Original airdate: September 29, 2024
The premise: Conan O’Brien hosts a star-studded gala in honor of The Simpsons long-awaited series finale, as written by an AI programmed with every series finale ever made. In the episode, Bart is eagerly awaiting his upcoming birthday, but is made increasingly uneasy as everyone in Springfield seems to be going through major life changes and personal revelations.
The reaction: How will The Simpsons end? It’s a question every fan has asked themselves over the many, many years the series has continued to chug along. We’re fast approaching the 800th episode, with seemingly no hint of an ending on the horizon yet. The show has gone on for so long, it doesn’t even feel possible that it can end at this point. That being the case, I guess they figured why not make an episode about that fact? In a reality-breaking meta episode similar to “Lisa the Boy Scout” a few years back, we’re cordially invited to The Simpsons Series Finale Spectacular, an event attended by hundreds of past guest stars and hosted by former show writer and three-time-talk-show-loser Conan O’Brien. FOX has at long last pulled the plug on the show, and in order to send it off right, they created a powerful AI system to shit out a “perfect” finale that will satisfy fans and hate-watchers like myself alike. The episode itself features Bart excited for his upcoming birthday, but everyone and everything around him seems to be changing, fast. Skinner is leaving Springfield Elementary, Mr. Burns meets an untimely end and the plant is bequeathed to the employees, Comic Book Guy and Kumiko have their baby (with birthing assist by John Cena)… these occurrences pile up so much that Bart starts become somewhat self-aware, as he desperately tries to stop all change from happening before it’s too late. It’s very cute in concept, of a character pushing against the fourth wall, acknowledging the narrative is reaching a conclusion they themselves want to avoid, with everything culminating in a birthday cake with an “11” on it, being presented to our terrified perpetual 10-year-old. I feel like in execution, it starts to feel a bit repetitive, at least somewhat purposefully, as we get the running gag of characters leaving a room wistfully remarking, “I’m really gonna miss this place.” They comment on its overuse, but it didn’t really save it for me. It’s one of those examples of recent episodes they’ve done where they have an engaging idea, but it all plays out in an expected way without any significant subversion or other elements peppered in that shake things up. I do like the very ending, where Bart provoking a new “changed” Homer into strangling him breaks the finale, reverting him back to yet another disastrous 10th birthday. It’s an alright episode, but like most of these format-bending stories they’ve done over the last couple years, it feels like it’s a couple strong rewrites away from being truly great. As cute as I think the premise of this one is, it ultimately is not going to be as interesting as another upcoming episode: the actual series finale. While modern-day Hollywood still refuses to let IPs die and we’re stuck with resurrecting properties for the sake of resurrecting them, it almost feels like disrespect to the beauty of endings. All great things must end, that is just the way of it. That’s a big reason why they have value, it’s the finality that make them special as these complete objects with a beginning and an end. Steven Universe, Better Call Saul, BoJack Horseman, these are some recent examples of shows I love dearly that had final episodes that just destroyed me with how perfect they were, where they left the characters and the worlds that had been lovingly created and nurtured over so many years on the air. Series finales have the potential to be something really special. In spite of all of my grumbling and grousing about the state of this series over the past twenty years or so, I’m still incredibly fascinated by that very simple question: how will The Simpsons end? All I can say is I hope I live long enough to see it for myself.
Three items of note:
– The opening five minutes at the finale event was made for fans to freeze-frame to identify all the different celebrity cameos and references they can spot. This kind of stuff doesn’t really do anything for me, but I’ll admit, I did smile when they showed all of Burns’s ringers from “Homer at the Bat,” with an empty chair for Ozzie Smith, with a photo showing he’s still trapped at the Mystery Spot.
– Early in Conan’s monologue, we get a brief history lesson on the show’s long road to cancellation, starting back from the first episode when the very first fan first complained how the show wasn’t as good as it used to be. Conan shows a few unaired clips of episodes meant to be potential finales, starting with “Bart the Daredevil,” where we see Homer was originally meant to be killed in his fateful gorge plummet. Two following clips also involve Homer’s grisly death. This is the kind of stuff that felt like they could have put more thought into. Maybe there could be other examples of twists to past episodes that would have been shocking revelations to leave the series on, rather than just show us Homer eating shit three times in a row.
