Original airdate: November 10, 2024
The premise: The women of Springfield get their moment in the limelight through a series of vignettes featuring the daily escapades of the ladies around town.
The reaction: As a series that was developed in the late 80s, The Simpsons has always had a bit of an issue with female representation, in that there really were never that many of them, both in the show itself and on the production staff. It was a (white) man’s world, baby, and we were all just livin’ in it. This is not an entirely damning criticism, as the series has crafted wonderful, funny, and touching stories with the few major female characters it has in the past. But as culture has marched on through the decades, it certainly is something that becomes more glaring with each passing year. This is very similar to the show’s attempt at rectifying its almost exclusively white cast in trying to prop up the few POC characters this show has more in the last five years or so. We’ve also seen an admirable shift in the writing staff, with the hiring of a diverse and younger talent pool. All of this is good, in theory, but whenever the show makes big swings in these more inclusive directions, it just makes the age of this series come out in more stark relief. Take this episode, all about the great extended female cast of this show. We’ve got at least a dozen! The screen grab above couldn’t even fill an entire frame of named characters, so we got some rando there in the corner. And at least half of the characters featured in this episode we barely know anything about, and thus are difficult to write real stories about. I guess that’s why they’re fine to do a little minute and a half skit with and move on. Falsely believing she has ten minutes left to live, Helen Lovejoy storms down to Moe’s and gives him a big kiss before slapping him. Bernice tries to have a role play date with her husband that goes seriously wrong. We also have Luigi’s mother, a character I don’t remember if we’ve seen before, acting as his defense attorney at trial? I don’t know how in-character all of this is for any of these people. Meanwhile, the narratives of the women I am more familiar with were pretty lackluster. Patty and Selma prepare for a cigarette shortage by hoarding their supply, because “smoking” is their only character trait. What happened to Ling, Selma’s daughter? We get a boring The Bear parody with Lunchlady Dora (Doris). And Homer gets called an incompetent husband in song for trying to duck out on buying tampons for Marge. I’d much rather see a full episode about Lindsey Naegle or Agnes Skinner than to just be drip fed this very minimal content. That’s what feels most damning of all in this episode, almost all the female characters here have never helmed their own story, and this episode seems to reinforce that. We’ll put all the women stories not good enough for prime time together in one episode, and next week we’ll be back to Homer farting on Mr. Burns, don’t you worry!
Three items of note:
– Why is Lindsey Naegle in Luann Van Houten’s book club? She’s much wealthier than the other housewives in the group, I assume she must circulate in more affluent social circles. Maybe the two of them are friends, but without that information given to us, I just assume she’s there because this show has so few female characters. In a similar vein, Kumiko is there too. Why? She’s a manga artist into with otaku culture, what the hell is she going to talk to Sarah Wiggum about?
– I shouldn’t have been surprised that the show took its shot at a Barbie parody. I was expecting the worst; similar to The White Lotus earlier this season, why would you attempt to satirize an already tongue-in-cheek satire? Malibu Stacy drives out of Malibu Stacyland (complete with using the same Indigo Girls song from Barbie) to find her girl in the real world. Turns out it’s Shauna, who beats Stacy up in the schoolyard to save face in front of the other bullies, capped off with kicking off her toy head. I guess that’s kind of a twist. Sort of. I’m sure all the Shauna fans loved it though. I joked about the “absurdity” of Shauna fans a while back, but then later I found out there actually are some people who do like Shauna, so what do I know?
– I just mentioned this in “The Yellow Lotus,” but hearing Kevin Michael Richardson and Dawn Lewis do a scene together as the Hibberts is really hard to process for me. It’s two characters I deeply recognize speaking in voices that I very much do not. It’s been a couple years now, and I’m sorry, but as incredibly talented as Richardson is, he just doesn’t hit that Hibbert range. I was surprised to briefly hear him voice Judge Snyder in this episode, and that is a voice he’s got down from the first line. Snyder and Hibbert are two lower register voices, but they have very different timbers and rhythms. I feel like I’ve basically gotten used to every other replacement voice but Hibbert’s, and I don’t think I ever will. Ah well. Speaking of voices, I thought Tress MacNeille was weirdly off in the Agnes segment. Maybe it’s because she was speaking more tenderly and awkwardly than we typically hear her character, but it didn’t sound like Agnes to me for the majority of the scene.
