732. The King of Nice

Original airdate: October 16, 2022

The premise: Krusty is convinced to host his own daytime talk show, a high-paying gig with minimal effort on his part. While focusing testing the show, executive producer Lindsey Naegle is impressed by Marge’s perfect “nice” segment ideas that she hires her on as a segment producer. Marge is thrilled at first, but quickly finds herself being stressed and worn down by the nightmarish world of daytime TV.

The reaction: I can’t remember the last time I saw one minute of any daytime TV show, so to devote an entire episode on satirizing this genre of television isn’t doing much for me at the jump. All of the targets of satire are pretty easy to discern though, as they’re things that basically anyone with even a cursory knowledge of these types of shows could figure out: a dancing host who caters to easily excitable moms and gay guys, overly cutesy, saccharine heart-string-tugging segments, product giveaways, and an overly phony atmosphere. I know daytime TV overall must still get pretty good ratings, otherwise there wouldn’t be any drive to make new shows, but as a subject of parody, this feels like such a moldy topic. The obvious inspiration for this episode was the 2020 Buzzfeed expose on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, revealing the shocking stories of the toxic work environment behind the scenes, and the torment staff employees went through. We’re two years past that scandal, and Ellen’s show went off the air this year, so this all feels like ancient history at this point. But beyond that, a big chunk of the episode is specifically commenting on shows like Ellen’s, but her show was on the air for nineteen years. Everyone’s done their parodies of these types of shows. Hell, they had Ellen on this show where they had her dance to audience applause and played it straight. It feels absolutely pointless to be raking this subject matter over the coals now. But whatever. Marge likes her new job at first, thrilled that someone is actually using her ideas, but she gets continually ground down by the workload and the abuse that she becomes angry and distant with her family. Then she snaps at a PA and realizes what she’s been reduced to. I just couldn’t care about this plot in the slightest. It seems like a no-brainer that Marge would be perfect to be the brain trust for one of these vacuously positive daytime programs, but it barely even felt like she was giving character-specific suggestions, just dumb jokes a writers room came up with like “Tweens Explain TikToks to Soccer Moms.” So much of this episode felt like it was way too inside baseball, where the writers either had personal experience or had friends who worked on these types of shows, and along with the Ellen scandal, wanted to do a whole episode on it. It just seems so far removed from the grounded reality of the show, for a subject matter that’s already been well trodden over, offering nothing new to the table. After last week’s surprising break from formula, I’m not too surprised we’re back to business already.

Three items of note:
– Krusty is lured into daytime television by the sweet smell of money, but there’s a moment I thought would actually develop into something. At the start of his first show, he dances awkwardly on stage to massive cheers. He sits down and notices his shoe’s untied, quipping, “Look at this! I already got a wardrobe malfunction!” The crowd eats it up, much to Krusty’s initial shock, then delight (one woman helpfully comments, “That’s the kind of joke we get!”) Between this and him continuously entering to Flo Rida’s “Low,” a 15-year-old song, I thought there would be some character turn that Krusty loves his new job because his famously out-of-date humor actually found a receptive audience. But no, he later comments he loves it because being nice is easy and he doesn’t have to do any work. The episode is more Marge’s than Krusty’s anyway, so it doesn’t matter much, but it seemed like such a gimme, since Krusty’s been doing outdated material since the beginnings of his character, that it was surprising they didn’t directly comment on it.
– The unsavory work environment of Krusty’s show is blown by “TMI,” a TMZ “parody” that the Simpsons watch on TV. I had to look up if “TMZ on TV” was even still on the air, but sure enough, it is. It feels like another ancient reference. The woefully underrated Lonely Island movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping already gave us an amazing TMZ parody, in a film from six years ago.
– The episode ends with Marge getting a call from Drew Barrymore (voicing herself), asking her for help on her daytime talk show. This comes mere minutes after Marge finally breaks and speaks her truth (“It’s the system of daytime TV that’s toxic! It’s turned us all into monsters! The pressure to crank out so much nice brings out the worst in us!”) So we’re tearing down the whole industry… but not really, because there’s some showbiz friends of ours in daytime who are actually very nice and we don’t want to paint them as bad. It wasn’t cutting satire to begin with, but having Drew at the end completely sweeps the leg under anything they were trying to say. This show has long since lost its teeth, and this is a pretty clear example. Celebrities used to be brought on to be cut down at the knee, even ones the writers respected and loved. Nowadays, more often than not, they’re glorified and coddled.