Original airdate: February 28, 2021
The premise: Bart gets a summer job at the country club as a caddy, finding that sucking up to the rich players earns him big tips, building up his “wad” of cash. However, Marge worries the job is changing Bart, leading her to rally to get the whole golf course shut down.
The reaction: Sometimes an episode will just lose me in exactly what the point of the story is and what’s motivating characters through it, like there’s script pages missing and I have to piece it together myself. Act one culminates in Bart thriving as a caddy once he learns that the golfers tip big if you stroke their egos enough. Initially thrilled about her son’s new job, Marge’s tune changes when she sees Bart’s behavior close-up (“I’ve never seen my son suck up before!”) “Sucking up” is a phrase that she repeats throughout the show, and that’s basically the extent of her complaints with Bart’s job. When she fails in enlisting Homer to get him to quit, she teams up with Lisa to try and shut the whole club down. But what exactly is the problem? Bart’s a ten-year-old kid scoring some extra cash off rich people as a summer job. It would be one thing if we saw Bart “sucking up” off the job, at home or at school, like his new mentality was warping his mind in a more negative fashion. But no, Bart’s aware that it’s all a schtick he does to get more money, directly telling Marge this information. So, really, what is the big deal? The fact that Marge never gives any further explanation of her feelings until the very end doesn’t help matter (it’s almost like it’s kept a secret on purpose, as she says to Homer, “I know it’s not logical, but when I saw Bart on that golf course, my mothering spirit just wanted to hurl!”) When her anger expands into wanting to get the entire grounds shut down, a clever idea Bart gives to the club owner has playing golf declared a protected religion, saving the greens. Act three has Marge pleading with representatives from other congregates to join her in rallying against the golf course… but the conflict has gotten so macro beyond Bart, I don’t even know what’s driving her anymore, as she gives some complaints about rich people and golfers. If she was upset about rich entitled people taking advantage of sweet common folk like her son, that’d be one thing, but it’s never framed that way. At long last, at minute sixteen, Marge admits to Bart why she’s upset, that she thinks the job is robbing him of his natural instinct to speak his mind. Bart assures it won’t (“I’m not gonna suck up forever! Just until I’m rich. Then other people will suck up to me!”) It feels like the point is that Bart wanted to make this into his career and is wholly focused on being a subordinate for hire, but again, this feels like another episode where I’m desperately trying to connect dots that the writers should have done while writing the script. Things all wrap up in the most formulaic ending I’ve seen in a while (more details below.) The meat of this story, Marge worrying a job is changing Bart, is a good one, but as usual, it doesn’t feel like enough work was put in to really develop that emotional through-line, and as a result, I just didn’t care.
Three items of note:
– Last week I wondered why Harry Shearer was still voicing Dr. Hibbert, and it’s almost like the show heard my question, because a news article came out about it a few days later, and now in this episode, we see that Kevin Michael Richardson is the new voice of Dr. Hibbert. It’s only one line, so there’s not much to gauge in comparing, but it definitely sounds much lower register, since that’s Richardson’s signature. But I wonder why it took longer recasting Hibbert than any other character. I know Harry Shearer wasn’t pleased with the recasting in general, but I’d also read rumors he was quitting the show because of it, but that isn’t true. Whatever. Speaking of voices, I’ve noticed in these last two episodes, Bart started to sound a little funky too, like he was skewing closer to Nancy Cartwright’s actual voice. I guess it’s just been a while since he’s had a ton of dialogue, but I can’t say it wasn’t distracting to hear.
– Marge finds a partner in Lisa in hating the golf course, who immediately says that they’re evil. When Marge asks why, Lisa immediately consults “The Woke-ster’s Encyclopedia of Outrages” to formulate her opinion for her. Okay, so they’re making fun of people who claim to care about causes but have no actual information. They’ve done this with Lisa a lot, but do they not realize how unlikable this kind of stuff makes her? Because this episode is about Marge and the local country club/golf course, I resisted comparing it to “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield,” but as we saw there, Lisa hated the country club too for roughly the reasons she reads off her phone here, but she was an actual character who cared about things, and on top of that, she was also an eight-year-old girl who put her grievances aside to go ride a pony (“I found something more fun than complaining!”) Anyway, Lisa tells Marge she should start an online petition to get the club shut down. In writing the title, Marge discovers it’s too long, and abbreviates it to “Stop Coddling the Springfield Juniper’s Wealthy” to “Stop Coddling the S.J.W.s.” Yep. The petition gets a million signatures overnight, as Lisa explains to her mother (and the audience) what an SJW is and why this is bad. Except it’s just a throwaway joke, it doesn’t really go anywhere. If Marge found herself aligned with a bunch of alt-right psychos, that would be an interesting turn-of-events, but it just ended up feeling like a stretch.
