Original airdate: March 27, 2022
The premise: Cletus is shocked to find that Brandine is actually smart and has been hiding her intelligence from him, causing them to break up. Meanwhile, Lisa stumbles upon an underground overachievers club at school, who do their best to act unassuming at school to avoid getting bullied.
The reaction: Watching last season’s “Yokel Hero,” also featuring Cletus and Brandine, made me think that perhaps not every secondary character needs to be fleshed out beyond their two dimensions (or in some cases, one). The slack-jawed hillbilly cousins (or mother/son, or whatever variation of relation they’re joking about this week) have always existed, and worked, as quick and dirty jokes, but for some reason, in recent memory, we’ve seen a couple of Cletus B-plots pop up featuring him for more than one or two lines at a time, followed by a complete plot line in “Yokel Hero,” and now this episode a year later featuring his lovely wife Brandine. After speaking eloquently about A Farewell to Arms at Marge’s book club, word spreads fast that Brandine actually has a brain in her head, working its way to Cletus. Confronting her, she admits that she started reading a few years ago, and that she likes actually knowing things. She and Cletus split up, and she moves in with the Simpsons, because of course she does. So what exactly does Brandine like about being smart? We’re never really told. We see her indulging in the very stereotypical “smart” creative pursuits like watching ballet and visiting art museums. She’s also reading the Grey’s Anatomy textbook, so is she interested in medicine? If they could narrow this down to a specific subject matter, or actually elaborate on Brandine’s feelings on why she likes all these things, maybe we could actually gleam some kind of character off of her? Instead it’s so intensely broad, like something out of a subpar kid’s cartoon. She’s smart and she likes learnin’! Does she want to actually do something with all her gained knowledge? I have no idea. She comes home from book club to pay the babysitter, who is actually a goat (“You free next Saturday?”) so I guess she’s not smart enough to know that goats can’t fucking talk. So what does Brandine want? Instead, we eat up time with two subplots, the first being Lisa and the secret smart kids society, and honestly, the whole premise of them laying low to avoid the bullies’ wrath also kind of feels straight out of a kid’s cartoon. Lisa has been the outspoken school-wide teacher’s pet for over thirty years, so this feels like a weird story to pull out now. Alongside that story is yet another goddamn Homer-Marge plot, where Marge realizes that everyone thinks she could have done better than Homer, and she starts to doubt her relationship herself. It’s all a complete waste of time. “Yokel Hero” was terrible, but at least it was an episode with some kind of crazy ambition. This one felt like it didn’t even want to try.
Three items of note:
– The Brandine and Lisa plots really feel like they’re tailor-made to go hand-in-hand, but they barely do. Lisa lets Brandine borrow some books when she comes to stay with them, and then toward the end, Brandine convinces Lisa not to hide her intelligence. The latter might have been sweet if it actually felt like it mattered. Showing Lisa and Brandine actually bonding over their brains would have actually meant that they’d have to actually have Brandine express a specific interest in something, so I guess that was out of the question.
– We get an extended flashback depicting how Cletus and Brandine met, which I guess is meant to be sweet? Going back to my first point, I honestly don’t give a shit about how these two characters met and fell in love. They’re the slack-jawed yokel characters, they’re the last people I want to be emotionally developed! Also, in yet another instance of this show feeling out of time, it feels really strange doing jokes about hillbillies in 2022. Cletus takes Homer to the “Hillbilly Pica-ture Palace” museum (Sponsored by Mountain Doo), featuring an exhibit on mullets and an exhibit on Hillfolk in Media (featuring busts of Hank Hill and Bill Clinton). I can’t even think of a contemporary example of hillbillies in media. What is this satire of? Cletus was created as a joke in “Bart the Elephant,” and kept around because Hank Azaria did a funny voice, and it was funny seeing him randomly pop up every now and again. But now I guess I’m supposed to be emotionally invested in him (“I want you to look at me not as a hick or a bumpkin, but as a human being, with feelings just like you!”) Sorry, Cletus, but in your words, I cain’t. I simply cain’t.
– Homer makes it up to Marge in the end by actually completing his neglecting home renovations, and as a cherry on top, he got “Elton John back, and he’s here to play for you again!” Except in “I’m With Cupid,” Homer usurped Elton John from arriving in Springfield to play for Apu and Manjula, who he ended up serenading at the end of the episode anyway. Ah, who gives a shit. Sir Elton is actually Lenny behind a piano, obscured in shadow behind the curtains. Also, it felt a little confusing that we go from upstairs where Homer’s fixed the big bedroom window, and cut immediately to the living room downstairs window. I had to remind myself that they had switched locations, since the windows appear the same and Homer and Marge are standing in the same place in both rooms.
Me Blog Write Good 
DAY 16 (I think)
Feeling so goddamn tired of Cletus
This is three seasons in a row we’ve had an episode about the Spucklers… Who cares about them? I don’t like them! Why does Zombie Simpsons love them so much? I mean, Cletus and Brandine USED to be funny back in Seasons 7 and 8. Hell, even their appearences in the Scully era were decent. Why was that I wonder? I dunno, maybe because Seasons 7-12 used them sparingly. But ever since Al Jean took off as the sole showrunner they’ve constantly overused these characters for the most tired redneck jokes imaginable. And then eventually they started to become part of the plots starting with that shitty Season 18 episode with Lisa making the Spuckler kids musicians or some shit. And now here we are in an episode where we’re supposed to care about how Brandine is actually SMART?! Hell no, man. Why does Zombie Simpsons want us to love the Spucklers? Why did they make one of their kids a recurring love interest for Bart Simpson besides cross-promotion for New Girl? Why do we expect them to be family friends with the Simpsons?! Oh, and the B-plot is just a ripoff of that one joke from “The Last Temptation of Homer”‘s B-plot. Worst episode in the season without a doubt. Too bad we still got 6 more to go!
