Original airdate: May 5, 2024
The premise: Marge discovers that Homer’s old, busted jeans are actually a rare collector’s item, and feeling particularly unappreciated, she sells them and keeps the money to herself.
The reaction: Homer being a selfish, inconsiderate dope may be an understood given, but it’s always good to re-establish these things in clear, direct ways when you’re writing these stories. Instead, this episode where we should have the most sympathy towards Marge comes off looking kind of badly on her. We see her running herself ragged doing errands, ending with Bart needing to go to the hospital for two broken middle fingers. Marge frantically texts Homer, but gets no response. Why? That rascally Moe has set up a wi-fi blocker in the bar to keep his three best patrons from getting any contact from the outside world. A rat gnawing a cord breaks the machine, allowing Homer to finally get the messages, but when he gets home, Marge is incredibly pissed and has no interest in any explanations (nor does Homer even bother trying to give one.) It reminded me of an older episode “I Won’t Be Home for Christmas” (curiously also written by Al Jean), where Marge is pissed Homer got home late from Moe’s, without knowing he only stayed because Moe was borderline suicidal and he basically kept him there. Very weird that Jean has used this same premise twice, giving Homer a very legitimate excuse that Marge has no interest in. Later, Mr. Burns gifts Homer tickets to a baseball game, and Marge is enraged Homer didn’t invite her along (“You don’t like baseball!” “Maybe, but more importantly, I like being asked!”) It should be an easy layup to make you empathize with Marge, so episodes like this where they totally bungle it are very impressive to me. Marge blows the couple thousand bucks she got for Homer’s pants on an opulent diamond ring, but feels increasingly guilty for her extravagant purchase. The episode ends with Homer acknowledging how much Marge does for the family (including seeing she bought him more baseball tickets for some reason?) It just doesn’t narratively make any sense since we really don’t see him taking Marge for granted or doing anything to negatively affect her life at all. The episode is almost entirely focused on Marge’s turmoil, but we don’t get any deeper than “Marge bought a thing and feels bad about it.” It feels incredibly unfair to even attempt to compare this to something like “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield,” where we see Marge actually go through a real emotional journey in trying to focus on herself for once, but this episode just has none of that. I find it really interesting how Al Jean, after running the show for almost 12 years, just started to write episodes every now and again (starting with the aforementioned “Christmas,”) and the episodes he’s written I recall being notably terrible (“Daddicus Finch,” “Mothers and Other Strangers.”) Jean seems to have less and less supporters amongst the dedicated viewership (if you consider No Homers a decent sample size), and I don’t think episodes like these do him any favors.
Three items of note:
– We get an extended scene where Mr. Burns complains about Oppenheimer, and a loooooonng bit where Smithers alludes to having seen Barbie without actually saying the title. I just don’t understand it. Even though I constantly talk about how I don’t like complaining about the aging voice actors, I just have to say, Burns has to be the character who sounds the most different out of the entire cast. I can barely even recognize it as himself any more, it’s so low register and muted, so far removed from what the standard Burns voice is in my head. Smithers is still pretty close, but he also has sounded more off the mark over the last decade or so, so in the aforementioned scene where it’s just those two talking, it was kind of a lot for my brain to process. What’s weird is that I think most of Harry Shearer’s other major recurring characters (Flanders, Lovejoy, Brockman, etc.) all sound pretty much the same. What is it about Burns that is more of a struggle for him? The man just turned 80, so it’s truly commendable he’s still doing this at all, to be clear.
– This may be the most pedantic thing I’ve ever “complained” about, but there’s a joke where we see Lisa going up into the attic to look through her old report cards, which are in a big tray that she leafs through. This girl’s been in second grade for almost four decades, and since grade schoolers typically get three report cards a year, that means she can’t have more than five report cards total, unless she’s got stuff from kindergarten in there. She also makes a joke about us “losing to China,” which feels very weird for her to say.
– Towards the end of the episode, as Homer wonders aloud at Moe’s if he’s been taking Marge for granted and what should he do to fix things, Moe breaks into a half-assed “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” parody song where he sings about how bad a husband he is to Marge before he, Lenny and Carl throw him out the door on his ass. Of course, this feels like pouring an entire salt shaker into a gaping wound given Moe is solely responsible for getting Homer in the doghouse in the first place. Remember last week when these four characters affirmed their close friendship with one another? That’s old news, I guess, time to dump Homer on his ass for no reason. Also, remember Maya? Moe’s fiancee? Can’t wait for the writers to remember she exists and bring her back in 2029 or so.