Me Blog Write Good 
“Twenty-Two Short Films About Springfield” this ain’t.
No, it really isn’t.
Frankly, I don’t know how to feel about these “break from the norm” episodes these days. Sure there were episodes like that in the first 10 seasons, but those were written by people who knew the industry and wanted to poke fun at it from the inside. This honestly feels like Selman and crew just wanting to throw things at the wall and see what sticks (which frankly rarely do). While Jean’s attempts felt like trying to remain relevant.
And I feel that’s part of this episode’s problem, between 25+ seasons since the tenth boiling characters like Marge, her sisters and Lisa into the same general mush characters like Luann or Helen, or newer characters like Kumiko or Bart’s new teacher are. No one’s given a real good exploration. “Oh, Shauna’s a bully. Oh, Lisa makes people (or Narnia creatures in this case) offended. Oh, Agnes is a bitter old woman. Oh, Marge and Homer are getting into yet another argument over something trivial, but this time there’s a musical number with drug store clerks that we blew half the budget on!” Seriously, I know the show sucks at the female characters (at least nowadays, I still remember when the Aunts and Lisa were more developed than “Chain Smokers” and “Liberal Mouthpiece”, arguably even Marge to some extent). But the fact that even with this episode Kumiko is still largely overlooked while Bernice and Marge need their husbands to play off of really makes you wonder how confident they actually were when making this episode.
As I mentioned on Bart’s Birthday, I’m sure that these kind of format bending episodes were more special at some point, but now they feel more like a crutch than anything to trick people into thinking that the show’s ‘improved’ when it really hasn’t.
“to trick people into thinking that the show’s ‘improved’ when it really hasn’t.”
Do you have any idea how insulting this is?
It’s about time we saw more of this series’ rich cast of female secondary characters! I’m sure this episode will do great things with characters like Marge’s sisters, Marge’s mom, uh, Lisa’s teacher, Bart’s new teacher … Skinner’s mom… female Jimbo… oh, and undefined businesswoman. And who could forget Wife of Man #1? Not to mention Wife of Man #2, Wife of Man #3, Wife of Man #4, and so on! Man oh man (or should I say wo-man), is this premise sure to be a slam dunk!
I have a feeling that the writers’ biggest regret is killing off Maude Flanders. She was the non-Marge Springfield housewife with the most character development.
Not to mention Edna, one of the more developed female characters on the show.
I mean, Edna couldn’t be helped. I know I’d prefer them to consistently retire characters whose actors unexpectedly passed than to recast them. It feels more respectful than the alternative (like they did with Lunchlady Doris).
I think the real problem is that Edna’s development came in the classic era, and the writing isn’t nearly as good anymore, especially for developing secondary characters. So there’s no chance that anyone else is going to get that same level of development again, if they didn’t get it in the 90s.
It all comes back to this show coasting (at least in most areas) off the quality and success it had thirty years ago. And those are a finite resource.
‘I’m sure all the Shauna fans loved it though’
As one of the apparently only 5 people that seems to like Shauna, I only liked the idea within the segment that could’ve been it’s own episode (having a secret girly side that she masks behind her usual tough exterior) and not the segment at all which falls flat as something that feels like it’s taken from a Jean episode (it’s honestly on-par with the random Stranger Things references in Burger Kings) that is only outdone by the later reference to the stuck cargo ship from a few years ago.
Anyways, there was potential here for an episode that was being touted as a spiritual successor of sorts to 22 Short Films About Springfield, unfortunately what we get is a messy vignette episode that at times comes off as rather pretentious and full of itself (the aforementioned Barbie parody and the stupid tampon song).
Besides Shauna’s segment, the only other one that came close to eliciting something of a positive response from me was Bernice’s. Sadly, that was squandered when the guy started choking and they turned her into a heartless bitch that’d rather let someone die in order to maintain her roleplaying which by now just becomes deluded! And because they’re still not done throwing away what little goodwill they had, it then turns into another bit ripped from FG in terms of it overstaying it’s welcome and seemingly never wanting to end.
The rest ranged from lackluster to awful with the title for the worst going to Helen’s. The ‘joke’ is that we’re suppose to laugh at her making a total idiot of herself after she listens to the initial radio announcement, but the ‘payoff’ was so painfully telegraphed the very second the ‘setup’ was delivered that all I felt was apathy and literally said ‘thanks for wasting my fucking time!’ as soon as it was over. Would’ve preferred them give that wasted airtime to someone like Sarah, Mrs. Hoover or any of the half dozen of other female characters that would’ve likely added more than Agnes, Lunchlady Doris and Luigi’s mom of all characters which comes off as they just randomly picked names out of a hat in terms of who was gonna be given airtime.