– I had a feeling in the back of my mind that the “Bart’s Birthday” premise reminded me of something with a very similar plot, and I finally remembered it: the Rocko’s Modern Life 2019 revival special “Static Cling” features Rocko being catapulted into the new modern age, finding himself overwhelmed at how different everything is. Desperate to find some comforting, familiar ground to stand on, he is tasked with putting together a revival of his favorite cartoon “The Fatheads,” but he needs to track down Ed Bighead’s reclusive child Ralph Bighead, who is revealed to now be Rachel Bighead. It’s a wonderful special all about the uneasiness of change, but how it is a necessity of life, and ultimately a very beneficial one. When Rocko balks that the new “Fatheads” is too much change, Ed dispenses the moral to him in a lovely mission statement for the special (“We can’t live in the past. We can be grateful for it, but life isn’t permanent, and if we don’t embrace what’s now, we miss out on a lot of the important stuff.”) It’s basically doing everything this episode is, but a lot more focused and effectively, but another big reason for its success is that it was a one-off special. There’s no Rocko reboot that followed to keep recycling the same shit over and over again, it’s a one-and-done fun throwback to a series we once loved, featuring tons of cameos and callbacks to moments of the show’s past, but they feel like they actually mean something because this is literally it. The special started, and then it ended, and that’s the whole point of it. The 36th season premiere of a series that still has no end in sight inherently can’t hold that same kind of weight. And in the end, its message is almost the opposite of “Static Cling,” where Bart refuses to accept things will inevitably change, so he short-fuses the episode back to the comfortable status quo that he’s used to. I guess we’re supposed to like this as fans, since we have a whole rest of the season to go, but as the cast continues to age and the writers start to run out of gimmicky, headline-grabbing episodes like these to produce, the life support system this show has been on for decades will inevitably give out. For sooner or later, all things… must end.
Me Blog Write Good 
I actually like Conan.
Well I’m happy to see that for once we didn’t get a snoozefest of a premiere. My hopes for Season 36 are not very high but at least the episode here, like a decent chunk of episodes from these past few seasons felt ambitious. Praise be to the Selman Era!
Oh, and on a different note, I’ve got a neat idea for a side project you could do for this blog: Why not check out the old drafts of the classic episodes and give your opinions on them? There’s a lot of them on the Internet Archive that show cool what-could-have-beens. I could go to detail on them, but then I’d be rambling for far too long.
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%2220th+Century+Fox%22 Just click the link, set the filter to a year from 1989-1996 and BOOM! You’ll get lots of first drafts and table reads. Have fun on your trip down Al Jean’s memory lane!
“I’m still incredibly fascinated by that very simple question: how will The Simpsons end? All I can say is I hope I live long enough to see it for myself.”
Considering the main cast are all in their 70s and 80s, I’d say we don’t have to wait much longer.
Some day fairly soon, one of the voices will die, and I can’t imagine they’d just continue the show after that.
We probably only have a few years left, maybe not even that.
My concern is they’ll just hire replacements, or worse, use A.I.
When one of the main six passes (probably Julie or Harry), the right move would be to end it.
I can definitely see where HOMR is coming from she he said that Selman era Simpsons is just nothing by crazy bananas that’s usually limited to THoH’s, because that’s what this episode is along with the typical faux-Full House forced sentimentalness and unnatural sounding dialogue that I guess is now ‘justified’ because the overall ‘joke’ is ‘what if an actual episode felt like it was written by AI?’
This felt like a crappier version of Lisa the Boy Scout (even though that wasn’t good either) and had several things in common such as misunderstanding what ‘satire’ means as it tries to use it as a shield from criticisms by pulling an American Fung where it being bad on purpose is the point thus making it ‘brilliant’. I guess at one point these experimental episodes were ‘special’, but now they just feel like a crutch with how often we’ve gotten them over the past few years and further showing the series turning into a parody of itself.
At least next week will be the first episode in a while that actually feels like one from this series.
Hot Take(s): Worst premiere so far (yes, even more than the divorce one) and every clip show (even the lesser ones) is better than this.
Exactly. Even episodes that initially seem like it’ll have a grounded storyline often end up going completely off the rails. I understand Selman wants to experiment and mix things up, but it shouldn’t mean abandoning more relatable storylines or episodes focused on side characters that don’t involve some bizarre twist, which ultimately lacks lasting impact in the end.
That’s why I don’t get my hopes up for these side character episodes anymore for example.
He has been on the show long enough to know things like this, but it seems like when he became co Showrunner a few years ago, it just seems he wants to steer the show away entirely from a familiar direction if that makes sense. I don’t like the thought that he believes every episode should be like a THOH, or almost like mocking Fan’s for investing in a character, he almost implies like “It doesn’t matter, screw you.”