Me Blog Write Good 
There’s also Manger Things, during which Homer is exiled from him home at Christmas for being drunk despite having had his drinks spiked. Not to mention It’s a Blunderful Life from earlier this season where Homer is a pariah for something he didn’t do.
The one thing in common? Jean is the showrunner.
“Remember last week when these four characters affirmed their close friendship with one another? That’s old news, I guess, time to dump Homer on his ass for no reason. Also, remember Maya? Moe’s fiancee?”
To paraphrase someone on NHC, Jean and Selman episodes effectively exist in their own separate universes now. Jean seems to have absolutely no interest aligning his stories and characterizations with anything Selman and his team do.
What’s more, despite only running 4-6 episodes a cycle now, the quality of Jean’s work has continued to deteriorate. They’re creatively bankrupt even on a fundamental conceptual level, self-contradictory, distasteful, and increasingly filled with non-sequiturs. Even basic scene-to-scene transitions (i.e. syntax) seem to elude him now.
Say what you will about Selman’s work (they’re not funny, they’re too straight, they’re overly saccharine, etc), but the effort and craftsmanship far exceeds Jean’s work and its been that way for years. It’s simply that the increase in Selman’s showrunning duties has now magnified Jean’s deficiencies.
You hit the nail on the head, my guy. I may be often be that person “saying what I will” about Selman-era Simpsons, but it does at least try, on some level.
When a Selman & co. episode gets made, a new, original, human work exists that wasn’t here before. Even if I’m not attached to it, I can respect it as some expression of art. I can take for granted that it has story structure, and intentions, and wanted to express something at one point, even if the ultimate delivery of that was muddled.
Even if I don’t feel strong positive emotions from most Selman episodes, watching them means engaging with some sort of human experience, at least a tiny bit. That will always have intrinsic value. I can’t say the same for this week’s recycled leftovers.
Even if Selman episodes try, most times I find them to be either on-par or worse than a typical Jean episode which is why I’ve always had the mindset that the former was never really much better than the latter even when he was only given about three or four episodes a season.
Though I guess it speaks volumes that of the episodes I’ve watched this season (skipped eight), so far this is the worst even beating out all the other Selman episodes I’ve seen this season even if they also weren’t that good either (barring the THoH if you remove the second segment).
Yeah. I’m of the opinion that most Selman episodes try and fail, personally. I want them to be better than they are, and they’re not. But 700+ episodes in, it’s more interesting to me, at least, when I feel like the show is trying to be something and failing than doing the same thing it’s been doing before.
For what it’s worth, we have about four seasons’ worth of Selman Simpsons now, on par with the Scully era. I think it’s safe to say now that both of them are the most polarizing show runners this series has ever had. People generally agree that classic Simpsons is great and that (at least most of) Al Jean’s solo run is pretty bad, but opinions are more-or-less evenly split on Scully and Selman, and often in opposite directions. Personally, between the two, I prefer the Scully era since I think it has more of the classic series’ feel to it to make its good episodes shine, but both of them get the same sort of reaction from me. They’re not always great, but at least they stand out, in contrast to 20 years of Al Jean cooking up the same meal every time.
Of all the Selman episodes I’ve seen (which is all of them before Carl Carlsson Rides Again, and a couple afterwards), the ones that are worth rewatching probably don’t even make up a whole season’s worth. And when you get the rare one that’s actually alright like Bartless, that feeling doesn’t last long as everyone else makes it look/sound a million times better than it really is and shuts down/disregards legit criticisms (Homer & Marge at the beginning) making them become overrated.
The Scully era even at it’s worst still feels like The Simpsons even if it’s no longer the classic era, which I’ll definitely take over feeling like a faux-Full House.
Hi John,
Can you direct me to where people have shut down and/or disregarded your criticisms of Bartless? Because I checked and see no evidence of it.
@vyrnnus Not me specifically, but just in general the vibe I get whenever people bring up those criticisms like Homer & Marge at the beginning of Bartless is that they’re brushed off for ‘looking too much into it’.
Jean needs to retire immediately.
I’m almost concerned for his mental health, to be honest. Watching these episodes, I keep picturing an old man telling his nurse how great it is that his son came to visit, and the nurse nervously smiles and nods along, not wanting to tell him his mind’s fallen apart and he’s talking to an empty chair. Except in this case, the “son” is a functional sitcom script. And Al Jean is only 63.
might explain those Grandpa senility jokes
I’m gonna real-time blog this episode and see how many Al Jean Simpsons tropes it ticks off.
