Original airdate: December 8, 2024
The premise: Homer and Marge speak before a deposition regarding their nightmarish experience on Convenience Airways, an airline that is revealed to specifically cater to the most obnoxious clientele banned from all other airlines.
The reaction: If you’ve ever taken a flight, you’ve surely dealt with some variety of annoyance thanks to one of your fellow passengers, be it a crying child, feeling extra wedged in your already small seat thanks to a big guy sitting next to you, or some absolute freak who decides this is the perfect place to take their shoes off and kick their bare feet back. This abhorrent human behavior is the bedrock of this episode, where the Simpsons find themselves trapped on a plane with seemingly the worst, most inconsiderate people in the planet. Eventually it’s revealed this is on purpose: Convenience Airways was conceived as a testing grounds for a radical new airline strategy. When passengers begin to get too unruly, they are dropped down via trap door to a holding cell for the remainder of the flight. This feels born out of wish fulfillment from a writer’s room who presumably are semi-regular flyers and have plenty of war stories about freaks they’ve had unfortunate encounters with on flights, and how much they’d love it if those aggravating persons would just “disappear.” Homer promises to Marge that he won’t freak out on the plane and get them banned from the only airline they’re allowed on anymore, and while she gets bumped to first class, Homer is stuck with the worst of the worst: loudmouth influencers, pimple poppers, messy eaters, and even more human scum. I was surprised as the episode was creeping to its midway point to see that this was basically what the entire story was gonna be. Homer tries to navigate through a myriad of annoyances, which gets even worse when he must tend to an upset Maggie, and we also get glimpses of Bart and Lisa creating their own disturbances as Marge is passed out on first class. Eventually, everyone is jettisoned down to the prison floor, and rather than embolden the burgeoning riot, Homer manages to de-escalate his fellow maniacs (“Flying is a modern miracle, and all that’s asked of us in return is basic human decency.”) This is one of those episodes I feel like I don’t have much to really say about, since the whole thing is all about people who are freaks on planes, and your enjoyment depends on whether you find that entertaining and interesting for an entire twenty minutes. For me, I found it wearing thin by the time we got halfway through, though I kind of enjoyed Homer’s dogged attempts to keep cool, especially when he has keep Maggie calm and retrieve her diaper bag. Certainly not a bad episode, but a pretty slight outing about a well-worn topic.
Three items of note:
– I don’t know why, but complaining about airplane passengers being horrible feels like an old comedy topic to me? Maybe I just immediately think to 90s and 2000s comedies that used it a lot as a set piece. People are definitely still animals on planes, but to see it as the basis of a 2024 episode of television still was surprising to me. Maybe they could have integrated some more current ways that flying is an absolute pain in the ass, like having to pay to select a seat or how you get nickel and dimed for more and more. My wife just yesterday told me how she read that some airlines give employees at the gate a cash incentive to convince people they need to check their bags for an additional fee, like a fast food employee who’s required to upsell a customer. The incredibly gross employee milking and penny pinching of the airline industry (and really, all industries) would lend itself to some great satire, but having it basically focused on the customers alone feels much less ambitious.
– I was surprised to see a lot of guest voices in this one. Joel, the jokey flight attendant Bart gets fed up with, was reminding me a lot of a toned down Billy Eichner, to the point where I was wondering why they bothered to book someone doing a similar voice and why not just give Eichner a call. Looking it up later, I discovered that a) Eichner has already been on the show, and b) the character is voiced by John Early, which made me feel bad since I literally just watched his new movie Stress Positions and thought it was fantastic. Jay Pharaoh reprises his role as the new Drederick Tatum, and along with newer regulars Alex Desert, Chris Edgerly and Dawnn Lewis, it felt a little strange to me to go through an episode with so many one-off characters not voiced by the regular seven or so Simpsons cast members.
– Lisa for some reason takes it upon herself to handle Maggie, smugly insisting she can do it (“I’ll parent you how I wanted to be parented, and sibling you how I wanted to be sib-led!”) She proceeds to torture Maggie with jazz flashcards and blasting music in her ears with headphones, making her cry, much to Lisa’s annoyance. When Homer desperately asks her for help finding the diaper bag, Lisa is pouty (“I don’t have it. Why don’t you ask your girlfriend?”) Ahh, pissy, self-righteous, unlikable Lisa. Haven’t seen her in this fine form since the 2010s!
