Original airdate: October 6, 2024
The premise: The Simpson family gets the once-in-a-lifetime chance to stay at the luxurious Yellow Lotus resort, until their free pass is yanked out from under them and they’re forced to leave. Laying low in an empty room to avoid getting caught, they overhear a familiar guest next door: Sideshow Bob, there with his new wife and seemingly plotting to kill her to inherit her fortune.
The reaction: It feels like it’s been a while since we had one of these episodes that’s just a full-length parody of a show one of the writers binged one weekend and loved so much they wanted to pay “homage” to it. HBO’s The White Lotus is already a satirical dramedy about the dysfunctions of the absurdly wealthy, which begs the question: what exactly does one satirize about a satire? Early in the episode, they “parody” the opening titles of Lotus with a new theme song (“Rich sexy people behaving badly, makes you feel better about being broke and unknown.”) Marge observes how miserable all the rich couples are and gives an angry speech at the end about how sad they are all to hang onto their petty squabbles in paradise. Like, yeah, all of this stuff is exactly what The White Lotus is all about, it isn’t adding any commentary on top of it. Also, its premise featuring a cast of the richest of the rich makes it difficult to cram the Simpson family in there, so we need to set-up an elaborate explanation of Homer getting fooled by a timeshare scam ten years prior, and now after a multitude of payments, they’ve added up enough points to be able to stay at the fabled Yellow Lotus resort… until they’re told by manager Lindsey Naegle that the property has been acquired by a new owner and their points are worthless. We see incredibly brief glimpses at the other guests: Dr. Hibbert and Bernice trying to hide their addictions, Smithers corralling Mr. Burns’s raging hounds around with them, but unlike The White Lotus having an entire season to follow the stories of multiple parties at the resort, there’s just no time to give anyone a real story. The closest we get is the Sideshow Bob plot, which really isn’t much of anything either. Bob backs the Simpsons into a corner: keep quiet about his possibly murderous intentions with his betrothed, or he’ll rat them out to management for staying on property. Which he later does. And then it turns out he wasn’t trying to kill her. Alright? The Sideshow Bob well has absolutely run dry at this point, there’s just no juice left in the character. And he’ll be back later this month in a soon-to-be-classic Disney+ short! Get ready, America! Ahh, whatever. This was a real flat line of an episode for me, a “satire” of a show that was already a sharp satire, adding absolutely nothing to the conversation.
Two items of note:
– Sideshow Bob’s wife Tasha is the stand-in for Jennifer Coolidge’s White Lotus character Tandy, voiced by some woman from SNL doing her impression of Coolidge. Again, going back to my “satire about a satire” question, the Tandy character in White Lotus is such an exaggerated performance by Coolidge, I really don’t see what this show thinks they’re adding onto it with this “parody.” Granted, Lotus has two whole seasons of screen time versus just this one episode, but Coolidge’s character is way more unhinged and comedically over-the-top than “Tasha” is portrayed here. The “twist” with her attempting to kill Bob is something? I guess? Except she did it because she’s mentally unbalanced and not out of any malice? Oh, whatever. I might as well use this space to bitch about how Coolidge won two Emmys in a row for best supporting actress in a drama, which I think is bullshit since she’s playing an almost entirely comedic character. But I’m mostly mad for her second win, stealing the award from Rhea Seehorn for the final season of Better Call Saul, an absolutely stellar actress giving an absolutely stellar performance throughout that entire series, especially in the last batch of episodes. I enjoyed Coolidge in both seasons of Lotus, but it just seemed ridiculous to give her the Emmy again for the same silly character in a drama category.
– It kind of threw me off seeing two scenes featuring Dr. Hibbert (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson) and his wife Bernice (voiced by Dawnn Lewis). Not that Bernice ever had that many lines in the golden years, but hearing these two newer voices coming out of classic characters exchanging dialogue threw me off for a moment. Also, I still don’t really like Richardson as Hibbert. He’s such a prolific, versatile voice actor that at least he doesn’t sound like one of his many, many, many other famous roles to me, but he’s been playing Hibbert for many seasons now, and unlike Alex Desert as Carl, I just can’t square the circle of him being the new Hibbert. It just felt like they gave him a shot at the role since Richardson already did recurring voices on the show, but I think they could have found a better voice match.
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Would’ve been a much better episode if Smithers, Julio, and Duffman (?) conspired to murder Marge on a boat.
This just feels like ego on the part of the writing team. “Your other satire might exist, but THE SIMPSONS will always satirize it best!” Where in reality, they can’t come up with anything new to add or even match the quality of the original. That won’t stop them from having a dozen animators spend a year bringing their non-contributions to life, though.
I’m glad they weren’t this out of ideas in 2006. Imagine if they did a “satire” of Arrested Development.
This episode is like the result of “The Italian Bob”, “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Livin’ La Pura Vida”, and “Murder, She Boat” having a four-way.
I was so lost. I’ve never seen the white lotus and am totally unfamiliar with the genre. I remember when you had Bart think Ned was a mur-diddly-urdler? That was funny even before I learned who Alfred Hitchcock was. They were like that with the Krusty Burger Succession episode too, assuming everyone watches the same Netflix shows they do.
A successful satire is when you don’t even need to know the source material to know it’s funny and once you do, you’ll understand it better. When you have to do homework to get most of the bits, it feels less like comedy and more like pandering. Also, given how disposable media is nowadays, especially on streaming platforms, it feels even more archaic than the show’s usual glacial pace at referencing trends.
God, I really hate this kind of humor where it’s literally just calling out the tropes. The intro here was particularly groan-worthy.
You know, after an ambitious season premiere that the writers probably had a lot of fun pitching, I’m not surprised the next episode takes us back to bland boring whatever-ness.
did they explain what happened to his Italian family or was this a Selman ep with different timeline?
It wasn’t a Selman episode, but his family had made a cameo in the previous episode (in the credits, rather).
It was previously mentioned in Season 31’s “Bobby, It’s Cold Outside” that Bob doesn’t wear a wedding ring, so I took that to mean that he and Francesca had divorced. That, or the writers had forgotten about Francesca altogether – either way, they seem to have dropped the Italian family thread, and I suspect that’s the closest we’ll get to closure for now.