image to close out on. I can’t wait for Artie’s next episode, where he traps Marge in a VR simulation to trick her into loving him or some other bullshit nonsense.
– The video tape Lisa finds in the library, “A Gal’s Guide to Wowing the Workplace,” feels like a film strip the show would have absolutely killed in the past. But here, the jokes just feel so obvious and on-the-nose (“Let me touch your body and show you the problem!” “No need to ask!”) Also Lisa being mortified that this sexist notion of women being accepted solely for their appearance actually seeming to be accurate is a humorous idea. It’s like something South Park would take and run with, that the “wrong” lesson is learned and how the characters deal with it. But that concept is dropped almost immediately, so don’t think about that anymore.
– Over the end credits, we get a montage of pictures over Lisa’s life of her not smiling, from being on a roller coaster, going to prom with Milhouse, to appearing on not-Oprah’s show to hawk a book about how smiling sucks. But we also get random shots of eight-year-old Lisa randomly inserted between adult Lisa, so it all feels weird and messy. I guess this is all connected to Marge saying how things will get better for women, and showing how Lisa is successful in her life without smiling? It just feels strange and sad, seeing snapshots of her whole life looking miserable and not giving a shit. Episodes like this make me miss classic Lisa so much. Socially conscious, wise-beyond-her-years, but above all else, still a little girl, prone to naivety and childish behavior.
One good line/moment: Nothing. This one blew big time.
Me Blog Write Good 
Moaning Lisa this ain’t. At least there Marge realized that “oh wait, what my mom told me about burying your problems was wrong–LISA, IF YOU WANT TO FROWN, I’LL DO THE SMILING FOR BOTH OF US.” and actually cheered her up while providing a sweet and timeless message.
Why does Zombie Simpsons feel the need to crush moments like that?
I don’t know, but even if that moment was redone here, I know you wouldn’t like recreating moments from past seasons purely for fanservice. Like Mr. Lisa’s Opus has done with redoing songs from Stark Raving Dad and Lisa’s Sax.
So what have we learned from this episode? Apparently a trip to the Re-Neducation Center can make you really popular at school. Plus, Artie Ziff is either mentally ill or just a wacky cartoon character. Seriously, that may be the worst B-plot in the show’s history. It makes “The Ziff Who Came To Dinner” look awesome in comparison.
Question of the Week: I know this came out in 2014, but what are your thoughts on the Family Guy/Simpsons Crossover Episode?
I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, but I don’t really have much to say about it. I really don’t like Family Guy, but the idea that a crossover with this awful show would tarnish The Simpsons’ legacy or whatever at this point is moot, so I didn’t really give much of a shit one way or the other when they announced it. It was also the same year as the Simpsons/Futurama crossover, which was weird timing.
As bad as this episode is, I have to give the writers credit on one thing: for all the soulless rehashing/referencing of things from the classic era they’ve done over the past few seasons, I’m surprised they had the restraint not to bring up the dental plan bit.
They probably just forgot as opposed to consciously omitting it.
…honestly, I wish I could give the show’s zombie era more credit than I do for these small, uh, ‘victories’, but, given the laziness of the surrounding writing, it’s difficult to assume they invest any significant thought into these episodes at all. Lisa becomes popular for superficial reasons? Yup, we’ve done it before, we can do it again because who cares. Artie Ziff is some deranged genius willing to get his lusty hands on Marge at any zany, cartoonish cost? Hmmm, we’ve done that less, it’ll require a little less autopilot to write, but hey, fanservice is the sweetest victory, right?
I’ll stop doing question of the week because the questions I ask are too random and have nothing to do with the episode. Sorry
No need to apologize, you can ask whatever questions you want on here. It’s not like these episodes really dignify any thought-provoking or interesting conversations on their own.
Thank you for the reassaurance! So Mike if you’ve seen the Family Guy/ Simpsons Crossover Episode, what are your thoughts and do you consider it to be a Simpsons or Family Guy episode? The only reason why I’m asking is because you never reviewed it.
There’s no consideration involved, it’s a Family Guy episode written and produced by their production staff, and aired as such. Just like the Simpsons/Futurama crossover is a Simpsons episode, which is why I covered the latter, but not the former.
I would honestly like to see what new writers actually wrote originally, just so I could prove one way or the other Elisabeth Kiernan Averick and Megan Amram have or haven’t had scripts be reduced to “bland, homogenous goop” by other story editors so we would know if you were right or wrong, because I know you would like to know. If you were wrong, I would feel a little bit better knowing other story editors didn’t ruin what they wrote, but I would also feel sad about them not thinking of anything better to do with The Simpsons because they would rather be too cynical and keep Lisa miserable instead of doing anything about the sexist problem of women needing to smile and being judged based on their appearance. I hate torture porns so much.
