Original airdate: May 8, 2022

The premise: Marge reveals that she used to be quite the prankster back in middle school, resulting in her bonding with Bart over their shared fondness for mischief. Homer feels left out, and turns to Lisa to try to find out if any of their interests overlap.

The reaction: Sometimes there are certain episodes that feel so incredibly thin that there doesn’t seem like there’s much to grab onto. This season has had a lot of fairly ambitious episodes, so this one feels pretty undercooked in comparison, like they didn’t bother taking a few more passes on the script. Marge has a run-in with an older woman who seems deathly afraid of her (“Marge Bouvier, you ruined my life!”) It turns out she was the principal of her old middle school. In flashbacks, we see that upon moving up from grade school, Marge was all alone and a constant victim of bullies, with the principal being largely apathetic to her struggles. She accidentally causes the principal to trip and fall in a garbage can, resulting in her getting some much needed social cred. We then see two more intentional pranks Marge pulled on her, and that’s it. If this episode is about her actual secret inclination toward mischief, it feels like we needed to see more of her actually being a little shit and what drove her as a kid to do these things. Also, Marge was at that school like twenty-five years ago, and this principal is still traumatized by her? Whatever. Bart repeatedly tells his mother how impressed he is and how he’s glad he has something to bond with her with (“We’re the same! I finally have a parent I’m proud of!”) Marge and Bart proceed to pull pranks on irritating townsfolk like Comic Book Guy and Helen Lovejoy, but Marge’s conscious is taking its toll. She loves this new bond she has with Bart, but feels bad about what she’s doing. This all culminates in a prank gone wrong involving tripping Mr. Burns into oncoming traffic, where he’s hit multiple times by cars and lands on top of power lines, getting repeatedly shocked, an aggressively cartoonish sequence that almost feels uncomfortable. Marge has a brief therapy session after that, which seems like it should delve into where these rambunctious urges of hers are coming from, but we get none of that. Meanwhile, Bart seems nonplussed about almost murdering an 104-year-old man and begs his mother not to give up pranking (“If you give it up, you’re giving me up!!”) He breaks down in tears after this. The emotional stakes are ratcheted way up, but I just don’t care enough about what’s happening to buy into it. I get that Bart feels a greater sense of attachment to Marge, but it’s being pushed too far. Marge agrees to one last job, a prank pulled on her old principal, which results in her having a heart attack. However, this was actually a prank she and Marge pulled on Bart to get him to stop pranking. So being responsible for nearly killing Mr. Burns was fine for Bart, but with this other old person, it’s fine? I feel like this had potential to be an interesting Marge episode, exploring her past and giving some insight into some hidden aspects of her character. She’s always portrayed as the perfect mom, so to see her indulging in some more off-kilter impulses might have been interesting. Instead, it all just felt so empty and pointless. There’s a lot of episodes that feel like they have premises with potential but end up falling short, but this one seemed like it was barely even trying.

