Original airdate: September 26, 2021
The premise: Marge yearns to relive her high school glory days as stage manager by putting on an encore presentation of their showstopper, “Y2K: The Millennium Bug,” but quickly finds herself ousted from the close-knit reunited cast, headlined by returning student and Broadway star Sasha Reed.
The reaction: There have been several musical episodes of the series before, but this one was promoted as the show’s first “full” musical, which is kind of accurate, as at least half of the episode’s runtime is comprised of songs. The writer, recent addition to the staff Elisabeth Kiernan Averick, previously wrote for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and the music was co-written by the composer of that series. Despite that impressive pedigree, the songs here are largely joke-free, which is really bizarre given how absurdist some of the numbers in Girlfriend could get. The story is very rudimentary, so I guess that doesn’t help spice things up: Marge has fond memories of being stage manager back in high school and is thrilled to revisit the role, but is quickly upstaged by the returning star of the show, Sasha Reed, where she is ostracized from the rest of the cast. Marge then exposes that Sasha lied about her Broadway career, making everyone else turn on Marge even more, and then they all make amends and do the play and everyone loves it and everyone’s happy. As common with episodes these days (and especially Matt Selman-run shows like this one), there’s no ironic twist or subversive take to a cliche, simplistic story such as this; it’s just played completely straight, and as such, is very boring. Marge’s first song introduces us to her singing voice for this episode, Kristen Bell, and our next song is performed by guest star Sara Chase, so for the first act, it didn’t even feel like I was watching The Simpsons. Normally I give the show a little credit with experimental episodes like these if I could appreciate the impulse of what they were going for, but I don’t know about this one. It’s their honest tribute to Broadway with songs that feel like they could be in actual musicals… except they’re really not that entertaining or creative or funny. Again, it’s not the show actually doing anything interesting with the genre, it’s just a musical episode that looks and sounds like a musical, with the characters doing perfect choreography and singing their little hearts out. I just don’t see why I should care.
Three items of note:
– Marge’s singing voice is Kristen Bell, for obvious reasons. Last season, I feel like I talked about Julie Kavner’s weakened voice a bit too many times, and I resolved not to harp on it at all going forward, just because it was getting redundant and I didn’t want to come off as mean-spirited. The in-universe explanation is that Bell is Marge’s inner singing voice, which she cheekily compares to that of “a Disney princess,” which is fair enough. In the instances before she switches from Kavner to Bell, they visualize a weird effect where there’s a magical colored mark on her throat. I get they were trying to make this cheat feel as “authentic” as they could, but it seemed a little unnecessary. It’s a musical episode, I can go along with the cheat. But like I said earlier, with Bell and Sara Chase singing for a bulk of the first half, it felt so unlike this show. The “best” song comes from Homer in the last act trying to talk some sense into his wife. It’s not particularly funny, but the concept of a song about a husband trying to talk delicately to their stewing wife is kind of cute, and it was a little fun actually hearing a regular cast member do a whole song for once.
– Floating timeline bullshit: Marge having done a Y2K musical in high school feels incredibly strange, but it is accurate. Given she has been bumped in age to 38, if she graduated at age 18, that would make her part of the class of 2001. I’m not a fan of the writers’ gradual increasing of Homer and Marge’s ages over the Mike Scully era, but the timeline does track. I feel when they do flashbacks now, they just shouldn’t mention anything era-specific, or at least not put a big highlight on it. I mean, the show already did an entire Treehouse of Horror segment about Y2K. I get that the idea of a Y2K musical itself is meant to be the joke and that’s it, but it just seems silly to me.
– There’s not a whole lot specifically to talk about in this one, given how the bulk of it is the songs. The Y2K cast consists of Barney, Dr. Hibbert, Smithers, Helen Lovejoy, Kirk Van Houten, and Lenny (who has to drop out after getting injured), characters who, to me, feel like are a wide range of ages, but, as we’ve seen many times over, they conveniently are all the same age when we see flashbacks to them as teens or as kids. Since saying maybe like two or three lines last season, we also get a good amount of dialogue out of Kevin Michael Richardson as Dr. Hibbert, and like most of the other recastings, it’s just going to have to take getting used to over time. He’s trying his best to match Harry Shearer’s cadence, and Richardson is an incredibly accomplished voice actor, but his Hibbert is definitely shaky at times. Richardson’s voice is too distinctive in the world of voice acting, he just ends up sounding like a bunch of other similar characters he’s done in my head by default.
