Original airdate: October 1, 2023
The premise: Homer unintentionally signs up to be a school crossing guard, and after he saves Ralph’s life in a crosswalk, he relishes his newfound fame and admiration. It isn’t long before he and his fellow guards start to get authoritarian, thanks in large part to a grossly inflated budget.
The reaction: The Simpsons has just passed the 750 episode mark, and 800 is sure to follow. That’s an absolutely staggering amount of stories for one series to tell. I don’t envy any of the writers and their position of needing to come up with new ideas for this show currently in its fourth decade on the air. I have been impressed within the last few seasons that they have started to experiment with the types of stories they’ve wanted to tell, which has yielded some surprises, a much needed freshness to a show that’s increasingly felt more and more stale. But I guess every episode can’t be like that, and you gotta pump out a script about Homer being a crossing guard or something. To be fair, the plot does veer into some interesting new satirical territory, as Homer and his crossing brigade grows larger and yields more influence. After a busy school event results in a parking nightmare thanks to Homer and his crew’s fumble, he turns it around and pushes to get more funding for “training,” despite already getting an enormous chunk of the town’s budget already. This of course mirrors obscenely large police budgets in major cities across America, which are consistently unaffected by any criticism of law enforcement practices or horrible incidents caused by cops. When Quimby fearfully suggests a whopping 1.5% budget decrease, Homer flies off the handle, producing an alarmist commercial featuring a ravaged street corner where poor little urchin kids are forced to fend for themselves with no crossing guards to protect them from maniac drivers. This five minute section of the episode is actually pretty entertaining, and some pretty rich and relevant social satire. But it doesn’t really culminate in any real meaningful climax, and the rest of the episode feels like it’s repeating beats we’ve seen so many times before. Homer feels unappreciated at work and at home. He then gets a new job, which raises his spirits. Then he abuses his power and goes off the rails. We’ve seen different permutations of these plot beats in literally hundreds of episodes at this point, so it’s almost impossible for me to feel anything for Homer in an episode like this. However, I’d certainly take a nice and familiar episode over an incompetent one. This easily stands above a good amount of awful, awful season premieres in years past.
Three items of note:
– Homer is surprised to see Lenny, Carl, and Mr. Burns handle a safety crisis at the plant on their own, until he finally realizes that Lenny’s console actually registers all important safety issues, with his own being just for show. When Homer probes further, the others awkwardly give pathetic excuses to ameliorate Homer’s feelings, including Mr. Burns. I’ve talked numerous times about scenes like these that kind of break the reality of the show too deeply. Not only is Homer still on the payroll despite his job being funneled to someone else, but Mr. Burns openly knows this and bends himself over backwards to make his worthless employee not feel worthless? Maybe for a quick joke, you can get away with something like that, but for me, it’s pushing things too far. If the characters don’t act believable, the scene just isn’t funny to me, regardless of whatever the set-up is.
– Speaking of Mr. Burns, boy oh boy do Harry Shearer’s characters sound old. Have I mentioned this before? I always try and restrain myself from repeating this point, since I know I’ve done it to death, but this is coming right off of the latest season of Futurama, whose subreddit has been plagued for the last ten weeks with endless duplicate posts asking why Fry’s voice sounds so different. The answer? Billy West is 71 years old, so his characters will invariably sound different than they did twenty years ago. Meanwhile, Harry Shearer is turning 80 this year, and you can definitely believe it, hearing how hoarse and withered Otto, Mr. Burns, and Skinner sound, which felt compounded as we hear all of them within the first three minutes of the episodes (weirdly, Lenny sounds totally fine to me.) As I’ve said over and over, this is a “problem” with no answer, but I’ll say that for The Simpsons, and as we’ve seen just recently with Futurama, your increasingly elderly cast should be a sign that perhaps your show has gone on for a little bit too long.
– In the final showdown between all the different enforcement agencies (which feels like a deliberate Anchorman nod), Homer’s intoning of “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts!” feels very much like someone in the writer’s room saw the The Flash trailer and got a huge boner for Michael Keaton coming back as Batman and saying his famous line. Now we’re four months removed from that movie coming out, being one of the biggest bombs in film history, and everybody collectively forgetting it ever existed. Time sure is a funny thing, isn’t it?