Three items of note:
– The B-plot involves Homer trying to see what he has in common with Lisa, if anything. He indulges in her love of vegan food, even though he finds all of it disgusting. The two plots seem to share a common thread that Homer and Marge are both doing things to bond with their children that they themselves don’t like, but they don’t really gel that well considering with Marge, it’s a secret shame she’s trying to suppress, while Homer genuinely hates everything Lisa’s making her eat. In the end, Homer and Lisa discover they have similar food allergies, and we get our sappy ending (“Dad, you passed down the most important part of yourself: your kind heart.”) The doctor lampshades this by fake coughing (“I’m afraid I’m allergic to treacle!”) Have the writers been reading this blog and seen how many times I’ve complained about bullshit overly-treacly endings?
– We see Superintendent Chalmers in the flashback, reacting to the principal being knocked in the garbage (“I’ll do a lot better with the next person I hire. He’ll be a WIN-NNERRRR!”) First off, I thought this was implying that he was going to fire the principal, perhaps being the beginning of an endless downward spiral for her, thus explaining why she despised Marge. But no, after this, we see she stayed on as principal to get pranked by Marge over and over. What? Secondly, does anybody still laugh at these “SKINNER!” variations anymore? They did a similar thing with Nelson doing alternates to his usual “Haw haw!” for a while, and occasionally still do. Thirty years of episodes and we can’t stop with these cutesy takes on these catchphrases. It all just feels so fucking old. In the last episode, we actually attempted to show a different side of Chalmers, at least briefly, but even there we had him scream “SIMP-SON!” just like he does with Skinner. Maybe after seven hundred fucking episodes, we can  examine different things that might be funny about a side character rather than do the same running gag for the hundredth time?
– Bart’s love of pranking almost feels out of time for me. I’ve talked about how weird it is whenever he uses a slingshot in modern episodes; it harkens back to his origins as a riff on Dennis the Menace, which was an old reference back in 1990, but now is completely anachronistic. Here, we see Bart attempting to pull the peanut brittle can filled with snakes gag, something that I just can’t imagine a kid in 2022 even knowing what that is. Maybe a really young kid might get his hands on a prank kit with a whoopee cushion, fake gum or whatever and think it’s funny, but modern day ten-year-olds are all on their smartphones cyberbullying each other on TikTok, not putting Kick Me signs on people’s backs. When’s the last time any kid has done that? I might be overgeneralizing a bit, but any time they try and portray Bart like this in new episodes, it always seems pretty outdated.

Original airdate: May 1, 2022

The premise: When Lisa is called in to sub for the high school band, she forms an unlikely bond with Shauna over their shared musical interest. Meanwhile, Homer discovers Chalmers brews his own beer.

The reaction: Are there any Shauna fans in the audience? I really haven’t a clue, but I can’t imagine there are many. She’s a total flatline of a character to me. The most interesting thing they ever did with her was reveal her to be Superintendent Chalmers’ daughter, which has lent to two or three somewhat humorous scenes depicting him as an exasperated father. But Shauna herself has always been a boring stock character of a disaffected teen, with this episode doing very little to flesh her out any further than that. Lisa starts going to high school band practice after school when she is requested to step in for an absent musician (why they didn’t call anyone from Springfield Middle School is unclear). There, she is surprised to see Shauna on drums, who she is eager to build a rapport with (we learn that she is the Simpson babysitter, so that’s how she knows her). Eventually, Shauna’s wall of teenage snark and detachment weakens and the two start to hang out, with her falling into a big sister role to Lisa. Through all of this, we don’t learn anything new about Shauna though. I understand that teenage angst is usually not rooted in anything specific, but we never get anything about her damages, or why she hates her dad. Her father is the superintendent, they could have easily thrown some kind of line about that in there. Also nothing about why she loves the drums, or why she’s hesitant to try out for first chair. Does she think they’d never accept her because she’s a “bad” kid? Or she doesn’t want to put in the work even though she’s insanely gifted? Anything? As a result of this, Shauna and Lisa’s bonding was superficially charming at times, but it never felt like there was any substance to it. This all leads to our final act, where they go to a high school party that gets flooded with alcohol, leaving Lisa out of her element. She’s left alone from Shauna, who wandered off to make out with the quarterback who invited her. Again, if Shauna had actually wanted the acceptance of other people, or it was established she had a crush on him, she might actually have conflicting motivations that would lead her to let Lisa down, but she remains as one note as ever (“Where were you?” “I was with Trevor, getting some.” “Some what?” “Some smooches! Duh!” This is how teenagers talk). I’m no fan of Shauna, but even a character as flat as her could turn into someone of interest, but this was a very barebones attempt.