Me Blog Write Good 
Good to be back! I’ll leave my thoughts on this episode when I watch it on Hulu.
The Posters, the promos, the Behind the scenes info had me all pumped up for this episode……and then I saw it. I mean it wasn’t the worth thing I’ve ever seen, but it wasn’t the best either. It was just mediocre. The story was so flat, usually, in a Jean story they would have a little twist or meat or something, but hear everything just goes from scene to scene. Marge wants a play, she gets a play, Sasha returns, Marge makes fun of Sasha, Marge feels bad, Marge says sorry to Sasha and then they do the play. That’s pretty much it, very boring. If you asked me about this episode two days from now, I’d probably have no idea what you were talking about, that’s how forgettable it was to me. Also, a side note while Kristen Bell and Sara Chase do great singing hearing the rest of the cast singing was hard to listen to. As you have noted before, MeBlogWriteGood, even though Harry is like 78 he’s still trying his best, but you can definitely feel the age as he sings as Smithers. The same goes for Maggie Roswell who in an interview stated this was the hardest musical episode she ever had to do, which is sad considering how few lines Helen had in this episode. It was almost impossible to hear Helen in the group numbers because her voice was out shadowed by nearly all the other deep voices like Dr. Hibbert. Dear God, Dr. Hibbert. I don’t like KMR as him. He uses the same voice for every character he does. The same goes for Grey Griffin, and yet they get hired for every role. It’s so annoying, just give someone else a chance! If your going to replace Hibbert which is a pretty dumb decision anyway, just go for a new actor in the industry. Going for someone like KMR just seems lazy in my opinion. Anyway, I got sidetracked there. Those were my thoughts on the episode. Happy to see you back MeBlogWriteGood, hope you had a good summer! (:
Oh dear, a Simpsons musical in the 2020s. It’s like living a nightmare I can’t wake up from.
For this 33rd(!) season, I will leave you all with a journal archive I had on my trek through this season.
DAY 1
Feeling depressed, yet warily optimistic
Why… why wasn’t Season 32 the final season? Hell, can’t this season just be Season 32 leftovers and just end? Who am I kidding, thanks to capitalism, the Simpsons will never end and that’s why I’m forced to suffer from a musical premiere with songs sung exclusively by guest stars. I guess I should at least be thankful that they finally acknowledged how Julie Kavner’s voice has gotten too raspy for her to sing, probably from all the hullabaloo the internet had over “The Seven-Beer Sni… er, I mean, Itch” or something… Whatever. I guess Disney thought, hey, young people these days really love Broadway musicals again, especially to dudes like Lin Manuel Miranda so let’s have this be our premiere! Also, we’re Disney, we make blockbuster movies with musical numbers! Well, at least this will be the first full season to be done under them instead of Fox so… perhaps will get some new and better stuff this season. Yeah, this premiere was drab and lifeless, but it’s only the premiere! Surely the new production season’s first episode will be a breath of fresh air, right? Right? *sigh* I must be hopeful, if I am to proceed through my arduous journey through the 2021-2022 season of the #1 show that refuses to die. I hope I make it out in the end so I can see classic episodes like “Co-Dependents Day” and “The Bart-Mangled Banner” get their high school diplomas. Those old ZS episodes grow up so fast… I wonder how “Barting Over” is doing in college?
PS
My cat’s breath smells like cat food
Last season’s Marge felt like an OneyPlays skit:
“Merge, they’re gonna replace your singing voice!”
“I can still sing just fine! *sounds like grim death*”
And as a result, they had to come to terms that Kavner, who already was known for sounding like an unpaved road, couldn’t work a full payload anymore.
On the one hand, they finally identified the inevitable weakness of this lumbering dinosaur we call “The Simpsons”, but on the other, the cynic in me feels like if and when any of the key cast members succumbs to the ravages of time, Al Jean and the other Harvard bigwigs will just plop another voice to fill in that slot to keep the machine going while they please their Disney overlords, much like they’ve already done with several ancillary players.