OK, you know what, I have to stop here. All this and I just reached the 2 minute mark. I can’t keep pausing and writing things down or I’ll spend several hours of my life in an Al Jean Simpsons episode, which I’m pretty sure constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
People say Jean episodes are empty but it doesn’t mean they’re devoid of things literally happening. It’s just that those things are the same tired schtick all his other post-movie episodes are. These episodes might as well be written by AI, since there’s no original human thought in them. The only difference is that Al Jean isn’t making 85 million people lose jobs.
You know how people say (quite accurately) that it’s impossible to name what episode most Family Guy jokes come from, because the episodes consist of completely unrelated cutaways they only kind of slapped a story structure onto? Al Jean’s Simpsons is the same way. It’s Family Guy lite, except it uses the same handful of Simpsons bits in place of cutaways. You watch an episode, it passes through you, and two minutes later you’ve forgotten everything that episode was. They’re basically all interchangeable.
At least Family Guy averages a couple really funny jokes every episode. I don’t know if it’s just the show itself or it’s when Jean is in charge of the episodes, but I’m not really laughing at The Simpsons. I’m just watching it and I’m aware that things are happening in it.
The last time I remember the show making me laugh is when Krusty misheard nachos as naches and Bart kept trying to correct him.
whoa, whoa. Homer’s been wearing jeans this whole time?
actually, they’re “Leevi’s Jeens”, completely legally distinct
I’m pretty sure they were stated outright to be blue flannel pants in the past.
What stood out the most to me was that Moe’s tongue was white for a couple frames during his awful song. I was shocked with how suddenly the episode ended.
We had an episode last year where it was shown that Marge has a safety net that she’s forced to use as the Homer Dumbass Fund to bail out her incompetent and insensitive lout (yet Homer got angry about it), and even in the good episodes, Marge is unable to think about doing nice things for herself without contemplating about how it’ll affect others because she’s been whittled down into a collectivist through secondhand degradation.
Marge episodes are always the hardest to write and as I said in Iron Marge, it’s due to them never really designing the exact character for her. She’s essentially a vessel for the writers to backdoor other characters instead.
Whats the point of the whole elaborate wifi blocker if the episode would make more sense if Homer just ignored her calls, or was too drunk to notice the phone was ringing? That would go a long way towards allowing the audience to sympathize with Marge.
If it goes a long way to say nothing, it’s an Al Jean episode.
I don’t think the episode wants you to see Homer as unlikable, but they still need Marge to be upset with him, so they come up with these elaborate scenarios to put both characters on a level playing field.
As much as those 2000s episodes made Homer look like a monster, at least it was clear that he was in the wrong and Marge deserved better. I really don’t think the writers want to portray Homer like that anymore, but they still need conflict, so you get episodes like these.
First episode I watched since Lisa Gets An F1 because the premise had potential almost like someone realized how actually depressing the ending to Homer’s Adventures through the Windshield Glass actually was (which was covered up by the typical Selman forced sentimentalness) and wanted to course correct by giving Marge a surplus of cash that for once she doesn’t have to waste on Homer’s recklessness.
Too bad I ended up being bored and almost falling asleep, but it speaks volumes for just how much of a rut I think the show currently is (in spite of what most people on another site would say) that I found myself more interested in seeing this episode rather than either of the past two because this at least felt like a real episode of the show (even if it sucked), and not a poor imitation of the same kind of sappy sitcom that they would’ve mocked back in the day.
On a completely unrelated note, I thought I’d bitch even more about Al Jean because it’s fun to, since he does the shorts that Mike ignores and for good reason. Everything about the latest one is so wrong: it messes up the pun of Star Wars Day, it can’t even get released on the correct day that corresponds to the freaking date anyway, it’s not funny, and seeing Disney characters all cheap and billboard like gives the impression that you are watching something illegal on YouTube Kids.
And, also, Merge in general sounds awful.
Hell, they can’t even be consistent when it comes to Simpsonfying them either. Even leaving aside the other FOX sitcoms (or Hulu sitcoms, in this case), at least half of the characters who aren’t given a half-assed overbite are just carbon copies of the original designs. And even the other sitcoms looking like they usually do, despite it being tradition for both this and Family Guy, feels more like they were lazy than anything else. And it’s clear AKOM has no idea how to do the KOTH style.
Is Al Jean okay? Every episode he writes now is just Marge being a whiny nagging shrew and Homer getting endlessly dumped on despite not really doing anything to deserve it. One could read something into that if one were so inclined.
IIRC, Jean does what he does as a mix of tiredness, not giving a shit, and trolling the fans.
This episode was painfully boring and sleep-inducing, even by Zombie Simpsons