Original airdate: October 22, 2023
The premise: A hip new couple moves next door to the Simpsons, the smooth-talking Thayer, who works at a sports car dealership, and his wife. They appear friendly enough, but it turns out it was just a smokescreen to get Homer and Marge to unintentionally agree to their incredibly noisy, seemingly endless home renovation. Meanwhile, Lisa helps Bart to stop Nelson’s bullying once and for all.
The reaction: While efforts have been made in the last few years to ground the show in a more widely relatable reality, there will still be an episode every now and again that feels born of an incredibly specific issue to a well-off, successful Hollywood writer (in this case, long-time writer Dan Vebber.) A story about being aggravated at your neighbor turning their house into a McMansion monstrosity feels like a very LA problem to me. I’m sure there’s other neighborhoods in the country that deal with noisy home renovation, but I don’t know how relatable this kind of story is to people who live outside of places whose neighbors can afford such lavish reconstructions. Between this and the “Lambuggini” dealership in “North Springfield” (which feels like a joke on North Hollywood), this is another episode where Springfield has been turned into Los Angeles, Junior. What is this couple doing living on a crap-nothing street like Evergreen Terrace? They could have made a joke about it being incredibly cheap to purchase land on, but they don’t bother. Also, speaking as a non-home owner, do you need to get your neighbor’s permission to construct something on your own property? That doesn’t sound like it makes any sense. If you’re doing anything on the shared property line, sure, but I don’t understand why this couple would need to waste their time schmoozing Homer and Marge over something they aren’t even involved in. Maybe someone can clue me in? Anyway, Homer and Marge are pissed off as their neighbor’s house gets larger and the construction more noisy. How will we resolve this… [yawn] enthralling plot? It’s Lisa to the rescue, who lets her parents know that their house actually sits on the very spot that Jebediah Springfield christened the town on, making their street a historical landmark, meaning it must remain unchanged. But the houses on the block aren’t historical landmarks, the land is. So either everybody’s house gets torn down to reconstruct the land as it was in Jebediah’s time, or nothing happens. How exactly does resolve the story? Oh, who cares. A real snoozer of an episode.
Three items of note:
– The couch gag was very strange to me, with Homer driving home from work in style in a slick sports car. I guess this is meant to be a parody of commercials for these vehicles, feeding into the desires of men on the brink of a midlife crisis desperately trying to hold onto their perceived manliness. Also the car flies at one point and Dick Van Dyke makes a cameo in the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, because why not. Then I was surprised that the episode actually revolved around sports cars, and Homer even refers to the couch gag as a crazy dream he had. I feel like there’s been once or twice where the couch gag actually led into the episode itself, but I don’t remember what episode(s) they were. It’s certainly an extreme rarity though.
– There’s not much to talk about with the B-story. I feel like we’ve seen numerous B-stories involving Bart finding some new way to deal with Nelson as a bully, but this one feels particularly lazy. Lisa stops Nelson in his tracks by showing her a website of embarrassing photos of him on her phone, but what is the threat? To spread the URL across the whole school? To post more videos if he steps out of line? Whatever. To fight back against Bart and Lisa, Nelson enlists the help of Hubert Wong to square up against Lisa in a nerd-off. We last saw Hubert in the previous future episode where he was Lisa’s fiancee, voiced by Simu Liu. I also realize I had confused him with Langdon Alger, the boy Lisa admitted to Homer she had a crush on in “Bart on the Road.” But I was mistaken, Hubert Wong is a relatively new kid character who’s had a small handful of appearances. He made quite the impression, I guess! He was previously voiced by Tress MacNeille, most likely doing a very appropriate Asian accent, but now he’s voiced by Rosalie Chiang, who played the lead character in Turning Red. She does a fine job sounding like a little boy, but I barely even knew this character existed, and nothing here is making him any more memorable to me. Also Turning Red fucking rules and is Pixar’s best film in years.
– We see Jebediah Springfield in flashback, but it bugs me that it’s Hank Azaria doing his voice, sounding like the rail-riding hobo from “Simpsons Tall Tales” (I’m sure he’s used this type of voice for dozens of characters at this point, that’s just the first one that came to mind.) But in previous appearances (all of which being in the classic era), Harry Shearer did his voice. I know this isn’t a huge deal, but if the staff had forgotten who voiced that character, there’s hundreds of resources online run by rabid fans where they could get the answer. I also wonder if they’re still operating on giving Harry Shearer as few non-recurring roles as possible, so Jebediah would fall under that category. In any case, it just irrationally bothers the insane super fan in me.