– This is a Matt Selman-produced episode, and as such, you can expect some incredibly generic and trite teevee, and the ending is exactly that. Club owner Bildorf (voiced by Stephen Root, doing the best he can with a nothing role) makes it clear to Bart he’ll never be more than he is, causing him to run off in shame. Meanwhile, Marge seems defeated as she goes to leave the golf course, when Bart returns on an ATV he was eyeing with Milhouse, Nelson and company in an earlier scene (he was aiming to buy one, and when the others asked if they could ride it, he told them to fuck off.) Bart then gives the killer line (“You forgot about the wad! It can buy a pretty nice ATV, or rent a whole bunch of them!”) Cue the other kids riding in on their ATVs as they proceed to wreak havoc on the greens, as fun, family movie-esque music plays and the club owner and his new rich boy caddy are aghast. Just absolute garbage. I guess this is supposed to be their tribute to Caddyshack, but since it’s a bunch of kids doing it, it’s like a scene straight out of a fucking Nickelodeon movie or something, with a bunch of kids getting even with the snooty rich people. Milhouse yells “Kid power!” for God’s sake. It reminded me of the conclusion of last year’s finale “The Way of the Dog,” where it felt the farthest removed from The Simpsons than anything I’ve seen in its thirty-two seasons. I’ve complained a million times about how this show once bucked the conventional, whereas now it warmly embraces it, but this and “Dog” feel like the greatest offenders of that. And in the end, when the club owner gloats that Bart has affected nothing, the police arrive to arrest him because his new golf religion has become a sex cult? Again, this show used to be very reflective of reality, and if there’s one social group that was completely above punishment, it’s rich capitalists. They could have done some schmaltzy ending where the club owner gloats but Bart and Marge unite in talking back to him and leave triumphantly, that would have probably sucked too, but it would have been more honest.
Me Blog Write Good 
So, is one of those “Marge vs an entire faction because it changes her son” again?
First was TV, then it was Sugar, later on children’s future, being a Mayor, but now is banning UFC sports and Golf clubs because “ooh nooo, why is no one thinking about the children!?”
Jeez, I wonder if later episode Marge will try to ban Donald Trump (look I know that joke is dead but hey! They did it on Treehouse of Horror, so why not again!?) Because Bart likes his haircut
“The Simpsons” using the term “woke” is utterly cringeworthy and that’s all I have to say about this one. I don’t even watch these episodes. I only read your reviews of them.
There’s an episode of ‘American Dad’ called ‘Stanny Tendergrass’, which has essentially the same plot (golf club and all) but is actually funny and well written.
It first aired nine years ago…
I think King of the Hill did something similar way back around the turn of the century.
Why did you have to remind me of an all-time classic episode just to point out how much worse this is in comparison?
“What’s going on?” “Oh, this is where I come to do whip-its and think about what would happen if the Ninja Turtles went to college.”
“Things are getting too spicy for the pepper.”
“I know you have a lot of questions, so I’ll just tell you: The dean closes down the campus pizza shop and the Ninja Turtles do not…..take it……well.”
wut
Wow.
Wow.
That sounds like such a terrible episode. Doesn’t help that you have Marge protesting without justification and Lisa being her traditional liberal douchebag self that the writers just love and worship. The series has made many strides in presenting Bart as being useless or untalented, so when an opportunity arises where he’s good at something, of course there’s a problem.
Next week is going to be a contender for worst episode in series history (and that says a lot) on a personal note, given that it will be about my least favorite inbred hillbilly on the show.
“Lisa immediately consults “The Woke-ster’s Encyclopedia of Outrages” to formulate her opinion for her”
Writers, if you set out to push the bile to the tip of my throat, mission accomplished
Yeah, I think mocking the perpetually-aggrieved is well within the bounds of fair play in comedy, but, as with everything else in this show, they do it in the clumsiest, least clever or funny way imaginable.
