Original airdate: April 7, 2024
The premise: An unexpected large bill leaves Marge to re-enter the workforce, ending up slaving away at a ghost kitchen. Fed up with the horrendous working conditions for low pay, she rallies together with her fellow workers for form a union.
The reaction: Over the last four or five years, this show has done many episodes tackling specific issues, to varying degrees of quality, but this one certainly benefits from being about something very close to home for the writing staff. I’m not quite sure the timeline of when this episode was being written relative to last year’s WGA strike, but that fire is definitely present by the time this show starts to get going. A bizarre incident wherein Snowball II viciously attacks an “emotional therapy chicken” leaves the Simpsons with a five-figure vet bill, so Marge goes to work at a ghost kitchen for the delivery app Gimme Chow to be able to pay it off. Once we get the ghost kitchen commentary out of the way, the story rolls along to be more about Marge and company being terribly overworked and exploited, to the point she thinks she should start a union, which of course only puts her into the crosshairs of management. The different elements of the story work well enough: the demeaning anti-union cartoon the workers are shown, Gil filling in as an empty corporate mouthpiece, the shitty pompous Gimme Chow CEO, voiced by Jason Mantzoukas, who I love (“I can’t get disrupted! I’m the disruptor!!”) I’ll say early on, this is easily one of the stronger episodes this season. What I brush against is the family story running alongside the main plot. Lisa is unintentionally at “fault” for the family’s financial situation, as she was at the therapy animal park during the attack, and she expresses great guilt about it and her mother’s situation during act one, but that basically goes away after that. Since Marge is working nights, the rest of the family is left to fend for themselves at dinner time, of which Homer has the perfect solution: order off the dining app, overworking Marge even more so. To be fair, Lisa speaks up about this once, but is quickly won over by the enticement of vegan tikka masala. The end of act two actually ties these two plots together well where Marge’s impossible task of delivering a massive amount of orders in a short amount of time to keep her job ends with her running out of time on the final delivery to her very own home. She’s extremely disappointed at this revelation (“My own family betrayed me. You know what family would never do that? My union family!”) Then for act three, the kids fade into the background as Homer takes the wheel, getting roped in by Marge’s corporate bosses to be a talking head opposite Marge in being anti-union, still trapped by the sweet siren song of easy food delivery. It isn’t until the Gimme Chow CEO directly congratulates Homer for stabbing his wife in the back does he realize the awful thing he’s just done, and then he saves the day via a deus ex machina set up just a couple minutes earlier. It all felt incredibly rushed within the last act of the episode to make this almost turn into a marriage crisis episode, when it would have been more fitting if it was the family as a whole making it up to Marge, especially Lisa, since really the crisis of conscious was set up for her early on. Honestly, the first two acts are maybe the best this show’s been at telling a story like this in a good while for me, and it was kind of a bummer that they weirdly deviated in act three and missed the landing. Homer refusing instant gratification for once in his life in favor of his wife seems like it could have worked, but it didn’t have enough time to gestate. But surprisingly, this is the best of the season in my opinion.
Three items of note:
– The shot of the chicken wrapped up in bandages and an IV drip being pushed out in the tiny wheelchair actually made me laugh out loud, something this show hasn’t done in I can’t even remember how long. Also we get to see the veterinarian from “Dog of Death” again. It’s still Hank Azaria doing the voice, albeit sounding thirty years older at this point.
– It was kind of weird at first to see Gil cast as the head of the ghost kitchen, ostensibly the antagonist for the first two acts, since we rarely ever see him in a role that’s not pathetic and embarrassing for him. However, this middle manager position is actually perfect for him, a spineless loser who relishes in wielding control over those beneath him, but is still completely beholden to his much more powerful corporate overlords. I kind of wish there was a scene where we see him sucking up to his bosses above him to kind of nail this point home further.
– The first delivery on Marge’s mad dash errand is to both Apu and Snake at the Kwik-E-Mart, as she tosses two food boxes into the store as the latter is, of course, holding up the former at gunpoint. I can’t even remember the last time we had a good prominent shot of Apu outside of being drowned in a crowd shot somewhere. I had to look back to remember, but “No Good Read Goes Unpunished,” the episode with the horrible B-plot where Lisa and Marge turned directly at camera to say, “We don’t think Apu’s a big deal, but we’ll fix it later for you crybabies. Or maybe never at all, who knows, up yours,”) aired six years ago. This feels like the situation of giving Bart a new teacher after Marcia Wallace died, where they just straight up never dealt with it for nearly a decade. Since they recast everybody else, just get an Indian actor to do Apu and just go on like nothing ever happened. Like, why not?
Me Blog Write Good 
“I’m not quite sure the timeline of when this episode was being written relative to last year’s WGA strike”
Cesar Mazariegos (writer of the episode) mentioned that the idea for this episode had been in his mind for a long time: his wife is an activist who has organized for years. And second is that the story for the episode had been conceived before the strike, but when it was shelved (not sent out for animation) it became an “advantage” for the writers because that’s when the story became more personal to them.