So, in case you guys haven’t noticed, there’s been some big strikes going on over in Tinseltown, with the writers and actors unions butting heads against the studios for a collective five months now. Just last week, a deal was finally struck with the WGA, and I’m hoping an agreement with SAG won’t be too far behind. It truly is crazy how long it’s lasted, and without getting too deep into it, it’s an absolute disgrace on behalf of the heads of the major studios. These gormless leeches who have never had a creative thought in their entire lives, who, after cratering their own industry through their own short-sighted decisions to chase after the Netflix streaming model, were seemingly content to let Hollywood burn rather than give a fraction of an inch to the people actually responsible for their companies existing at all. I pray for there to be some kind of industry reckoning that will actually change things for the better once the dust finishes settling, but I’m not holding my breath about it. But I digress. As we enter the fall TV season filled with plenty of good, cheap, “unscripted” programming to fill the empty schedule, FOX is in a very fortunate position in that they can premiere new episodes of their animated shows, as they have a much longer production schedule than live action. In the case of The Simpsons, there are six more episodes of production season 34 left, but leading up to this premiere, I wasn’t sure where exactly production stood on season 35 when the WGA strike began. Originally I thought this season would barely last a dozen episodes, but Michael Price recently confirmed that the first twelve episodes of season 35 were already written and put into production before the strike happened, and the plan is to get as close to a complete 22-episode season as possible between now and next May. With that much time, it seems like they can hit that goal. So yeah, originally I thought I’d be in for a scant season, but I guess not! Hooray for me! A whole 22 new episodes! Yaaaaaayyyyyyy…
Me Blog Write Good 
I am so sorry you are back to talking about modern Simpsons after a whole summer of reviewing modern Futurama. And we start off with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink to law enforcement gone amok.
The problem I have with modern Simpsons is that, in spite of them being more experimental, they refuse to push the Whopper button and go for the ultimate experiment, and that is… have continuity where things don’t reset at the end of an episode. For a show that’s going into its fourth decade, helmed largely by writers who have been in position for decades themselves, you’d think they would at least be comfortable with radical ideas that would span multiple episodes. But, no; we have to abide by the daily comic strip philosophy for a show. Have the writers recently ever been confronted about the show being compared to a lumbering dinosaur while non-Brickleberry contemporaries are willing to explore story arcs or season long angles that explore character nuances or world building?
Meanwhile, while we are still in the midst of our Gordon Ramsay nightmare, it doesn’t help that a lot of the animated shows on Fox right now that are in post-production are shows that are long in the tooth… and Krapopolis, which just plain sucks (I’m sorry, but I do not like Rick and Morty humor which this has in spades, and Richard Ayoade is a strong YMMV kind of actor despite me liking Apple and Onion during its brief existence on Cartoon Network), so for everyone looking for a TV fix at the moment, get used to what was made before the strike. 22 more middling episodes.
You know, by this point, you have to wonder just how much of the status quo remaining the same is due to the writers either being hesitant/not caring about changing it too much, and how much of that is the fault of Fox or Disney being worried that changing it too much would “alienate” the audience willing to shell out money for merchandise and thus forces them to keep things the same.
Which is wired considering that even Family Guy has status quo changes quite often, and it’s a show that easily could fit into the “status quo resets every episode” pile. Yet Peter’s had two jobs and four bosses, Most characters who die stay dead, hell, they even make references to past incidents with Brian. Yet, the Simpsons feels reluctant to even bring up any of the pitiful changes and shakeups its done like Krabapel’s death. Even the Futurama revival, for all its issues still acknowledges past events and follows up on some of them.
I swear all the Simpsons writers know how to do is write plot outlines. Yes, plot outlines matter a lot. But you know how most shows flesh those outlines out? They write scenes where characters have feelings and make decisions based off said feelings. Man, what a waste of time and effort that must be! The Simpsons just writes scenes where characters repeat the part of the plot outline they’re on, over and over and over and over, and they’ve stayed on the air for 35 years!
I’m exaggerating, of course. The Simpsons writers do more than exposit their plot outline. They also throw in some forced puns and tired schtick if we’re lucky. And how about those classic “repeat something that isn’t a joke over and over as though that makes it funny” moments? God, we don’t deserve the blood, sweat and tears these absolute masters of their craft put in for us. Even with hundreds of fresher, more creative and competent series just a mouse click away, why would any of us watch them when we can consume more Simpsons product?
It’s sad that Futurama and The Simpsons are at the same level of quality now.