Original airdate: October 26, 2025
The premise: The men (and boys) of Springfield are sent to an enrichment camp to teach them how to better themselves and reorient their masculinity.
The reaction: Initially I thought this was going to be an episode parodying those absolutely insane men’s training programs where charlatans get weak-willed men to pay them thousands of dollars to get back to their primal tough manhood or whatever the fuck, but actually, I really have no idea what this episode is trying to say. Abe is incensed that Homer and Bart are being lazy at home, decrying the death of manliness. Marge is similarly worried about her husband and son’s laziness, until Alexa suggests that she send them to “Man Camp,” which is holding a special program to help address the men in crisis epidemic or whatever buzz phrase we’re calling it now. Turns out almost every man and boy in town is sent there thanks to Alexa, a plot detail I thought was going somewhere, but is never addressed. We see that Alexa glitches out and starts to promote the camp, it made it seem like it was getting hacked? But whatever. The camp is hosted by a man voiced by Albert Brooks, who of course is Simpsons guest star royalty, but I feel like he hasn’t had a memorable appearance since he voiced the head of the weight loss center in “The Heart-Broke Kid” (I guess you could also count the movie, if you want to be generous). His last appearance was as Cletus’s music manager, which I recall being very laborious and boring. It’s clear that everyone on staff loves Brooks and was cracking up at his dialogue, some of which seeming to be improved. Here, it’s pushed to its extreme limit, where the middle ten minutes of the episode is almost exclusively him talking to all of the male characters. Every scene begins with him in a new location talking. It’s wall-to-wall Brooks, except he’s not really saying anything funny, and also nothing is really happening and no story is progressing. What is this camp? I guess my thoughts about this being a commentary on men’s rights bullshit might have been too much like low hanging fruit, so instead, the camp is sort of about getting in touch with your feelings and treating women with respect. But then also Brooks bitches about kids with cell phones and exerts physical dominance over them, as well as forces some of the men into rigorous training exercises. There’s no story advancement to anything that’s happening, and as time started to run out in the episode, I had no idea where we were gonna end up. The final camp challenge to hunt for dinner, specifically a little duck, but Homer refuses to do so, thus passing the test (“That’s the right answer: kindness!” Cut to the other men tearing up.) Right before this point, we saw that back in Springfield, the women have taken over the town and have worked to greatly improve things, but are worried about the inevitable day the men return to ruin everything. However, they’re shocked to find their men have come home reborn, loving and open and in touch with their feelings, as everybody has a big hug and the episode ends. The catalyst for everyone being sent to Man Camp was that the men were all portrayed as lazy good-for-nothings, not that they were descriptive chauvinists selfishly clutching all the levers of power. That angle would have had a little substance, but it’s not at all what the episode was about. I feel like I can’t even pick through and parse out the episode because it wasn’t really saying anything about the subject. An honestly surprisingly minimal effort affair.
Three items of note:
– This episode opens with the first day of summer break, which is a little odd to be airing immediately after the Halloween special. I know the settings of episodes don’t really matter as much anymore now that almost all television is being continuously streamed all the time, but could they have not ran this towards the end of last season or something? Maybe they didn’t finish it in time as a holdover episode.
– For all your Moe/Maya shippers out there, we finally get an update on their impending nuptials, and explanation for Maya’s multi-year absence (“Due to my eastern European culture, there’s a five year period where we can’t see or talk to each other.”) Maya makes a silent cameo at the end running to hug Moe, but is stopped by Moe’s mother, telling them they have another four and a half years left. The episode where Moe proposed to Maya aired four years ago, so by that math, these two crazy kids should finally be tying the knot in 2061. I recall that there was supposed to be an upcoming episode written by Al Jean called “Homer & Marge & Moe & Maya,” but apparently it was shelved seemingly indefinitely thanks to the writer’s strike. I don’t know if anyone on staff gives enough of a shit to see this relationship through. John Frink, who wrote this episode, also wrote “Eeny Teeny Maya Moe,” which is kind of weird that his script has this arbitrary kicking off the can down the road on featuring a character that he should be residual checks for.
– The women-run Springfield has a few flashes of moldy old gender “comedy,” like the tire fire being replaced by giant scented candles, but that “storyline” is so abbreviated that thankfully we don’t get much more of that Futurama “Neutopia” type shit. Also we see a woman version of Frink we’ve never seen before. Is that supposed to be his legendary unseen wife as referenced in “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?” We’ve seen Frink numerous times as a bachelor looking for love, so maybe it’s his ex-wife, most likely due to the death of their son in that toy airplane.
Me Blog Write Good 
The most recent season of King of the Hill also tackled the subject of these ridiculous manhood seminars or whatever with much better results, not sure if you’re a fan of the show by any means (my memory is pretty crappy but as far as I can tell it rarely if ever comes up here) but it’s worth checking out for the sake of comparison.
I totally forgot to mention that, but yes, that’s an excellent comparison. That episode was absolutely brilliant, a true highlight of the new season. It doesn’t even seem fair to compare that to this.
What bugs me the most about the episode is the new “Female Springfield” by its very concept.
We only see a handful of the men and boys at the camp (Homer, Kirk, Clancy and their boys, Skinner, Lenny, Barney and Carl, Krusty and Mr. Teeny, Hibbert, and CBG in particular), but like, where’s Ned and his sons or Abe? They only appear in the opening and we never get any followup on them. Hell, where’s Quimby, Burns and Smithers? I feel like they’d be the most objective (or at least the first two given how out of the closet Smithers is by this point. Speaking of, where’s Largo?) to the radical makeover. Did Lindsey, Lisa and the rest of the women run them out of town? Is that also why we don’t see the Flanderses or the seniors after the first few minutes?
