808. Simpsley

Original release date: July 3, 2026

The premise: In neo-noir style, a poor, but cunning Marge Bouvier travels to Italy to retrieve Agnes Skinner’s wealthy, layabout son Seymour. She quickly finds herself ingratiated into Skinner’s lavish life style, alongside her fellow mooch Homer, only for things to get far more complicated following Skinner’s unexpected passing.

The reaction: As was the case with the last Disney+ special extravaganza, this special is also just an incredibly long parody, this time of The Fantastic Mr. Ripley, or seeing as it’s presented in black and white, specifically the recent Apple TV+ Ripley mini-series starring Andrew Scott. I have not seen it, nor the 1999 Matt Damon film (though that’s on my incredibly long watch list), but I know the basics of the story that I could understand what’s going on. But really, what’s the point of these episodes? It’s retelling all the basic plot beats of the story of the film/series, with some minimal jokes and commentary sprinkled in. It ultimately feels like a drama with some mild laughs added for flavor, but I can’t give the show credit for experimenting with tone when it’s just lifting said tone from a source material they’re copying. The Treehouse of Horrors of old had it just right, you do a parody of a horror movie in under seven minutes, you play with the tropes, make your jokes, and you’re done. The trilogy episodes would sometimes do this as well, but as the show went on and degraded further and further, the parodies would become less actual parody and more boring, plotting re-tellings. Cut to the present and we get last month’s pretty lazy re-tellings of Top Gun and Joker, and now this episode, probably the most egregious example of this format yet. To be fair, I’m not familiar with the source material, so I can’t really judge specifically what’s been changed and what has not. A core difference is Homer and Marge are both interlopers, with the two kind of sharing that role alongside the woman Ripley is already with in Italy and intends to marry (who funnily enough is named Marge in the story.) But after watching something like this, I just don’t even know how to react to it. I already don’t like fantasy episodes of shows, since there isn’t much reason to feel emotionally invested in these characters I love in a one-off experimental special. Again, this is why the trilogy format works so well, since they can be fun little shorts. As far as I could perceive, and again, I could be wrong, but there doesn’t appear to be any really clever twist on this story being told. Maybe someone who’s more familiar with the source material can fill in the blanks here. The ending with the double murder, I assume is new. Oh, spoiler alert. A dying Marge being impressed that Homer was actually clever enough to kill her, like yeah, okay, I get it, but whatever. They want to play up the dramatic irony of it so bad with the reveal that they would have gotten the inheritance, no strings attached, but again, because this is a fantasy parody episode, it feels like it doesn’t matter at all. I’d be up for the show to try to do a more dramatic episode like this within canon, but that would be a risky move that might upset the status quo, so instead, hey, I binge-watched this great show on Apple this weekend, maybe we could just do that?

Two items of note:
– The show gets a lot of mileage out of cramming in a bunch of cameos of other characters by depicting them as marble busts, fountains, parodies of famous artworks hanging on the walls, or cutting to them reacting to events that have transpired. There’s part of me that feels like this might be lifted from the Ripley mini-series, but I can’t confirm that.
– My assumption is that this is what the Disney+ “special episodes” will be going forward, non-canonical parody stories or formats, like the National Geographic-esque “Yellow Planet” or the upcoming Black Mirror send-up. Maybe they’ll attempt something like “Oh C’mon All Ye Faithful” again in the future, a double-length episode that tries to reach for something loftier emotion-wise, but we have no way of knowing. I remember being shockingly moved and surprised at the show attempting to deal with Ned Flanders being a double widower and having a crisis of faith over it, it’s maybe the most human moment the show’s done in a long time. The crisis resolution with Frink sucked, but they tapped into some real emotion there, I’d much rather the show try and go in new, unexplored directions with these special episode rather than this shit. These are still technically part of the regular production season, I guess going forward they’ll set four episodes a year aside to be engineered as Disney+ specials from the ground up.