That just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Ironically the left field twists is something the faux-Full House era has in common with the Scully era, difference being that most people hated when the latter era did it yet praise it when it happens in the former era because Selman ‘saved’ the show somehow by turning it into the very thing it would’ve mocked during it’s peak. Even when episodes aren’t crazy bananas, they’re boring slogs like Pixelated and Afraid that feel like 45 minutes have been wasted by the time it’s over yet you automatically become the bad guy if even criticize it in the slightest!
For as bad as the Scully era could get (especially Season 11), I can safely say that I prefer it over Selman’s entire showrunning tenure (2011 onwards).
John, again, people aren’t making you out to be the bad guy. People are just tired of your toxic attitudes and behaviors, nothing like what you just mentioned.
But waiting for you to become aware of yourself is a lost cause, isn’t it? Alas
Man, I just think people love to dogpile on him simply because he doesn’t like the new episodes, attitude or not.
I was hoping for a premise like this, but I was hoping it was sincere.
You WILL go off the air soon, Simpsons. Your cast is aging. The more you put your ending off, merely making fun of the idea, the faster it’ll sneak up on you and the less you’ll be able to control it and make a graceful exit.
This episode implies to me that the crew knows people think they have to wrap the series up, but they have no plan to do that soon, because the very concept of a finale is just a big goof. Make fun of the idea and return to business as usual. And now they can’t really use any of these ideas sincerely in their real finale. Which they’ll do everything in their power to avoid having at all.
For all my criticism of this show, I don’t want it to abruptly end because a cast member died. And yet, that would be fitting at this point. The Simpsons put off its finale for decades, convincing itself the golden age would never end and it could live forever. And then the end came abruptly, and took it without warning.
Funny thing is that back in 2011 they were given the opportunity to end the show with Holidays of Future Passed, a much better episode than this poor man’s Lisa the Boy Scout.
Come to think of that, I think even Yeardley Smith hinted at an “eventual end”.
I can’t remember where I saw that, but it was in some article.
Conan brought some life to the show here, and it kept my attention. I’ve been surprised that the show is somewhat more interesting in the last couple seasons, after seasons 20-32 were a total dead zone.
It’s still a dead zone since 33, with episodes like this happening more as a crutch in contrast to the rest of the show turning into the same kind of sappy sitcom they would’ve mocked in their prime.
At this point, I don’t know if it matters what the Simpsons series finale is. They’ve done so many stories and been to so many places, it’s going to be very difficult for that last episode to have the impact it would have had 20-25 years ago. What can you really get from a sitcom pushing 800 episodes that relies on the status quo? Even if the show ends, it’s never going to die. Give it five or ten years after the finale, it’s absolutely getting a reboot with new actors and writers. That might end up being fresher and more entertaining than the current show.
If I had the opportunity to pick a finale out of everything from the last 35 years, I wouldn’t even pick an episode because there’s no one episode that sums it up for me. I would pick the movie. It’s as high stakes as The Simpsons has ever gotten. It’s this big adventure where the family has to save Springfield. Marge finally disowns Homer. Homer has to prove that he’s a good husband and father because his incompetence ruined everything. Every character gets something to do at least. And you have that great scene at the end with Homer and Marge taking off on the motorcycle.
I know the movie has its problems and it doesn’t have the same legacy that the show does, but it’s as big as you can go. If The Simpsons had to say goodbye, what better way to do it than with a summer blockbuster? Plus, 2007 marked twenty years since the Simpsons shorts first aired on The Tracey Ullman Show. In theory, it’s the best send-off you can get.
I still remember seeing the teaser for the film in front of Ice Age 2 when I saw that in the theater more than a year before it came out and what a big deal that felt like.
My hot take is that “A Streetcar Named Marge” was the series finale in a parallel universe.
That honestly is still my basic ideal for the final curtain. I don’t think that an episodic series like The Simpsons needs to go out on anything overly dramatic or game-changing. A small moment of quiet reflection is fine.
I don’t expect a finale to be anything mindblowing, personally. I doubt it’d be a better send-off than the last few episodes of season 8. But if it’s truly just a random episode, whatever they finished before some real-life circumstance forces the series to end, then I think that’d be a shame. Post-classic Simpsons not having a real ending would feel like confirmation that the last couple decades of the show were basically just killing time.
Even a low-key finale like Scampyspiro describes below (which is also what I personally want to see) ends the show with some statement of intent. That this episode represents the heart of the series and is what it’s all about. The details of that statement are unimportant. The Simpsons already means something unique to everyone. But I think there’s value in how an ending says it meant something unique to the people making it, too.
No Homers, as usual, loved this episode, but to be fair, they love everything Modern Simpsons and will most undoubtedly give rave reviews to next week’s episode, which is yet another Sideshow Bob wants to kill people episode. They also seemed to take great joy in Homer brutally dying on multiple occasions, which came off as more unnecessarily cruel than funny.