”Brooks bitches about kids with cell phones and exerts physical dominance over them”
Not having seen the episode myself, I choose to interpret this as Albert Brooks going around town beating the shit out of children. While being extremely proud of himself for doing it.
This just in, Al Jean has announced that he is done with The Simpsons, leaving Matt Selman as the sole show runner.
https://www.cbr.com/the-simpsons-al-jean-steps-down-as-showrunner/
I’m assuming he stepped down to work full-time on the movie. That’s the only explanation I can think of because he’s been a part-time showrunner for the last couple years. When they did the first movie, he was doing that and showrunning at the same time, so I doubt he wants to put himself through that ever again.
It makes me wonder what Selman plans on doing since he’s 100% going to be involved in the movie. Maybe he reduces the amount of episodes he runs and someone else steps up, or he does the show and the movie simultaneously like Jean did.
“His last appearance was as Cletus’s music manager, which I recall being very laborious and boring.”
Don’t tell me you’ve memory-holed his return as Jacques three seasons back?
How could I forget? It was just so memorable! I was more thinking of Brooks’s last original character, but I honestly didn’t think of Jacques at all.
“Is that supposed to be his legendary unseen wife as referenced in “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?”
We actually do see Frinks wife in “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy”.
I always assumed that woman was Frink’s assistant. I’d say inconclusive evidence.
I want to say something positive about every episode I watch this season so… the flannel shirts everyone wore wear cute and there was a lot of variety in the patterns. That’s it, this episode was a dumpster fire and everyone has already pointed out how annoying Greg the counselor was. I agree but I just wanted to be nice in a small way.
Oh wow, an Albert Brooks character that the writers thought was hilarious but was very, very annoying. Where have I seen this before?
Just a heads up but they started a Fortnite event and it’s the first time The Simpsons have been in a video game since LEGO Dimensions. I bring it up as there will be four shorts that will eventually be spliced together into a full episode… Kinda? Fortnite lore is weird because the game started as a PvE survival game called Save the World but they abandoned that entirely because the Battle Royale mode was more lucrative and they keep resetting the island over and over again, with pop culture characters being added as important chess pieces only to be removed due to contractual obligations. For example, the Peter Griffin crossover had him as one of the villains in a previous chapter, and earlier in this chapter, the Power Rangers got involved to battle a giant eldritch squid monster. Which makes the episode part of the greater lore of Fortnite but also a random, non-Canon Simpsons episode.
Also, because video games are expensive to make, it appears that cross promotion is likely the future for our favorite family. Why spend millions of dollars to make The Simpsons Game when you can pay a company to put the characters in an existing game and use FOMO?
I’m an old man so I’ve never played Fortnite and don’t know a whole lot about the specifics of it. I know how huge it is with children, but it’s kind of weird to me seeing these major companies doing tie-in events with characters like Scooby-Doo for what is essentially a shooter game with semi-realistic guns. Yes, it’s all fantasy violence with no blood (I think?), but the base of the game is still running around strapped and ready to kill. It’s not as weird with the Simpsons since they’re an adult property, but I think Disney is going to do even more Fortnite stuff with their major family-friendly properties, which feels wrong, but I guess that speaks to more of these companies letting their guard down about brand protection in order to make as much money as possible, for better or for worse.
But I agree, I see cross promotions being the more likely future of Simpsons games than stand-alone titles. As much as I’d like to see a Hit & Run-style sequel with a full map of Springfield, I’m not holding my breath over it.
The really weird part is that there’s a Xenomorph costume that can be played in any mode… And a similar costume that’s aged restricted. Cosmetically they’re about the same.
Meanwhile fucking Huggy Wuggy is in the game from that same season as Scooby-Doo and if I was a real parent and not plunking an iPad in front of my child, I would not buy that skin.
Disney has already dipped their toes into Fortnite before. Remember Rise of Skywalker? A critical plot point was during gameplay before the movie came out, which made the announcement of PALPATINE LIVES! in the crawl a huge spoiler to audiences. This is going to be their strategy going forward as they had tried to make games themselves and saw negative returns. So it is better to license out their properties to established studios for limited time events or things that are popular in the moment, like “cozy games”, as we see with Dreamlight Valley.
I know they’ve done Marvel and Star Wars events before, but Disney dumped like a billion dollars on Fortnite for an upcoming new mega-crossover or something that will most likely include more family friendly properties from Disney and Pixar. Will this be a whole new, slightly sanitized game experience? Or can we finally achieve our childhood dreams of playing as Donald Duck or Mike Wazowski mowing down enemies with an uzi?
At the Xmas Bash I hosted last year, one of the terrible songs included was this Fortnite Santa thing. (<- Link) Obviously it exists in a very specific context, but pretend Fortnite doesn’t exist for a moment. This is literally popular children’s media telling them to ask Santa for military weaponry this Christmas. It’s insanely dissonant.
Still hoping you do a retrospective on Simpsons games at some point. Also some of the official/unofficial books.
I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to suck your dick or anything, but you are easily the most insightful Simpsons reviewer on the internet this side of Charlie Sweatpants. Would love to get your thoughts on other Simpsons media.