Just like Lisa Gets An F1, the episode suckered me in with an interesting premise only to let me down ever harder than that one.
Frankly, Shauna’s segment and Marge’s segment were probably the dumbest (still not sure how the hell the Malibuverse is supposed to work in the first place, much less why those drugstore clerks felt the need to break out into a choreographed music number other than “lol, random”), with both Helen’s and Bernice’s the objective worst by how they thought ‘asshole wife’ was a funny characterization.
Which is why I compared Shauna’s segment to feeling like something from a Jean episode because that kind of nonsensical thing like Malibuverse and life-sized living doll people feels like something I’d expect from his episodes. Though as evidenced by things like this and the living balloon Lisa talked to from a few episodes ago, Selman proves to be just as guilty in yet another case of there honestly not being much difference between who showruns an episode despite the constant insistences of this not being the case.
Helen being a bitch is nothing new (and the ‘joke’ of her looking like an idiot afterwards doesn’t justify her segment putting me at least a minute and a half closer to death), but seeing Bernice being so cruel that she’d rather let someone fucking DIE to maintain her own delusions just feels OOC for her unless I’m forgetting some obscure moment or two from a prior episode that’s similar to this.
This episode was cringe worthy and a disservice to most of the involved female characters. It seems that in recent years, when the show focuses on the women, it often turns into something crassly sexual, followed by an “empowerment” arc that makes them overly masculine, often at the expense of male characters.
We get Luann wearing a “Milf” and “Slut” shirt, tomboy Shauna beating up Malibu Stacy, Homer being mocked and shamed for not buying “tampons” (hilarious….), Helen being demoralized — chugging wine, throwing off her bra, punching Ned, making out with Moe, etc etc (again, hilarious….). These moments with Luann and Helen were so out of character and forced. Helen was turned into a hyper masculine slut in record timing. Sure Helen can be an asshole, but not that intensive.
The Nelson and his Mom moment was sweet, especially at the end, but I didn’t mention it above because she’s always been portrayed as a reckless, immoral stripper who neglects her son for the sake of her own promiscuity because….she’s a slut! and sluts have no morals or decency.
Is this a problem with the writer or the showrunner? If this is the best they can do with the female cast, they should just leave them alone before they do any damage. Instead of forcing crass or over-the-top “empowerment,” they should focus on grounded, wholesome stories, perhaps exploring their relationships with their spouses or kids.
The show needs more competent writing that creates positive, meaningful moments without going too far. I’m sick of this stupid “experimental” crap as well, that just screams “We are out of ideas for grounded storylines!”
Exactly, the experimental episodes are simply a crutch now in order to trick people into thinking the show’s ‘improved’ when it’s honestly in it’s worst era possible.
Since you keep calling Selman-era experimental episodes tricks, John, what do you think of Season 7 and 8? The Simpsons under Oakley/Weinstein had a similar amount of experimental episodes as it does now, like A Fish Called Selma, Raging Abe Simpson, Burns Baby Burns, Homer’s Enemy, etc. Would you consider those to have been a crutch to trick people too?
Although Season 8 is my least favorite season of the classic era, I don’t get that same impression that I do from Seasons 34 onwards, maybe because they feel more spread out versus this season where within it’s first seven episodes three (four if we’re counting the THoH) of them have been format benders with varying levels of quality (even if I can’t speak for Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes since it hasn’t aired yet). And we’re getting at least one more later this season which sees the cast portrayed as animals in a faux-nature documentary.
And personally, I don’t consider the examples you listed to be the same kind of format benders as say 138th Episode Spectacular, 22 Short Films and Spin-Off Showcase.
“Is this a problem with the writer or the showrunner?”
From what I’ve seen, especially recently, both. This is a show that has to be put down, but can’t because Disney still makes money off of it like it does Marvel or Frozen.
We don’t need new writers, we need this to end. Full stop. New writers would only make things worse since it’s clear they’re all in it for the money and only the money, and given Disney’s financial woes lately, who knows how long that’ll last.
I was waiting for the scorpions, female scorpions, to start attacking outside.