As for the episode… it’s another Zombie Simpsons escapade, where rather than tackling the subject, it’s a blatant love letter towards subject. There’s no bite. Even when personal interests were explored in the early seasons by the writers, they made sure to highlight those faults or how stupid those things can be, but not anymore. It’s all a celebration. Plus, they had already done several Broadway episodes in recent years, with Lisa going to New York and the “Hamilton” inspired episode. What’s next; making fun of the cinematic adaption of “Cats”? I assume that will definitely be a joke that is part of this season.
It’s sad to think about what’s going to happen after the key cast members die, but that’s how old this series really is.
I assume that when Yeardley Smith dies, they’re going to continue the show with Lisa at Camp Grenada.
Part of me thinks the show should have ended with Phil Hartman’s death
My biggest problem with the episode was one that actually tends to pop up a lot in Selman’s episodes either as a showrunner or a writer (or both) where we’re supposed to side with characters who don’t deserve any sympathy and vice-versa.
Oh, we’re supposed to side with the cast when they’re upset that Sasha is exposed for being a fraud? The same cast who financially ruined Marge’s life back in the day and at best were very nonchalant about it and at worst acting all high and mighty about where they ended up in life (even though you ended up being a saleswoman and a liar) while showing zero remorse for what they did? Tell me again how we’re supposed to think Marge was in the wrong here?
I think the general issue lies with how The Simpsons is a series that abstains from continuity with furious vengeance, meaning characters never grow emotionally or learn any lessons. Everything must reset at the end of each episode, as we are all aware, which is a boon for the writers, but a curse for anyone who wants to see the show aspire beyond self-parody.
This mindset that all of our characters are damaged goods are we’re going to keep them that way for the sake of convenience makes writing these kinds of episodes where a character has to learn a lesson about themselves in the end all the more difficult, because they’re never going to retain that lesson, nor do you feel like the path they took to learn that lesson was genuine. You don’t need to have all your characters go to therapy or have thorough heart-to-heart moments, but at the very least, after 9 billion episodes, you want there to at least be some sort of causality to someone’s actions, and not in a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” sort of way that makes you feel dumb for having interest.
It also doesn’t help that in the case of Selman, he has a lot of emphasis on guest star characters being treated almost as martyrs, enjoying casting them too much as such out of some strange notion that this must be done in an effort to get the guest star on the show. We can no longer have Mike Scioscia potentially dying of radiation poisoning or Spinal Tap being ran off the road.
Wouldn’t “All Singing, All Dancing” count as a full musical episode? And that one actually had funny songs in it, even the original ones by Snake and the family
Well….That was a well-plotted piece of non-claptrap that never made me want to retch. /s
At least they lampshaded Marge’s singing voice, because otherwise there would be no excuse for this. Though I’d take Twilight Sparkle over a dying goose any day of the week. I guess the crew learned their lesson after “The 7-Beer Itch”.
Also, gotta love how the high school musical that Marge and the other adults starred in is a Y2K musical, when, y’know, this show was in its eleventh season and had already turned to Zombie Simpsons two years earlier?
And of course, as “The Blunder Years” demonstrated, the adults all have to be the same age in flashbacks. These characters are clearly as many as 10 years apart.
Okay, I did laugh at two things: the house party that apparently got Marge’s parents sued and thus unable to send her off to college, and everyone walking away covering their ears when Marge yells “PLACES, EVERYBODY!” in Julie Kavner’s dying voice. At least the crew is self-aware.
This episode’s biggest sin is that it was painfully bland… which makes it one of the best episodes in a very long time by default. It’s only gonna get worse from here. Happy season 33 everyone!
So…I was four years old when “The Way We Was” aired, a 1991 episode about Homer and Marge reminiscing about their 1974 prom.
The show is still airing and Homer and Marge would now have graduated high school in 2004 and been born around 1986, making them my age.
That’s fucking terrifying.
I’m honestly not sure if this wasn’t a parody of the Disney+ original Encore- it does feature a similar plot of old high schoolers trying to reenact old plays. If that is indeed the case, that’s depressingly out of date- that was one of their LAUNCH programs, but that’s obviously not the one most people will remember (*coughBabyYodacough*), and…. Y’know what, I’d say this is not a good idea to be biting the hand that feeds you, but at this point they’re so completely toothless they’re merely gumming the hand at this point.
A bland and boring episode aired on my birthday… Yay?
I think, whenever possible, it is better for the show to avoid dates and the sliding timescale, rather than shine a giant spotlight on it.