Three items of note:
– As with the bully characters, Shauna’s age has always been rather nebulous. We’ve seen her work in retail and service jobs before, so she must be at least 16, which checks out with her being a high schooler. Meanwhile, Dolph, Kearney, and Shauna’s ex Jimbo are stuck at Springfield Elementary, which must have been pretty awkward for her when they dated. But had we not seen Shauna at Springfield Elementary before this point? I feel like we must have, but I don’t remember. It just made it all the more awkward when the show had done semi-sexualizing jokes with her, like when she flashed Bart her breasts, or when she made out with Gil at one point.
– The Homer/Chalmers B-plot is kind of nice, but I didn’t get a ton of out of. I kind of like the little glimpses we’ve gotten into Gary Chalmers’ personal life over the years, even if they haven’t lent themselves to successful episodes. His love of history and his marital history in “Bart Stops to Smell the Roosevelts,” his vulnerability and growing respect for Skinner in “The Road to Cincinnati,” and here, with his beer brewing acting as an escape from his detachment from his daughter (“You’re there when it enters the world, so full of promise, and you know that if you pour your heart and hard work into it, it won’t tell you it’s pregnant just to mess with you.”) How does Chalmers have greater and more satisfying character motivation in the B-plot than Shauna in the main story?
– The ending reveal that the teens at the party are not actually drunk at all because Homer forgot to add the yeast to their brew is actually clever in concept, but all it did was remind me of the pilot of the wonderful Clone High, where Abe gets an invite to the cool kid’s party, but only if he can bring the beer. Unable to get any, he brings a non-alcoholic keg which the kids drink up anyway and act like maniacs, regardless of their non-inebriated state. Abe finally admits what he did, and that he only wanted to be accepted by his peers, a moment undercut by a police sheriff calling him a loser and everyone laughing. Meanwhile, Wiggum gives a speech to sermonize to the teens about the consequences of their actions and to have compassion for their fellow students in a bit that’s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it feels more like the older writers openly venting about not understanding their teenage children. Give me the Andy Dick sheriff any day (“Son, if we don’t enforce the drinking age, the excitement of sneaking around to get wasted might disappear forever. You want that on your shoulders, pal?”) Man, Clone High was so damn funny.

Original airdate: April 24, 2022

The premise: The new fourth grade teacher causes Bart to act out in ways he can’t explain, triggered by a previous interaction he had with her. Meanwhile, Lisa directs a well-received documentary short about an octopus and its tragic end, however, she is actually keeping the creature in secret as a pet.

