Original airdate: March 7, 2021
The premise: After being incredibly moved by a jail cell serenade by Cletus, Homer vows to make him a music superstar, which he succeeds at. However, he must pull Cletus back down to Earth when he hires a new manager after fame goes to his head.
The reaction: I’ve long spoken of my desire for this show to flesh out its secondary cast in the pursuit of new and different stories to tell, but I don’t think every denizen of Springfield deserves to be put under the characterization microscope. Case in point: an episode about everybody’s favorite slack-jawed yokel Cletus. He’s played a part in a couple plot lines over the last decade or so, but this feels like his meatiest role yet. I guess you could make a substantial episode all about Cletus, but man, I am perfectly fine with keeping him a goofy side character, because I did not give a flying fuck about him at all in this story. It also doesn’t help that the premise is obviously lifted from “Colonel Homer” (they even directly reference it), and it’s not even worth comparing the two. Homer gets tossed in the drunk tank, missing yet another family dinner, and Cletus’ heartfelt song about family or something motivates him to be a better family man, which we know because he goes home and tells the family that directly. And like all good family men, he then proceeds to spend all his time managing a hillbilly’s singing career. Cletus sings about how he doesn’t need the finer things and loves his country life, but none of the songs are funny or catchy, or honestly, even intelligible, as I had trouble hearing his low singing voice over the music at points. He has no motivation to want to be famous, nor does Homer to actually give a shit about making him famous. His jail cell song didn’t move him in a profound way like Lurleen Lumpkin back in the day, at least it didn’t feel like it at all. When Cletus hits it big and he and Homer are on a private jet for some reason, he fires Homer, gets a new agent and moves to a fancy Shelbyville loft, content to shill low-grade moonshine on TV with tee-vee actors playing his kids. I’m finding it difficult to really parse through the plot, because I honestly and truly did not give a shit. Cletus abandons his family through one quick line to Homer at the agent’s office that it doesn’t even register, so Homer and Marge end up confronting him with his wife and kids, and Cletus makes good with them, and then that’s the end. But the episode was short, so we end on Albert Brooks’ agent character talking with an unnamed client for two minutes. Boy, maybe you could have used those extra minutes to flesh out the story some more? No matter, it would have been wasted anyway. But like I said, some characters like Cletus, or Miss Hoover earlier this season, you can leave well enough alone in the background, and they’re much better for it. Later this season, we’re going to get an episode spotlighting Sarah Wiggum. I think I’d put her right below Cletus on a list of characters I want to learn more about.
Three items of note:
– Homer’s desire to be a better family man ultimately translates into him being the good guy not wanting Cletus to abandon his family for his career. But he’s basically abandoned his own family to manage Cletus. It’s unclear exactly how much time elapses between the first montage and when they’re on the private jet before Cletus fires Homer. We see a bunch of magazine covers with Cletus’ face on it, and it’s implied they’ve been touring and working a lot, presumably with Marge and the kids stuck at home. In the third act, when Homer is finally back, rather than be pissed at all about this, Marge insists they both go get Cletus back with his family? Why? What loyalty does Marge have to this random hillbilly who lives in her town? It’s a big leap for me in certain episodes where she supposedly cares about Moe, but he at least has some connection to the family, but fucking Cletus? Ridiculous.
– The only scene devoted to actually showing Cletus’s success is her appearing on the Ellen Show, or “Elin Degenerous” as she’s called here. They attempt to do material about the recent stories about the toxic work environment on Ellen’s actual show by having her trapdoor the audience for not applauding enough, and her billboard shooting lasers out its eyes, but it all just falls flat. First, why the hell don’t they just make it Ellen? I hate this change-one-letter bullshit when it comes to referencing real people. But beyond that, I remember a decade or so ago in that fucking terrible American Idol episode, they had Ellen on as a guest, because that was the one season she was an Idol judge for some reason, and they made fun of her by having her dance, because that’s the thing she does in real life. And what does “Elin” do when we first see her? She’s dancing in her office. Eleven fucking years and they can still only do the same fucking “joke” about Ellen. A good show would have fucking ripped her apart, not this softball nonsense.
– The unnamed agent is voiced by Albert Brooks, having last appeared six seasons ago as an anger management counselor (I think?) in the brilliantly named “Bull-E.” I remember not being too taken by his character then, and I feel about the same here. It hurts him that he’s showing up thirteen minutes into a story that nobody could possibly care about, but none of his lines are really very funny, which makes it more baffling that they give him two whole minutes at the end to just ad-lib and fill up time. I guess his material is a lot funnier in isolation, and I imagine it was very funny to hear him in the booth just riffing and they laughed so much they decided to keep it all in, but none of any of that humor translated onto the screen.
Me Blog Write Good 
More like “Yokel Zero”
More like, “Jukebox Zero.”
I would never have remembered I even watched this episode if not for this review.