Me Blog Write Good 
I actually decided to sit through this one. It wasn’t too bad. Not anywhere near good but not awful. I think it’s genesis came from just how awful and entitled airplane passengers have gotten since COVID started. For a while cell phone footage of insane airline passengers was a pretty regular thing in my Redddit feed. This was most likely born from that.
Is this the very first time Maggie has actually spoken as part of a canon storyline and they didn’t draw any attention to it? She actually screams “Mama! Mama!” when Homer walks past first class. Honestly, it’s been 35 years. Maybe it’s time for this character to actually talk a little. It could be mostly baby babble, but it’s the kind of change I wouldn’t mind.
I don’t know how well this comment will be recieved but I’m going to just say it. There’s nothing wrong with adding more black characters to this show, either as ongoing or one-off roles, and it’s a great way to diversify the voice actors without replacing the voices for longstanding character. But between the lady at the gate, the family with the little kid who was potty training and another woman later whose role escapes me, it seems every brand new black character just doesn’t fit into the flawed universe of the show. They’re all pleasant and soft spoken with nothing odd or humorous about them. Same with Bart’s new teacher. It’s like the producers and writers are deathly afraid of offending anyone the more they try to be inclusive. I can’t be the only person who feels this way. Thoughts?
I think your comment is fine. Modern Simpsons is a very safe show in a lot of ways and it can often feel like they walk on eggshells whenever even getting close to a sensitive topic. This example reminds me of how Community didn’t want to pair Troy and Shirley in episode plots at first because they didn’t want to come across as pairing the two black characters up right away. The result was Troy and Shirley not getting anything to do together until season 4, and then nothing ever again.
In The Simpsons’ case I think they just added more black actors to the cast as part of recasting characters, and add more black background characters now as a way of getting more mileage from these new recurring actors. I haven’t personally paid super close attention to a trend of those characters being really basic, but I could see that being true, like the producers make sure to never assign their black actors roles that depict those characters negatively for fear of coming off offensive. This might be true for other nonwhite actors as well. Again, I haven’t personally noticed this, but it feels in-character for current Simpsons to be cautious like that. Or maybe Bart’s new teacher being pretty boring just influenced how other characters were perceived, I don’t know, it could be that too.
It’s not the issue of having too few minorities on the show, it’s that at the end of the day, The Simpsons is still written and overseen by pasty-faced, white bread Harvard graduates. And to me, writing for demographics that you aren’t part of is walking across a mine field, because your options sometimes boil down to just focusing on outdated stereotypes that might even border on racism or making them talking cardboard cutouts, devoid of basic humanity. Now, if you’re culturally immersed in other groups and have lived in the weeds (such as having grown up lower income and thus more likely to encounter a more diverse set of lifestyles), so to speak, you are probably able to understand how people in certain demos typically function and can build characters off of those, but I get why The Simpsons doesn’t even try as they don’t seem to be an ethnically diverse group.
But Hibbert, Carl and Lou have been around forever, were always funny characters and I never felt anything they ever did was culturally insensitive.
Since I can’t seem to reply to the comment below (not sure if that’s be design or a flaw in the system):
“But Hibbert, Carl and Lou have been around forever, were always funny characters and I never felt anything they ever did was culturally insensitive.”
At the same time, their roles have been severely reduced since their recastings, and arguably a bit before then too. Honestly, I feel that is probably more insensitive since it means they’re not willing to expand upon those roles as much as they are their newer characters. Sure they weren’t the most developed already, but still a little more effort. Then again, this is modern day Simpsons we’re talking about here, where they flip-flop between “Bare-minimum effort” and “effort in all the wrong places” even during episodes.
Yes, I noticed this right away with Bart’s new teacher. I had never seen a competent and caring Springfield Elementary teacher before. I guess it makes for a change of pace, which isn’t a bad thing…but it’s also boring. I absolutely get the impression that the Simpsons writers are deathly afraid of getting more Twitter criticism after the Apu fiasco.
This feels like the sort of episode they would have done around season 13. The conceit is heightened from reality in a cartoonish, almost Scully-era way, but unlike those episodes it doesn’t happen through a twist or Jerkass Homer, there’s just this level of weird cartoonishness dispersed through the whole episode, combined with a thin premise lacking many varied jokes. Kind of feels like the very early Jean era without its reference humor and music montages.