(sigh) As much as you dislike Lisa the Drama Queen, Juliet Hobbs had a point that could unintentionally go for any uncreative writers of The Simpsons or other stale TV shows: “The real world is for people who can’t imagine anything better.” Maybe the next The Simpsons episode, or the next next The Simpsons episode of 2020 will give you something good to laugh at. Something good is always better than nothing good.
It took 18 years, but we can finally scratch “Marge becomes a robot” from “They’ll Never Stop the Simpsons”. I’m counting it, dammit!
They’re not going to bother developing characters like Sideshow Bob or Artie Ziff or Snuffy Sniff or any of the peanut gallery because, once again, doing so would require them to recognize that would require acknowledging character growth, which is part of the dreaded “C” word. Having him realize his chance with Marge has come and gone, and his inability to move beyond that is stifling his life despite his success (yet they are willing to mention other events, such as Artie going to jail) would require them to come to terms with other character foibles, and that is not good for their daily gag comic strip approach to writing, where the characters are stuck in a frozen timeline in which everything must reset itself or the universe will implode. You know, the weird thing is… I honestly disagree sometimes with people who bicker about the disintegration of most of these characters. Yeah, I get you don’t like seeing characters like Moe or Mr. Burns humanized, but the reality is you can’t do episodes with them if they’re in their one-note asshole state ‘cuz obvious reasons, so you’re sort of forced to humanize them a little bit to give them that extra bit of depth. My issue is when you make them cardboard cutouts and stick them into a scene so you can go “Character #3, say your catchphrase and… go! Okay, back to Homer.” Which has been virtually the case for the better part of 15 years.
Meantime, I wound up dropping in and watching this episode, and honestly, I legit thought the Marge/Artie stuff was the main story because… the story with the flipping guest star would be the main plot point since Simpsons. The show didn’t do much favors with the build, or even the resolution. It just ends with Artie still living in his delusions, and is actually worse off because the robots either develop free will and don’t want his sex or malfunction. But getting hit with toast… that’s progress!
Over on the “other” story, I had to bite my tongue when I realized a member of the Spuckler litter was involved. Lord knows how much I despise anything Spuckler. The general philosophy towards hillbilly character writing is exclusively “Dem hicks r fummy1″… or F-U-McDonalds Logo-McDonalds Logo-Slingshot. I don’t say this as a member of an anti-defamation society towards Appalachia; I just say this as a person who despises the fact Cletus and his family have had multiple episodes built around them in some way even though writing hillbilly and redneck characters often means you don’t get them past first gear (which, ironically, makes them perfect for Zombie Simpsons). It only existed as sort of the sobering reminder for Lisa that the vanity-driven Springfield Elementary will take the inbred hillfolk who definitely is only going there for the free saltines and fig paste they serve for breakfast and not for any education over the person who actually has answers and advice simply because she doesn’t look happy ‘cuz again, “Status Quo”, but the stakes would have mattered more if we built up what goals she had and so forth. Didn’t help that I knew what was gonna happen since they firmly established she was going to get her bottom teeth worked on and I knew what the twist was going to be.
Some random thoughts:
*They spent too much time on the “dentist hates kids” bit. Just have it at “I don’t actually like working with kids”, and leave it there. No need to go all in and explain her name origin and stuff since she’s most likely never going to be used in another episode. They’ll just create yet another dental character anyway.
*”Homer is Fat/Dumb/Cheap” Roundup; included Homer being fatter than a rhinoceros, Homer taking forever to recognize that’s not actual burning money in the bonfire, and Homer ignorant of the fact that you can literally buy Toblerones at a Dollar Tree (or the 99 Cent Store for the West Coast folk). By the way, two of those jokes I mentioned all occurred in the same segment, coupled with him “dying” twice from taking a bite out of a roast pig that they did a bait and switch gag just so they can do the same joke once more. Speaking of the “Homer is fatter than…”, recall when early in the show’s history they had Homer be smellier than a pet store and a fat rendering plant, but then decided to show restraint? I’ve encountered malodourous folks who could realistically make a case for that, but given Homer’s now average build for the typical American male, the idea that Homer can be fatter than a several thousand pound rhino isn’t humorous because it defies logic. Gotta know where you can do your weight jokes, especially in comparison to other fat things.