Me Blog Write Good 
Ah yes, I love relatable Simpsons episodes like this, in which Homer gets a Lamborghini and learns how overrated they are. Al Jean’s Harvard alums truly have their fingers on the pulse of working class America.
Not to mention this episode continues their tradition of mocking poor characters just for being poor. Nelson, Gil, and Kirk all get this anti-VIP treatment. I guess people like them deserve to be ridiculed, since they don’t have the power to fight back. That’s how satire works, right? *sips caviar wine*
Remember when this show treated the Simpson family as working class and chronicled how they struggled with finances, like the time the dog needed an operation and had to eat chub? Now they’re buying Lamborghinis and schmoozing with upper crust townsfolk whenever the plot demands it. It just shows how detached the writing staff has become over the years from the original idea of the series being a generic “Wherever, America” show to “This is really us bitching about living in suburban Los Angeles, so this week we’re complaining about Burbank; the next, Pasadena, then North Hollywood, and so on”.
And, I agree; the show is extremely hostile to characters below the poverty line (except Cletus, they treat him like he’s special), or anything that has to do with the concept of socialism or income equality. Basically, they love to tout social liberalism whenever it benefits them, but like in the case of mocking visual effects studios or treating Bernie Sanders as an insane infant, it’s all a “fuck you, I got mine” libertarianism that comes along with age.
Thank you for not pretending that this awful show is “good again”.
This had to be a Jean episode.
“”Also Turning Red fucking rules and is Pixar’s best film in years.
Glad I’m not the only guy who believes that.
God, yet another episode where our main characters who look like total freaks hang out with characters who look like they were made in those “Generate a Simpsons character based off your photo” apps (especially Merge with her 1950s beehive and crude one-piece dress). It just highlights the disturbing march of time in terms of society but also storytelling as a whole in the show, as a much stronger show would feature this as a plot point throughout the season instead of it being something randomly brought in, and then resolved to never be seen again.
Also, King of the Hill did a much stronger episode involving the building of a McMansion in their final season, where Ted, using legal loopholes, builds an extremely shoddy McMansion for the purposes of luring in rich people to Arlen, or to convince someone else to start building genuine McMansions in the area, and the consequences of his cutting corners threatens the well-being of the neighborhood when a storm comes through. Here, the plot is “Oh, no! The people that were nice to us suddenly are no longer nice to us, what do we do?!!”, as if that hasn’t been done 20 or so times in this godforsaken series.
“especially Merge with her 1950s beehive and crude one-piece dress”
Implying that’s the only thing she wears (besides her necklace and heels). There has to be a skirt under there or something.
Yes, I felt this way too. Sometimes the Simpsons protagonists have more details to their outfits than they did in earlier seasons (such as fishing outfits or striped lawn chairs or detailed bathrobes, for example), but their everyday outfit is too simple to accommodate for really detailed characters. I feel the same way about the design of Ms. Peyton. Theoretically I support a cute, calm new Black woman character, but I wish the design team had made her look as simple as the Season 1-10 designs (or as wacky as the Season 1 designs). A few tweaks I would make for her is at least coloring her glasses, earrings, headband, and dress the same pink color which is easier on the animators and on the eyes…sorry I went off topic but those are my thoughts lol.
I think the one where Lisa got the yips and they had to go to New Orleans was the last time a couch gag segued into the main story.
I did not care for this story. Homer and Marge’s problems with the mcmansion seemed very one percenter woes. And the subplot was worse with Bart intimidated by kindergartners and Lisa humiliating Nelson for the awful crime of … trying to save a hummingbird? Wouldn’t Lisa normally think that was a wonderful thing to do and not a blackmail worthy shame?
Greetings from nohomers.
I know that curved line is supposed to be the outline of Marge’s leg, but it looks so weird
I am a decades-long Simpsons watcher and a big fan of SOME new Simpsons episodes (like the Chalmers/Skinner road trip one; “Undercover Burns”; and especially “You Won’t Believe What This Episode is About—Act Three Will Shock You!”), but others can be cringey at best. While some jokes in this one weren’t so bad, I hear where you’re coming from regarding this being rich-people-problems. Besides that, it just seemed weirdly written.
For me, the unforgivable offense is how both Principal Skinner AND Chalmers’s characters have been flanderized past recognition (Skinner should be an intense tough Vietnam-guy to his students, not a literal waiter to Nelson, and Chalmers should have more important things to do than roam the hallway and stand around in a playground next to Skinner).
I will admit the Kirk joke made me LOL, and so did the Wiggum lines.
I am just really tired of ‘here are some new rich characters to hate’ cliche, because it just feels like a rehashed version of Hank Scorpio most of the time.
Thank you for sharing your perspective!