The reaction: I’ve talked about the awkward subject of replacing Mrs. Krabappel several times at this point. Nine years after Marcia Wallace’s passing, there’s been little movement in regards to creating a new permanent fixture in Bart’s class. Ned Flanders was christened the replacement a few years ago, but I think we’ve only seen him in that role maybe three times? If that? Considering he was married to Mrs. K in the end, you’d think that inheriting his deceased wife’s job and teaching his neighbor’s kid would have lent itself to some new or interesting story lines, but instead they just decided to do nothing with it. But hey, that’s fine, now they’re going to try again with an all-new character, Rayshelle Payton, voiced by Kerry Washington. Promotional articles about this episode have called this character “permanent,” so it seems this is the series finally being proactive in filling this hole in the cast. So who is Rayshelle? She’s an incredibly earnest and caring teacher who wants to help all her students do the best they can. Are you laughing yet? Her only “humorous” quirk is sometimes blurting out her unfiltered thoughts and stammering to backpedal them, like insulting her husband’s shitty musical abilities or directly calling Bart a problem child. Very funny stuff. So for her debut episode, she’s not giving that strong of an impression, but the story here is more on Bart’s reaction to her. When he first lays eyes on her, he gets a weird flashback to having seen her before, then proceeds to act absolutely bonkers in every scene with her going forward. It feels really awkward, with him getting incredibly anxious and losing himself, making strange noises and smacking his head onto a piece of paper drowning in glue. But then his behavior turn to jealousy, destroying Milhouse’s model project after Rayshelle compliments him. All the while, I’m just waiting for them to finally reveal where Bart knows her from, as they teased from the beginning. I hate whenever they do this stuff. Are they expecting the audience to be glued to their seats wondering what the reveal will be? So it turns out that while sneaking into a fancy beachside resort, Bart almost drowned in their pool and was saved by Rayshelle. Embarrassed by having to be rescued, he shouts at her (“Why did you do that?! I was fine! I’m an amazing swimmer!”) and runs off. As he recounts this story to Homer, Bart feels remorse (“I feel awful. I ruined her dress, I yelled at her… She doesn’t recognize me yet, but when she does, she’s gonna hate me.”) All this feels so wildly out-of-character for Bart, even with it obviously heading toward the added “reveal” that Bart has a crush on his new teacher, as when he sees her interacting with her husband, he gains Hulk strength and rips the water fountain out of the wall. We’ve seen Bart feel vulnerable, we’ve seen Bart in love, but this pathetic, sniveling display here feels so off to me. He hides his head in his shirt as he eventually confesses his crush (“Barf emoji,” he concludes). Rayshelle uses this as a teachable moment (“You know, a crush on a teacher just means you’re coming to love a new part of yourself that I’m bringing out in you.”) Bart found himself actually doing homework and liking it, so I guess this is part of him learning to be a good student! Based on this episode, it appears that Rayshelle’s role as Bart’s teacher is to help him teach lessons about life and grow as a person. This also seems to be the motivation reflected in quotes from Kerry Washington and writer Carolyn Omine in the aforementioned articles about this episode. So… this is a show that’s lasted for over three decades. I don’t expect the series to stay exactly the same for its entire run. In fact, the best long-running series are the ones that shake things up to make things feel fresh. But the very ethos of this show is that it was the anti-sitcom, filled with miserable characters in a world full of misfortune and indifference. Springfield Elementary acted as a scalding critique of education in America, staffed by teachers who hated kids and an administration who cared even less. You could definitely work in a teacher character who actually wants to do their job in a world like this. You can even have them form a kinship with Bart in some way, it’s definitely possible. Instead, everything just feels incredibly sanitized. In the again aforementioned articles, Omine compares Rayshelle’s character to Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, where the comedy comes from them being overly positive and super into their jobs. The humor from Parks also relied on characters like her grumpy polar opposite Ron Swanson and other weirdos butting up against Leslie, something we get none of here. Rayshelle is just the most caring and awesome teacher who’s gonna stick around and help all the kids with their problems! That ending scene with her and Bart is easily one of the most schmaltzy, cliche sitcom scenes this show has ever done. Again, I’m all for this show growing and changing in new ways. Even though I didn’t care for them, episodes this season like “A Serious Flanders” and “Pixelated and Afraid” were ambitious departures for this show in trying something different. But for the most part, any changes the show has done is to devolve more and more into a boring, traditional sitcom, and the addition of Rayshelle seems to be a pretty big indicator of such.

Three items of note:
– There’s not a whole lot to talk about with Lisa’s story, especially compared to Bart’s. The plot was clearly inspired by the Oscar winning documentary My Octopus Teacher, chronicling the relationship between a filmmaker and his octopus subject. While the octopus in the film naturally dies, the twist here is that Lisa’s film depicts the octopus being dragged off by shark, while in reality, she keeps the creature in secret, manipulating the narrative of the film in order to win an award. I guess we’re just supposed to think Lisa bonding with the little octopus is cute, but nothing happens and it’s just boring. She tries to keep the octopus safe in her room, then she overhears Homer giving Bart an uncharacteristic pep talk about accepting the reality of things no matter how much it hurts or fucking whatever and she decides to set it free. We see their tearful departure over the credits as Lisa lets the octopus go in the ocean as the music swells… hey, remember when this show was funny? Some of the writers were clearly touched by the documentary, so they decided to pay homage by just ripping it off.
– This episode really shines a light on how small the staff of Springfield Elementary is. Our focus has always been on Bart and Lisa’s classes, but in the classic era of the show, we used to catch glimpses of the rest of the faculty that filled out the school, just enough to make it feel like a real place (the teacher who jubilantly tells the kids we won World War II at the start of summer break, the burned out hippie teacher telling his students about the sixties, and of course, Mr. Glasscock). But as of the last twenty years or so, unnamed one-off characters have been mostly exiled in favor of the sixty or seventy rotating members of the established cast. Rayshelle busts into the teacher’s lounge where we see Groundskeeper Willie, Miss Hoover, Mr. Largo, Lunchlady Doris (or Dora, whatever they decided to call her now), Mrs. Pommelhorst, and Coach Krupt. Only one of these characters is an actual academic teacher, alongside two gym teachers. Where the fuck is everyone else? There’s five entire grades of kids being taught at this school, right?
– The promotional articles talk about Rayshelle being recurring to the same degree Mrs. Krabappel was, so I guess time will tell as to how her character will develop and ingratiate herself with the rest of the cast. They mentioned that her husband, the terrible oboist, could have a future plotline with Lisa, but who knows if they’ll actually do that. It’s too soon to call any of this, but if this episode is any indication, I can’t say I’m looking forward to her next appearance.