*The Act II break makes no sense. Wiggum can afford to waste taxpayer money to dig through Garbage Island, but not the insurance for a retainer? I know dental insurance is expensive, but… ah, I’m thinking too hard.
Actually, they’ve done Marge becomes a robot twice if we count The Heartbroke Kid. I’m waiting until Moe updates his cell phone!
“It just feels strange and sad, seeing snapshots of her whole life looking miserable and not giving a-” Thank you for saying that. I felt the same way when I saw clips of frowning Lisa myself. It won’t kill her to have a legitimate reason to smile, and I never saw Lisa look and feel this apathetic before. There was more happiness to Lisa’s story in Springfield Splendor 2 years ago, and the main focus of that story were her “Sad Girl” comics.
What year does The Way We Was take place in now?
Since they bumped Homer’s age from 34 to 38, the senior prom now would have occurred in the year 2000. Pretty crazy.
Does “now” really matter? It will always be 1974 as far as I’m concerned. It was 1974 in 1991 and it was still 1974 in 2009’s Take My Life Please. Since Mike seems to be so concerned with consistency, I never see why he feels like past events need to be moved up. If he didn’t like That 90s Show before, then why does he care if Homer and Marge’s senior year in Take My Life, Please was 13 years more than 22 years ago?
If your show is supposed to take place in “present day,” as we see with the show referencing current pop culture, world events, etc., then your “past” inevitably has to change with it. It’s not a problem that really comes up a whole lot on the show, but it’s just another example of their dogged resistance to trying anything new or changing anything. Skinner will still make references to Vietnam with war flashbacks, but at this point in 2020, he would have been just a little kid in the 1970s. Same with Abe being in WWII, even if he served as a teenager, that would put him well into his 90s now. Honestly, I think the best solution would just be to not reference the past in specifics at all anymore. It just gets too muddy.
Oh, okay. Well, that is the only example of dogged resistance to not trying anything new or changing anything that I can live with. That’s why most of us have such a big problem with That 90s Show when The Simpsons’s run started at the beginning of the 1990s.
Let me ask you a question. What would you, as a viewer, have to gain from The Simpsons updating the past? Because that never worked out for anyone who watched That 90s Show. I liked The Way We Weren’t and Springfield Up for what they were, even though you may not have, partly because one thing that made the setup work was that they don’t reference the past in specifics. Also in The Way We Weren’t, you yourself had some concerns with the series rewriting its own past to make Homer seem like he was always the crazy jerk-ass he was in the modern seasons and the movie.
By your logic, you make it sound like you think each season should have its own timeline, which also doesn’t help in your previous case of The Way We Weren’t because that just gives the current writers more license to change, derail, rig, rip apart, and twist up the characters in whatever way they want to, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand The Simpsons at all. Unlike you, I am not concerned with having the past change with the present, and when you get to know about the secondary characters’ pasts in the aforementioned two flashback episodes, I have no idea why you would not take what you can get in most of them already knowing each other, as long as it doesn’t contradict anything from previous seasons’ flashbacks, unless you yourself, from your own childhood, do not know most of the people you know now.
I’m speaking just in terms of them referencing the specific years in flashbacks not lining up with our present, the only big offender of which being “Take My Life, Please.” I really don’t give a shit about flashbacks contradicting each other anymore; as long as the stories are interesting, it doesn’t really matter to me at this point. I just didn’t find the stories of “Springfield Up” or “The Way We Weren’t” compelling enough to justify delving into the past. If you’re going to do a flashback show, it should be about exploring some element of the characters’ past and how they grew as people. How Homer and Marge met, got married, had their kids, how their family grew and changed, these are all major events of real growth. But the flashback shows after “Lisa’s Sax” just never felt that engaging to me. Homer and Marge met as kids and kissed, but they forgot about it. So what? What does that add to their relationship? “Springfield Up” showed Homer as a screw-up, then we see he’s rich in the present, but he actually just locked Smithers in a closet and was just play-acting in Burns Manor, and the family went along with it just because. I guess the thread was that Homer is bummed he never “accomplished” great things in life, but that kind of gets undercut when we see he had no real ambition, and also was planning on just murdering Declan Desmond in his editing bay.
I dunno. I think for a lot of this stuff, you just need to make peace with the fact that you like some of these episodes and I don’t. I don’t know what answer I can give to satisfy you on this.
Actually, yes, I can make and have made peace with the fact that I like some episodes that you don’t.