” I can’t even remember the last time we had a good prominent shot of Apu outside of being drowned in a crowd shot somewhere.”
He was in A Serious Flanders too. He was simply relegated to cameos.
As far as socioeconomic standings with this show, I feel like the fanbase historically has leaned more towards progressive if not leftist over the years while the writers have staunchly been liberal if not center-left, largely due to how social media interacts with the show via shitpostings and analyzing it from a rhetorical sense as opposed to the weirdos on Facebook who insist it’s always predicted the future due to a few stupid gags, if I’m to kick that hornet’s nest. Obviously, the most prolific of Simpsons writers, John Swartzwelder, is a libertarian who famously annoyed the staff with his “This Things I Believe” antics but largely kept it in check as the show famously held an attitude that politics suck and everything sucks.
The issue with today, however, is that when the show tackles said socioeconomic issues, it does so from the safety of the center-left position, if not even the dreaded centrist argument. Now, the writers had every purpose to strike, as they have the right to as members of the WGA, but the issue is that you then go and make fun of non-union jobs over the past few years and people who struggle to make ends meet and act like that’s okay, it’s kind of stuck in my craw.
Ironically, ghost kitchens as a concept was something they could have done a whole lot more with, considering it was something that start up investors tried to put money into, and you could probably do some jokes about, say, one kitchen doing 30 different restaurants or Luigi’s suddenly doing burgers, which is a reference to how Buca di Beppo’s now has to make Mr. Beast Burgers. But, it feels like jokes on The Simpsons are either rushed out fast or are stretched beyond recognition.
Mantzoukas was alright. For goodness sake, he’s essentially doing his character from Big City Greens.
True, the show has had quite its fair share of “Nelson’s so poor!” jokes over the years that never sat well with me. You also reminded me of the joke they did a season or two ago about the hellish nightmare that the VFX industry is, but played for laughs, which definitely did not play well to myself, as a former VFX artist.
Weren’t there also the jokes regarding outsourced animation too? I know the Banksy open got into hot water by the staff at AKOM because of how offended they were over its depiction of outsourced labor.
Marge’s complaints about being overworked ring a little hollow when the family is financial secure enough to (usually) allow her to just sit at home* while Homer earns 90% of the money they’ve ever had. GimmeChow was a stressful job but Marge is still financially better off than Otto or Mrs. Muntz or Dewey Largo and is only temporarily slumming with them. She was absolutely the wrong person to be the face of the union. Just because she’s a main character on the show doesn’t mean this should have been framed as her story, first and foremost.
*I’m aware she cooks and cleans but she really enjoys doing those things to the point she wanted Homer to quit working for Scorpio, a better paying job he loved, because the house had labor saving devices.
Sorry if my earlier comment went too far.
I didn’t see it was unapproved. It’s alright, didn’t want you to feel you stepped over the line or something.
SprinkleDonut, actually the complaints spanned decades; when the show did Itchy & Scratchy: the Movie, the show depicted a Korean studio as a sweatshop, with the animators held at gunpoint and the people at Rough Draft were very upset. It also didn’t help that was the first episode done at Film Roman, who were going from Garfield and Friends to a more sophisticated television show and didn’t need that kind of controversy in production.
Yeah, I was aware of that, also. But at least that was a brief gag and not en entire minute (also Banksy’s overrated, but that’s neither time or place to get into that). But I can see where the R.D. staff were coming from, considering their origins.
That aside, I think what bugged me the most this episode wasn’t just the whole idea of treating minimum wage jobs with kid gloves (speaking as someone who works a once-a-week minimum wager inn what is one of the worst places for minimum wage). Or the fact that it devolves into another “Homer vs. Marge” story by the end. It’s that they forgot what to do with the characters. Not just with suddenly forgetting about them once the plot moves ahead (like with Snowball, who just vanishes after the attack on the chicken. Not even a dumb throwaway line of her being removed from the Simpson household indefinitely), but also the assassination of personality with Gil. I’m hating the fact that they’re doing a 180 and making him a colossal jerk to everyone. I mean I get the old joke of him being down on his luck was getting stale, but was this really the only direction they could take him in? Also chalk him up as the show suddenly forgetting characters once they become irrelevant to the plot, consider we don’t see or head from him after firing Marge. Again, was a throwaway line of Gil being fired like everyone else too hard for the writers?
Attempting to make The Simpsons (1989) a show that reflects our modern reality is about as futile as brokering world peace between cats and dogs, and just as worthless. But if the Simpsons team wanted to try anyway, and they’re happy making nominal status quo changes now … why NOT keep Marge employed at her ghost kitchen job? What harm does it do to the series? Not much in my eyes. It’s not like Homer working at the power plant keeps him from showing up in house scenes. It’d be a mostly offscreen thing. So for barely any additional effort going forward, the writers can go a long way towards restoring the working class feel of the show, even if Marge did wind up here because of an injured chicken and not the economic reality of the 2020s.
This is still the best episode of the season, I agree.