By the way, I should mention that I’m putting together the Noiseless Chatter Xmas Bash this year, which is five hours of ripping apart old sitcoms & Christmas specials with some of the funniest people on the planet. I say this not to self promote but because I genuinely think that if you like this blog, you’ll have a great time there. You can drop in our Discord server anytime, and there will be post-classic Simpsons included at the beginning and the end. It’s happening this Saturday, December 14, from 7pm to midnight eastern time. Check it out if you can!
Announcement Link: http://noiselesschatter.com/2024/12/07/xmas-bash-3000/
That’s wonderful. I’m so happy that people like you have kept the Xmas Bash alive the last couple years in Philip’s honor. I don’t know if I can watch this year’s, but I second this recommendation. It should be a fun time.
Yeah between the weak sounding premise plus it having a number of guest stars as these one-offs I just didn’t even bother with this one as I failed to see the appeal outside of a certain niche which tends to happen in a fair amount of Selman episode (such as Desperately Seeking Lisa which I also passed on).
The problem with this kind of episode is that it boils down to wish fulfillment from a rather niche audience, in which it talks about how terrible people are on an airplane and how cathartic it would be to punish anyone who disrupted the mundanity even just a bit. The end of the episode even insists upon it, as the Congressional hearing decides that punitive measures during flights are the best strategy as opposed to treating people humanely or tackling the reasons why people misbehave in these kinds of settings, implying that the staff is perfectly fine with security theater as long as it gives them what they want.
Lisa was a total bitch in this episode, between her being upset that Bart is trying to pass the time with other stuff, making Maggie cry by forcing *her* lifestyle onto her, and generally being cold towards a well-meaning Homer who’s trying to maintain order and show, for once, that he won’t be the reason why this family trip goes to hell.
I also agree that this feels like something you would have seen in the Scully era, as it all largely takes place in the so-called “sitcom premise” and minimizes frivolous details such as new environments in favor of the cast largely being stuck in a giant tube.
Referring to an 8 year-old girl as a “bitch”.
Hmmmm.
Oh, don’t you start. She may be eight, but they write her as a 30-something San Francisco liberal.
Sometimes, yes. “Bitch” is still a repugnant, highly gendered insult.
“She proceeds to torture Maggie with jazz flashcards and blasting music in her ears with headphones, making her cry, much to Lisa’s annoyance.”
This is a bizarre criticism, in my opinion. I mean, I get some of the anti-Lisa sentiment that has popped up over the years (especially when it concerns her politics and activism), but I don’t think it applies here. She’s an 8 year-old who loves Jazz and can’t fathom that her baby sister wouldn’t be calmed by it. It’s not like she was conscious of Maggie being triggered by the music specifically because, y’know, she’s oblivious and self-centered in a child-like way.
I think I was more rubbed the wrong way by Lisa’s righteous attitude in tending to Maggie the way SHE knows best. I also acknowledge they cranked up her brattiness a bit for plot purposes, since she, like everyone else, needed to be dropped down into the jail level. But her behavior was giving me flashes of Lisa at her worst, despite not being that degree in this episode.
I see what you mean. The episode could have benefited from a moment or two that balanced out the brattiness.
I think that all the time Lisa has spent being characterized as a mini-adult really hurts these little moments where she is more bratty/childish. Oh well, no harm, but it sure can get weirder when she acts a little more immature.
Having Seeking Lisa and her Women in Shorts segment this season doesn’t really help that much.
I enjoyed this one. Easily my favourite of the season, which has otherwise been pretty dire. Chaos is the defining characteristic of episodes co-run by Michael Price, which I haven’t liked very much. This was similarly frenetic, aggressive, borderline unhinged, but it worked in large part due to the setting/context and it actually made me laugh out loud several times (a rare feat these days). The gradual escalation of chaos and tension in a confined space was fun to watch. I loved the energy and the ensemble nature of it (it’s very rare to get an episode that features all 5 five family members let alone juggles them this economically) and I really liked well-meaning Homer’s valiant struggle to stay composed in such trying conditions. I also enjoyed the cuts to Marge in first class and thought it was the best use of Bart as a prankster in God knows how long. Lisa was certainly the weakest of the bunch, but her screen-time was relatively minimal and it’s far from her worst. A promising start to the new production run.