The agent was one of the most intolerable characters I’ve seen in recent memory. I hated every moment with him.
Tonight’s episode really did suck. I agreed with everything you said about it except the fact that characters like Miss Hoover and Cletus Spucker should never get episodes. In truth, the episodes surrounding them suck, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be done. They just have to be done by the right person who is Matt Selman. Although some of the recent Matt Selman’s episodes have been pretty mixed (Podcast News, Wad Goals) he still is making great episodes (The Road to Cincinnatti, The Dad-Feelings Limited, A Springfield Summer Christmas For Christmas) and I believe he should be the showrunner from now on. Al Jean’s episodes have all been terrible this season, with the only actually okay one being Diary Queen, but that was just because it was a Krabappel tribute, and even she felt out of character. This season has been pretty mixed for me overall, but I will remember it as being an interesting experiment. This season has tried to flesh out characters who have never been fleshed out before like Miss Hoover and Sarah Wiggum, and I applaud them for that and hope this continues down the line. Also, it feels weird how there are only 2 episodes till the 700th which seems to have Maude Flanders as a main part of the story so hopefully, they don’t screw up her character as well. Anyway, hopefully, next week is better than this week’s episode. With Matt Selman as the showrunner for the next episode, it’s obviously gonna be way better.
A key problem is… Cletus keeps getting so many damn episodes despite hillfolk not being creative characters. In this episode, we had references to how unhygienic he is, his inbreeding, having 130 kids and naming them the dumbest things, and not having any smarts, which is essentially the entirety of the hillbilly comedy manifesto, and also being used countless times in the past (there was even a reference to his uncharacteristic penmanship, which was all the way back from “Sweets and Sour Marge”). I have mentioned he’s my least favorite character in the series as he is not a character worth investing in, yet the show believes he is even though they just do the same tired shtick over and over again.
As for the rest of the episode, Homer becomes a “family man”… and proceeds to spend the whole episode outside of one scene not doing family things. Typically, these types of “character has a lifestyle change” episodes try to run with them, not have the character keep saying they are said thing without actual examples. The Ellen parody once again goes up there with their lazy name changes and barely doing anything different besides “Oh, this person is horrible!” It even included tired exposition bits during the montage like “Second stop during a montage” and “The halfway point during a sequence”, along with Homer randomly typing a bunch of hashtags, as if that was the joke; Homer saying a list of things, and that we were to laugh at Homer saying a list of things. Al Jean is the master of the bland and the forgettable, so it’s frustrating the show keeps being dragged along as the carcass it is, since he’s never going to wrest authority away full-time.
Finally… Albert Brooks. I never wanted to strangle a fictional character since that one guy in “Sit Down, Shut Up” as I did this character. There’s a difference between playing a character in a table read and actually doing a character for a TV show. Nobody likes folks who keep interrupting you and refusing to let you get in anything and assuming they know what’s best for you without getting your input. And the fact they went back and did a whole bit with a generic character was more gas on the fire.
Fuck this show.
That was a well-plotted piece of non-claptrap that never made me want to retch.
You’re being sarcastic…right?
He’s quoting Sideshow Bob from “Black Widower.”
Oh, can we talk about how apathetic the show is that the conflict of the episode takes place with no effort?
Cletus just randomly goes, “I’m firing you.” at the end of the second act, with no rhyme or reason.
I said this was going to be a worthy contender for worst of all-time, and I believe it.
Having Cletus as a main character works as a quick joke (like in “22 Short Films”), but not for an entire episode, especially not in the state that the show is in now.
I didn’t read it but I saw a stupid new article about them replacing the actor’s with AI generated deep fakes.
Your name is familiar…
Really where do you think you have seen my name before?
Luke Pearson
I chuckled at Cletus’ kids being named after streaming services (Disney+, CBS All Access, HBO Max), if only because of how dumb it was.
Not to mention that immediately dates the episode before last week. Unless he renamed that specific kid Paramount+. Considering they seem to change names every appearance (with the exception of Mary Spuckler, because you can’t exactly be on SNL with a constantly changing name), that could be possible, they may not even have birth certificates.
And you can’t go to school without a birth certificate. Maybe that’s why we never see Cletus’ kids attending Springfield Elementary.
The Ellen parody just reminded me of how much better Family Guy made fun of her.
“This movie is hot, hot, hot…..h-how does it feel to have the hottest film in Hollywood?” “What the fuck?”
“I-I love talking on TV, I-I’ll say anything……to be on TV.”
Also, this is probably something a lot of people have already said for years, but does anyone notice how much modern Simpsons goes out of its way to reference current pop culture? It takes up to a year to finish an episode, but it feels like they rewrite the episodes to incorporate as many current things as they can. I don’t think the show used to be like that.