Could you do reviews of the Simpsons political-themed shorts that have been coming out for the last few years? I kind of want to read your reaction to that West Side Story parody featuring Trump and “the squad”.
Oh hell no, I’m not watching any more of those. I’ve seen the West Side Story one, and I think another one a couple years ago, and they are just so fucking embarrassing. They combine the self-congratulatory, limp-wristed neoliberalism of Saturday Night Live with the laziness and uncreative writing of this show, and the result is absolutely painful to watch. The West Side Story short just might be the worst Simpsons-related thing I’ve ever seen.
Remember in Lisa Vs. Malibu Stacy, the brief scene with the sexy secretary? “Hey jiggles, grab a pad and back that gorgeous butt in here.” That was a funnier and more incisive commentary on sexist expectations of women’s appearance and values than anything this episode could hope to offer.
Sigh.
I know. And for all we know, Elizabeth Kiernan Averick could just be some…newbie writer who doesn’t understand The Simpsons at all and barely watched it, just like Mike Scully and Ian-Maxtone Graham 20 years before her. I mean, just watching this episode for the first time, it feels too simple-minded even for the later The Simpsons seasons before this point. Like someone who just wanted to use The Simpsons as an empty vessel or a blank slate to…vent her frustrations about people who tell her to smile. It’s like the Manachek episode: A story written by someone who blatantly could have made it its own IP instead of The Simpsons material, because it doesn’t even feel like a The Simpsons episode in any era, even in modern seasons. At least, it doesn’t feel that way to me, but to you, it might feel like a modern episode. To me, it’s not even Zombie Simpsons. It’s just something else entirely.
What I mean is, if Elizabeth Kiernan Averick is a new writer who joined near the same time as Megan Amram, but is less familiar with the classic seasons from her youth than Megan is, then maybe it’s not…other people in the writer’s room hive mind turning this into bland, homogenous goop. How bad Hail to the Teeth is could be all on her. Well, mostly on her.
Just one episode into the 2020s and I can already tell we have a contender for my Top 10 Worst The Simpsons episodes of the 2020s. An entire story about Lisa only being liked for her smile that does nothing about it is a terrible idea from the start, and what’s really not helping is how self-aware it is when Lisa says in her thoughts “Can it really be that people are this shallow? And am I shallow enough to enjoy this? (gasp) I am.” I can tell we are off to a terrible start. These are even worse self-aware jokes than Midnight Towboy.
At least there were two moments with Nelson that I found funny, even if no one else on this blog did. The first was the couch gag where he tried to use a train track to make a novelty penny of the Simpsons on their couch, and got hit by another train. The second was in the actual episode when Bart asked Nelson why he is fat if he is too poor to eat much, and then Nelson said “Americans can be fat and poor!”
Throw this one on the sci-fi pile with ‘The Caper Chase’, ‘The Girl Code’, and ‘The Man Who Grew Too Much’. Sentient Marge robots? Really? These episodes feel more like rejected Futurama scripts recycled into Zombie Simpsons. I don’t expect the show to have any sense of realism anymore, but these concepts really exemplify how the writers no longer care about the show’s reputation.
The reputation of…The Simpsons not being a sci-fi show? Maybe I misunderstood that last sentence about reputation. (sigh) Great. How did I not see this before? That The Simpsons was picking up Futurama’s scraps after it ended in 2013?
“Can it really be people are this shallow? And am I shallow enough to enjoy this?”
Can it really be that the writers’ understanding of human behavior is this out-of-touch? Or are they just lazy or incompetent?
I didn’t even know a new episode had aired already. I thought they weren’t showing anything new until after the Super Bowl.
Anyway, when I saw your first three words as, “Lisa’s new braces,” I instantly thought, “Um, we already had this plot…” So why did Lisa need braces again when she just recently had them taken off not too long enough? The dentist said she was now fine.
That’s really all I’ve got for this one as nothing sounds enticing at all. I’m actually feeling some relief as my mind hasn’t felt the need to watch all of the episodes I’ve missed throughout 2019. Maybe I can finally ditch this show. Although, that also means I won’t get what you are talking about in the reviews…
I’ll bite… I laughed at Dubya spelling “Results”
“R-E-squiggly letter-bucket letter-tall man-plus sign-squiggly letter. Results!”
I finally watched this one and yep, nope, nothing of value to be found in it at all. I think I should just stop playing catch up and go back to ignoring the show, but then, I miss out on the context of your reviews, so who knows. Though, I was doing pretty well boycotting the show for a while…