Original airdate: April 10, 2022

The premise: Lisa is outraged that one of Bleeding Gums Murphy’s songs is being used in a lottery commercial. She is later shocked to find out that Murphy has a deaf son, and goes on a crusade to get the rights to his father’s music back in his hands.

The reaction: Bleeding Gums Murphy is a curious character. He feels like such a timeless fixture of the show (especially since he used to appear every week in the opening theme), an integral figure in the first episode to really explore Lisa’s character, but he only really featured in season 1’s “Moaning Lisa,” and season 6’s “‘Round Springfield,” where he was killed off. We actually learned a lot about Murphy in his second outing, almost purposefully to give more weight to his upcoming death: his mentor, Blind Willie Witherspoon, his possible relation to Dr. Hibbert, his fledgling mainstream success appearing on The Steve Allen Show and The Cosby Show, and his crippling Fabergé egg habit. All of these bits, in addition to being funny, further served to flesh Murphy out and make him feel more like a real person. So here, posthumously, we have another chance to learn more about him, so what’s up? Well, despite Lisa priding herself to be the biggest Bleeding Gums expert around, she’s stunned to discover he had a son. And a wife, apparently, who we see only in pictures in his house. Where were these two when he was on his death bed? What’s the story there? We’re never told, with our only flashback involving Murphy taking his son to the doctor to find out he’s deaf. Who was his wife? Is she still alive? In the last episode, we had an extended flashback sequence of Cletus and Brandine’s courtship, but we can’t delve into this material? Whatever. Monk Murphy is a deaf man with a healthy relationship with his deceased father, and Lisa pries her way into his life to try to get the rights to his father’s music back. Lisa is in 100% insufferable idealist mode here (“I was destined to find you. My new mission in life is to make you happy! You’re my new cause!”) The point of the episode is that Lisa’s childlike optimism hits hard against a harsh reality, but she’s written less like an innocent child and more like the 30-something grad student the writers have spent the better part of two decades writing her as. Lisa’s search for answers of who owns Murphy’s music is just so boring. They go to the Jazz Hole to talk to his old colleagues, we have to endure an unfunny scat session, then Lisa happens to look at one of Murphy’s album covers on the wall and they decide to go to the record label’s office. She didn’t think to go there first? It’s not like it was hidden information. For a huge Bleeding Gums expert, she doesn’t seem to know about this obvious stuff. The record label is a humungous scam created to steal shit from artists (as made obvious by endless sign gags), where Monk eventually calls it quits and tells Lisa to just stop bothering her and it’s not her business. Lisa learns a lesson not to pry, I guess, and makes up with Monk, who later gets a cochlear implant, then Lisa plays his father’s record and he cries. Hooray. The thing is that this structure could have actually worked. In her apology, Lisa tells Monk that her father helped her when she was sad, and he wanted to return the favor by helping him. We even see a recreation of “Moaning Lisa” at the beginning of the episode, but it doesn’t feel like it translates to Lisa actively recalling how much Murphy’s kindness meant to her, outside of being a music snob who’s pissed off that Big Lotto is appropriating the music of her people. It’s just a big wasted opportunity, given how strong the Lisa/Murphy connection is, despite their screen time being so brief.