A lot of the references in the classic seasons weren’t from the 90s, but from the 80s, 70s, 60s, and 50s, even further back than that. The show didn’t rely on being part of the 90s, even though the kind of show it was couldn’t have been made at any other time than the 90s. “The Springfield Files” was reliant on 90s pop culture, but that’s mostly because that was Al Jean & Mike Reiss’ style of writing, and not reflective of what the show usually did.
I feel like these newer episodes are going to age a lot worse because they’re a product of when they were made. Other shows reference modern-day pop culture all the time, but the way The Simpsons does it just feels so…..forced.
Today (as of this post) marks officially the ten year anniversary of Red Letter Media’s Half in the Bag, and I decided to watch some of their older episodes at random, which included (For the sake of this reply) a random Arnold Schwarzenegger film and “A Haunted House” (spoiler alert: they did not like A Haunted House), which ended with Jay explaining to Mike about how Seltzerberg movies are structured.
Modern Simpsons episodes are a lot like parody movies that Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (or whoever they were, I don’t care) got infamous for, and all the knockoffs that ended up being made. Although Zombie Simpsons isn’t as crude as those films unless you want to look hard enough, like “The Scorpion’s Tail” or most of Mike Scully’s era, those movies were filmed by mentioning things that were popular in pop culture about 6 months to a year prior, instantly dating said films. I believe this is another side effect of Al Jean being showrunner for so long, given his penchant for wanting to mention things that are as relevant as possible, and ignorant to the fact that this traps episodes by making certain scenes or jokes difficult to understand without proper context. It also makes it when the show does references to things that aren’t from the past year or 2 the more jarring, like every Wes Anderson film in Comic Book Guy’s episode this season; another drawback.
I think this is spot-on. The way modern Simpsons does references is very similar to how Seltzer & Friedberg do it: Take something relevant right now, and just mention it, or make it as specific as possible so it works in the context of that scene and only that scene. I didn’t think this was an Al Jean problem, but after reading part one of Mike’s season nine review, I’m starting to change my mind.
The episodes that Jean and Mike Reiss co-produced when they were with Disney (the 3G episodes) have this weird feel to them because they are specific to the time period. “The Springfield Files” and “Lisa’s Sax” especially feel like outliers because of how much they reference 90s culture. They feel like episodes of The Critic with Simpsons characters in them. But these episodes still work because of how hilarious they are, or how the story still has a tight structure. “Lisa’s Sax” is a flashback episode based in 1990, but it’s not about referencing 1990 stuff. It’s just the backdrop for the episode. Nowadays, if the show made something like that, it would have to remind you over and over what year the episode is based in.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but does anyone feel like this season feels so different than the last few seasons of Modern/Zombie Simpsons. In terms of quality, some of the animation this season and last season has been incredible especially with the body movements. Also, this has to be one of the most experimental seasons I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad they’re focusing on the Springfield residents more than the family because I think even they realized they milked all the good stories out of them. I’m excited to see who’s going to be getting an episode about themselves next. Does anyone else feel like the Simpsons are getting a tad better or is it just me? Also, does anyone feel like they should give Miss Hoover another story to redeem herself as a character because they really flandarized her in this season’s episode about her. I would love to see Matt Selman take a turn trying to make Miss Hoover a better character.
First off, the problem I have with them doing these episodes with the residents is that the family is still involved in some capacity, often being the ones solving the problem they themselves created. The Skinner/Chalmers episode has been the only real episode where the Simpsons are persona non grata this season, and folks typically don’t like it since they hate the obsession the staff has with Skinner and Chalmers.
No, the Simpsons is not better. It’s just you. I’m sorry if I come off as bitter or jaded, but that’s just someone who wanted this dinosaur to go extinct a long time ago.
And, no, they’re never giving Miss Hoover a chance to redeem herself. That ship has sailed, and to be frank, while I wrote my explanation as to why an episode about Hoover was worth doing, the fact it’s already been done means it’s no longer worth revisiting. For a character like her that’s so low on the priority meter and has the problems she does (it’s too tempting for the writers to make it all about their favorite liberal moral beacon instead, for one), it’s not worth the effort to go back to do an about face, especially in a series that worships the status quo.
Different yes, better, no. The animation certainly looks like it’s trying, but it’s not trying enough if you ask me. It just feels like Family Guy with more poses, camera angles, and in-between frames. And their attempts to try and flesh side characters who are literally just stereotypes like CBG and Cletus have fallen flat on their faces. I’m sorry, but I feel like this season’s been the most pointless one as of late.
This sounds like an incompetent rehash of Lurleen Lumpkin, replacing any semblance of good characters or heart with shit that no one cares about and overused, unfunny characters. Does anyone actually think the Cletus schtick is still funny? It was wearing thin during the classic years.
And if you’re going to make bad twists on Ellen’s name, at least go for the low-hanging fruit and call her Ellen Degenerate. It’s right there, man!