747. Write Off This Episode

Original airdate: April 30, 2023

The premise: Amazed by her mother’s super cleaning bags, Lisa convinces Marge to start a non-profit to benefit the unhoused. However, it doesn’t take long for Marge to get swallowed up by the wacky world of non-profits by spending millions to spread awareness of your organization while doing nothing to actually help anyone.

The reaction: Sometimes when the show tries to pick out a specific societal topic to ridicule, the episode ends up losing sight of its specific characters and it ends up feeling like an endless tepid segment of The Daily Show, or I guess to be a little more contemporary, like a segment of John Oliver’s HBO show. Our main story tonight: charity organizations. Marge reveals her homemaking secret weapon, a bag filled with her secret mix of cleaning ingredients. Whatever you place in the bag and give a good shake to instantly ends up looking brand new. Offering these to Springfield’s unhoused population with Lisa, Marge then starts a charity based around them, naming it in her daughter’s honor, the Lisa M. Simpson Foundation (side note, has Lisa’s middle name Marie ever been spoken aloud on the show before? I think it’s only been in non-show media, like the comic books, or I believe I first read it in the character bios at the beginning of the Simpsons Complete Guide book.) From here, Marge gets swept up in the clutches of Bernice Hibbert, who in a song-and-dance emphasizes the importance of giving your charity exposure, holding expensive galas, creating a memorable ribbon icon that you can slap on merchandise, billboards, cross-promotional tie-ins, and opening an enormous building for yourself and your dozens of new employees who do a negligible amount of actual work. All of this, per usual with this show, is an incredibly surface level critique. Marge stuns the board by asking when they’re going to actually help people (“As the wife of a surgeon, I’m all about helping people. But we’re a mega-successful non-profit, not some charity.”) This is paired with a Lisa-Marge story, where Lisa becomes disillusioned and angry at her mother for creating this monster of a group that doesn’t help anybody. Marge is blinded into still thinking her organization is actually doing something, but the argument gets escalated so quickly with so little actually being said between them that it just feels like time-wasting in the middle of the episode. Lisa eventually forgives Marge just because, and I’m checking my watch until the ending happens where Marge announces their new non-profit building will now be a living space for the unhoused. All in all, a pretty light and dull outing without anything unique to say about the non-profit business.

Two items of note:
– As Lisa is sourcing cruelty-free products at a monastery, she passes by a monk who finally achieves a new level of enlightenment, thrilled that he finally understands the plot of Inception. Congrats for being the ten millionth show to make that joke. They make it “contemporary” by having the monk say his next goal is to understand Tenet, but it really doesn’t excuse it. I never got the popularity of this gag in the early 2010s, it felt like it was everywhere in comedy movies and shows where characters would talk about how Inception was so confusing. The literal first hour of that movie is Elliot Page asking Leo DiCaprio all sorts of questions about how the dream world works and him laboriously explaining all the rules, the broad strokes of which honestly are not that complicated. What were so many people getting tripped up about?
– At the end of the episode, we get a very long speech by Mr. Burns spelling out the episode’s moral, that it would be nice if we had a government that could take a more active hand in tackling society’s ills rather than leave it up to thousands of ineffective private charities. It’s very weird to hear this overly written creed come out of Burns’s mouth, even though he undercuts it at the end (“But no one here wants the rational way, we want the united way!”), it’s still strange for him to talk a big set-up about increased governmental oversight and having a greater social safety net. But more glaring than that is Burns’ voice. I try to avoid bringing this aging actor topic up for a number of reasons, but this was such a big, long scene of uninterrupted Burns, and man, he doesn’t even sound remotely like himself anymore. It’s weird, since I feel like most of Harry Shearer’s other main characters, like Skinner and Flanders, still sound okay, but Burns has seemed to reliably be the most difficult one for him to do in the last couple years. As I always say at the end of these, this is an issue with no solution. Barring the invention of time travel, these actors are getting older, and so are their voices. It’s just something we have to accept, but I think it’s something the writers can try and curb by identifying which voices are the most difficult for these actors and pick and choose the times they use them. Or, I dunno, maybe Shearer had a cold the day they recorded and they couldn’t do a re-take, so he sounds extra lethargic, and Burns could sound a bit better in his next appearance. It’s a possibility. But Shearer is going to be 80 this year. It’s just a sad reality knowing that someday these actors will be gone. Hopefully not anytime soon, but hearing these performances sometimes makes me think about it.