P.S.
help me
This episode exposes the problem with the “fleshing out the side cast to keep the show fresh” idea. Namely, that the current show isn’t up to the task of making the audience care about characters they didn’t before. Looking back, secondary character episodes have worked only for characters who were fleshed out during the classic era. The current team seems to either lack the skill, interest or commitment to turn their caricatures into fleshed out people.
It’s a good impulse to think that a new creative direction can give the series life, but it really feels like the rot runs deeper. Until the way episodes are written fundamentally changes, modern Simpsons will stay mediocre. I don’t know what exactly needs to happen, since I don’t know what’s going so wrong in the writing / production process, but clearly change needs to come from within.
The other problem is… it’s the characters that they *want* to flesh out.
Like, how many episodes has Cletus had that either feature him in a main role or is a key part of the story?
As for your question; to me, the main problem will always be Al Jean. Sure, Matt Selman is no prize pig, either, given his penchant for forced sentimentality when not every episode needs to be schmaltzy (didn’t this guy use to be a real asshole on commentary?), but I will always complain about how Jean is patient zero for episodes being really awful. If somehow Jean was barred from the process entirely and you made a bunch of episodes where Al Jean had zero input, would the episodes be better? Probably. Probably not. But, they would at least go somewhere compared to what we have now.
Did anyone else find the scene where Homer was talking about home improvement to be weird? It kinda felt like the animators forgot that there was a giant queen-sized bed in the room, with Homer just kinda clipping into it. I remember there being a point where a countertop or something randomly changed color.
Small animation quirks aside, I think this might have been the worst episode in a long while. It was immensely boring with way too little happening. It resolves things too quickly at times while being way too slow at every other time. It was also just horribly unfunny, as usual.
Dhar Mann: The Animated Series. That’s what this show is turning into.
About 7 or 8 years ago, a full featured article in the Miami Herald cited how one of the last stereotypes to prosper in American society without anyone batting an eye or challenging it is that of Appalachia hillbillies, or generally the white poor. Comedy was briefly touched upon in the article, describing how in American media, the perception of hillbillies are gullible simpletons that mate like rabbits has stuck for ages, and doesn’t plan on going away anytime soon. In a day and age where people feel like you can no longer make jokes about race, sex, or gender and complain endlessly about how apparently “woke” the world is becoming, the idea of “white trash” always will remain a place of respite considering nobody is coming to defend them nor is anyone trying to fight to improve their quality of living in social advocacy (like a GLAAD or NAACP in terms of scale) or politics (the majority who live in rural areas unsurprisingly vote Republican, and are always hosed by Republicans who give sweetheart deals to factory farms to pollute the areas and mining and energy concerns to pillage the land as cheaply as possible, while those in urban climates get hosed by the same systems that also punishes blacks and other minorities for having the temerity of being poor). It is both fascinating but also tragic considering that even as more and more members of society fight for acceptance and are granted that, there’s whole sectors that have pretty much been set aside and have been branded as comedy fodder for generations.
My point is, you won’t ever be seeing a “The Problem with Cletus” documentary anytime soon, unless it’s someone spewing nothing but hatred about how unfunny the character is.
But regardless, Cletus will always remain my most hated Simpsons character thanks to how obsessive the writers are about fleshing out his existence. He doesn’t have one. He was born from dirt, he’s gonna die in dirt. He has no plans to ever truly improve his quality of living, as the writers feel he is the perfect vessel to cram all of their incest and poverty jokes as possible. Why is it that they keep giving him all of these stories while characters like Hans Moleman or Captain MacAllister or Bumblebee Man struggle to even get the disjoined introduction story that establishes the actual episode?
And, oh; Brandine’s smart, but she’s not smart enough to hone her intellect on a singular subject to, I dunno, make a living? Instead, the episode was “she’s smart, look at her do generic smart things now” and, of course, Cletus doesn’t want anything to do with bookworms because, apparently, hillfolk law demands your IQ be in the single digits.
I also think about how a modern Simpsons episode is constructed, with characters speaking with the purpose of delivering exposition as opposed to behaving like you’d assume they would in a situation, the bizarre need for them to want things you know they will never care about again in the next act, nevermind future episodes, the manic obsession with cramming multiple stories into episodes where it may have helped to just focus on one, and of course; tired and forced pop culture references. I feel like if you created a machine, and named it the Al Jean o’Matic 9300, it would randomly make Simpsons Episodes by just giving it a few key phrases, and you wouldn’t even have to deal with moody manatees.
Can confirm. I have now generated episode ABBF01.
Title: “The Blizzard of Claws”
Act 1 Setpiece: The Simpsons go to Charles Dairy, a Chuck E Cheese style place, on its closing day.
A-Plot: Lisa bonds with Shauna Chalmers over her anti-authority attitude, but Bart attempts to abuse this connection to Chalmers to pull off an ambitious prank.
B-Plot: After getting sympathy and free stuff when Maggie is trapped in a claw machine, Homer pretends to trap his infant daughter in similar situations to scam more free stuff out of Springfield.
Random line: “You’ve got to help me! The claw machine’s stuck and my least important daughter’s inside!” — Homer Simpson (Timestamp: 5:29)
(I am a bot. Provide more key words and I will generate a new episode of The Simpsons.)