Three items of note:
– This episode got some minor buzz for featuring deaf actors playing Monk Murphy and the characters at his non-profit, as well as featuring sign language (which must have been a challenge adapting to the four-fingered characters). In principle, I’m all for the inclusion of different types of people on any kind of show. It’s also fortuitous that this episode is coming off of CODA winning Best Picture at the Oscars. As we saw in that film, as well as Troy Kotsur’s speech after his Best Supporting Actor win, there’s plenty of ways to be humorous with deaf characters, and the subject matter itself. But Monk Murphy, much like almost all one-off characters this show creates now, is pretty uninteresting. It’s not entirely his fault, as he basically functions as the silent tagalong as Lisa drags him around to fight a cause he doesn’t even care about until he puts his foot down. But finding out more about him and his father would have been interesting, and he could have had some funny moments along the way, but he just doesn’t. The closest we get is when he tells Lisa he can tune her out at will by closing his eyes, as he won’t be able to read her lips, which he demonstrates. It’s not a bad joke, but it reminds me too much of a much, much funnier real life story from my wife about one of her students, who happens to be deaf. In class, the girl was getting annoyed by some other students who were being loud and obnoxious, who insulted her when she asked them to be quiet. She then shot back herself, saying, “I don’t have to listen to this,” then turned her cochlear implant off. What an absolute badass moment. It’s pretty much the same as the joke done here, but not as cool. Anyway, the writer of this episode, Loni Steele Sosthand, pulled this story out of her real life: she has mixed race parents, a father who loved jazz music, and a deaf brother, all of which were made part of this story. The golden years of this series were built on the writers remembering elements of their childhood and amplifying them to comedic purposes. A stable of younger writers could definitely harness this power again to create new and different stories like this one to breathe life into this decayed husk of a show, but for whatever reason, it’s just not coming to life for me.
– I think Kevin Michael Richardson did a pretty solid job voicing Bleeding Gums here, especially with the “Moaning Lisa” recreation (in 4:3, no less), and even with Richardson repeating some of Murphy’s other previous lines (“You’ve made an old jazz man happy, Lisa!”) It’s not a perfect match, but like Grey DeLisle’s Martin Prince, it captures the essence of the character enough to work. Also, this is the first time that I haven’t been bothered by his Dr. Hibbert. It still doesn’t sound like Harry Shearer at all, but my brain has just stopped hitting the brakes whenever I hear it at this point, so that’s progress, I guess?
– There’s a bit late in this episode that feels like the most damning example that this show should just never, ever do pop culture references ever again. The spirit of Bleeding Gums tells Lisa that he’s always magically here for her, citing The Legend of Bagger Vance and Driving Miss Daisy as examples, basically labeling himself as Lisa’s Magical Negro. Before we get into the actual scene, this set-up feels wrong to me. Lisa is a little girl who loves jazz, so it’s appropriate she would look up to and idolize an old jazz man. In his two appearances, it never felt like Bleeding Gums filled the Magical Negro role at all, other than just being a black man who “helps” a white person. He acted as a sympathetic ear in “Moaning Lisa,” and gave Lisa his saxophone on his death bed. That’s all. But whatever, from there, we cut to a recreation of Miss Daisy featuring Bleeding Gums and Lisa, where they do a really annoying joke where Lisa just says what happens in the movie (“Teach me about equality and civil rights in a way that doesn’t make me feel too guilty. In return, in thirty years, I will ask you your last name.”) Wow, way to take down a prime target for ridicule, Driving Miss Daisy, a film over thirty years old that nobody cares about anymore. Would you believe that it’s outdated in its racial politics? Just as I mentally griped about the show carting out such an old reference, Murphy’s car slams into that of Frank Vallelonga from 2018’s Green Book, helpfully holding up a copy of said book as he’s driving. Even being a four year old movie, this feels super outdated too. Everybody already had their fill ragging on Green Book when it was out, many of which were parallels to films like Miss Daisy. Even outside the age range of the references, the pop culture jabs are always just so surface-level, stuff that has been observed and ridiculed millions of times over already. Then we get stuff like the scene over the credits, where a black-and-white Lisa, Bleeding Gums, his son and the whole band of jazz musicians and deaf kids sing at a jazz club. The other Simpsons are in attendance, Bart complains to Lisa, and Lisa makes him disappear by nodding her head in an I Dream of Jeannie reference. I Dream of Jeannie! A show that went off the air over fifty years ago. Who is this joke for? Despite featuring more and more scripts by writers in their twenties and thirties, this show still manages to make time for jokes that only appeal to people in old age homes.