The problem I have with this kind of episode is that it spits in the face of finality; that the show can, nay, must live forever as if it must prove its critics wrong, and don’t look at people like me; Matt Selman literally was interviewed about this episode and flat out stated that he and the rest of the Harvard rejects will run this static, unchanging monstrosity for as long as humanely possible. Which doesn’t come as noble more so as demented. I’m sure there’s obviously an audience of people who love television that shuts your brain off where nothing changes and nobody learns any lessons (again, No Homers), but that kind of cynicism is kind of why the world is shit today. I know that change for the sake of change isn’t good, but when you’ve been on for 4 decades, are you actually content with just being a broken record? The Simpsons writers emphatically say “yes”, and as long as there’s a fandom that gladly swallows that tripe, who’s to stop them?
As for the episode itself, it once again plays into a key problem with the show, as Bart effectively represents the show proper; stagnant and refusing to change. While the turn of events happen at an alarming rate (including guest star Dave Meltzer, no that does not look like John Cena), so does Bart’s efforts to fight back against adaptation, ultimately culminating in resetting to the shitty status quo; forever 10 years old and deluding himself to a falsehood like he’s a conservative. This would have been an interesting premise… hadn’t we not seen it several times already where the show has used a character who opposed change as a protagonist.
Eh, actually next week’s episode probably won’t fair well over their either based on what’s known about it so far.
There was also gonna be a fourth scene in the ‘Homer is killed’ fakeouts that was cut for time with him in Lost Our Lisa getting his head crushed by the draw bridge.
“No Homers, as usual, loved this episode, but to be fair, they love everything Modern Simpsons and will most undoubtedly give rave reviews to next week’s episode, which is yet another Sideshow Bob wants to kill people episode.”
Fuck, I hate sweeping bullshit statements like this. Sorry, Gindy, but this pisses me off. There’s no room for nuance and the internet is rife with it. A bunch of people on NHC (including myself) were lukewarm to this episode. In addition, very few people on NHC enjoy Jean episodes and there’s no reason to thing next week will be any different.
Please do not mischaracterise or misrepresent an entire community of people, most of whom are very nice and thoughtful. You just come across looking like an ignorant, reactionary asshole.
Let me put GinyDraw’s ignorant comments to rest. Shall we actually take a look at some recent NHC poll numbers from last season?
64% of polled users scored McMansion & Wife unfavourably.
Over 70% of polled users scored It’s a Blunderful Life unfavourably.
80% of polled users scored Frinkenstein’s Monster unfavourably.
Over 65% of polled users scored The Tell-Tale Pants unfavourably.
How about some Selman episodes?
80% of polled users were lukewarm towards Thirst Trap: A Corporate Love Story at best.
80% of polled users were lukewarm towards Ae Bonny Romance at best.
70% of polled users were lukewarm towards Murder, She Boat at best.
So, MeBlogWriteGood. Are we quite sure GindyDraws has any idea what the fuck they’re talking about when they claim “they love everything Modern Simpsons”?
Yeah, if everyone can be a little bit more civil towards each other and other communities in the comments, that’d be fantastic. It’s easy to generalize the viewpoints of No Homers, but like any other user base, it’s filled with a myriad of individual opinions, all of which are equally valid.
In fact, a NHC user recently collated the poll numbers for the entire season and the average score was just 3.20! Hardly a glowing endorsement.
Sorry, you can tell this has triggered me. When someone denigrates and attempts to discredit a community in which I participate on false pretences, well, I’m going to fight back. It’s not the first time GindyDraws has generalised NHC negatively and I hope they refrain from doing so again in the future (in addition to a humble apology, ideally).
You’re a dull boy, Gindy. If anything this episode had the poorest reception on NoHomers compared to other places, because a substantial number of prominent members were lukewarm on it.
I’m on NoHomers and I rated it 2/5. Hated the I’m gonna miss this place line repeated endlessly and while I liked some of the resolutions for characters (CBG and Kumiko having a son seemed sweet to me) it all became a little too much. I would have liked it if they seriously had Bart turn 11 and just moved things forward a little bit. Maybe Skinner leaving and getting a nice principal would help, Skinner has become such a pathetic shell of what he once was, it’d be nice to have a principal challenge Bart again.
*new principal. sorry I typed it wrong
Actually, this episode’s premise is more similar to the ACTUAL series finale of OKKO: Let’s Be Heroes. Not that I blame you for not remembering, that show is impossible to legally stream anywhere.