Just like the last episode, you’d figure they’d just be happy Bart was acting nicer. Hell, maybe he could do the act full time and the family actually WANTS him to stay that way. But at this point, any hope of actual effort in the show instead of blatant paycheck cashing went away with the Disney acquisition. I’d say Dead Putting Society was a better golf-related episode, but hell, i remember the golf bits in the Lost Verizon and Moe on American Idol eps better than this. That means they’re blatantly ripping off Zombie episodes now, and if that’s the case…. yikes.
Do they not realise that Marge and Lisa are the sjws there? Or is the joke that they have become sjws but don’t realise it?
The majority of the writing staff are Harvard educated liberals who believe that now that Trump is out of office, everything is back to normal and we don’t need to hold our politicians to accountability anymore (I know what I said is speculative, but based on the amount of content that ends up on the show, it just feels that way). As far as they are concerned, if Lisa is a SJW, it’s justified.
They just don’t understand that being a social justice warrior isn’t a good thing, even among people who lean left, cause a lot of times, those people crusade over the stupidest or most trivial of things. It also doesn’t help that the show is afraid to put Lisa in the wrong or have her as anything besides “nagging voice of left-wing talking points”.
All this ends up highlighting the tone-deaf attitude of the writing room.
…yeah, no. King of the Hill did this better.
And it featured Hank Hill getting molested by a dolphin.
And he wasn’t even a prank monkey!
lolwut
I don’t understand why we were supposed to be cheering Marge and Lisa on when they were trying to get the whole club closed down. Sure the golfers were a bit patronising but they didn’t seem to be treating the caddies badly or otherwise doing bad things – even the cynical ‘religion’ plot was only in response to Marge coming after that.
I’m genuinely baffled how the writers don’t realise how unlikable Marge and Lisa come off in episodes like this. Or maybe they just don’t care. I assume it’s the latter option.
Long time reader, first time commenting. This episode was a total mess. Bart was self-aware enough to know that he was mooching off wealthy people and he knew it wouldn’t change him. It feels like the writers had like three scripts and taped them together, or one of the stupidly rich writers pitched this after getting rejected from a private golf club. It’s clear how out of touch they are.
Also, I saw some people claim that Hibbert didn’t sound different but once I heard him laugh I knew it was wrong. It sounded way more like KMR doing his Principal Lewis on American Dad voice. At least try to get him to sound more like Shearer’s impression of Bill Cos-… You know what, maybe we should replace Hibbert with a different black doctor. One that isn’t a clear indication of hanging on to the 90’s.
Fuck this episode. Fuck it to hell and fucking back.
Not quite the first time I’ve felt compelled to say something this coarse about a modern-day episode (see “The Miseducation of Lisa Simpson”), but again it feels good doing it.
Nancy Cartwright’s voice isn’t starting to go too, is it? She’s actually not *that* much younger than Julie Kavner when one thinks about it…
Are they using a computer to come up with plots now?
[Homer} gets a job as a {door to door bible salesman] and {Lisa} is not happy about it.
Bart’s voice hasn’t sounded right for a long time now. Nobody says anything because Marge’s voice is far worse in comparison. The only main character that still sounds like themselves is Homer, just a little more tired.
Also, that whole scene of Lisa explaining what an SJW is to Marge reminded me of what you wrote when talking about “Homer’s Phobia” last week. That if they did an episode now about Marge owning a Confederate heirloom, Lisa would hate her for it because it means she’s promoting slavery. That was the kind of scene that people make fun of the show for having.
Never in my life did I think I would hear a Wu-Tang Clan song on this show. Then again, I never thought I would hear a Destiny’s Child song on this show so I’m glad that they can still make me laugh unexpectedly.
Bad news, gang. The show has been renewed for seasons 33 AND 34:
I predict it’s going to go until one of the main voice actors either dies or decides to retire. Unless they decide to replace them, in which case it actually might never end.
No one likes Batwoman. Since the beginning that show had really bad reception and every episode and season get lower and lower ratings. No one cares about it except youtubers saying over and over again how awful it is and still for some reason it was renewed for season 3.
At this point, I’m starting to believe we will get season 40 and beyond even if those episodes will be made for the sake to burn money.
I’ll probably be dead before The Simpsons ends.
Awful. I think if the point was that Marge didn’t want Bart to become a pathetic, sniveling toadie, they could have given Smithers (Classic Smithers, at least) a prominent role. And it didn’t seem like they were taking advantage of Bart, but that he was taking advantage of him. And why does a ten-year-old have a job? And goddamn, they can’t write Lisa anymore.
Fuck this show.
This wasn’t a good episode, but seeing so many commenters whine about SJWs is so funny to me.