Original airdate: March 27, 2022

The premise: Cletus is shocked to find that Brandine is actually smart and has been hiding her intelligence from him, causing them to break up. Meanwhile, Lisa stumbles upon an underground overachievers club at school, who do their best to act unassuming at school to avoid getting bullied.

The reaction: Watching last season’s “Yokel Hero,” also featuring Cletus and Brandine, made me think that perhaps not every secondary character needs to be fleshed out beyond their two dimensions (or in some cases, one). The slack-jawed hillbilly cousins (or mother/son, or whatever variation of relation they’re joking about this week) have always existed, and worked, as quick and dirty jokes, but for some reason, in recent memory, we’ve seen a couple of Cletus B-plots pop up featuring him for more than one or two lines at a time, followed by a complete plot line in “Yokel Hero,” and now this episode a year later featuring his lovely wife Brandine. After speaking eloquently about A Farewell to Arms at Marge’s book club, word spreads fast that Brandine actually has a brain in her head, working its way to Cletus. Confronting her, she admits that she started reading a few years ago, and that she likes actually knowing things. She and Cletus split up, and she moves in with the Simpsons, because of course she does. So what exactly does Brandine like about being smart? We’re never really told. We see her indulging in the very stereotypical “smart” creative pursuits like watching ballet and visiting art museums. She’s also reading the Grey’s Anatomy textbook, so is she interested in medicine? If they could narrow this down to a specific subject matter, or actually elaborate on Brandine’s feelings on why she likes all these things, maybe we could actually gleam some kind of character off of her? Instead it’s so intensely broad, like something out of a subpar kid’s cartoon. She’s smart and she likes learnin’! Does she want to actually do something with all her gained knowledge? I have no idea. She comes home from book club to pay the babysitter, who is actually a goat (“You free next Saturday?”) so I guess she’s not smart enough to know that goats can’t fucking talk. So what does Brandine want? Instead, we eat up time with two subplots, the first being Lisa and the secret smart kids society, and honestly, the whole premise of them laying low to avoid the bullies’ wrath also kind of feels straight out of a kid’s cartoon. Lisa has been the outspoken school-wide teacher’s pet for over thirty years, so this feels like a weird story to pull out now. Alongside that story is yet another goddamn Homer-Marge plot, where Marge realizes that everyone thinks she could have done better than Homer, and she starts to doubt her relationship herself. It’s all a complete waste of time. “Yokel Hero” was terrible, but at least it was an episode with some kind of crazy ambition. This one felt like it didn’t even want to try.

Three items of note:
– The Brandine and Lisa plots really feel like they’re tailor-made to go hand-in-hand, but they barely do. Lisa lets Brandine borrow some books when she comes to stay with them, and then toward the end, Brandine convinces Lisa not to hide her intelligence. The latter might have been sweet if it actually felt like it mattered. Showing Lisa and Brandine actually bonding over their brains would have actually meant that they’d have to actually have Brandine express a specific interest in something, so I guess that was out of the question.
– We get an extended flashback depicting how Cletus and Brandine met, which I guess is meant to be sweet? Going back to my first point, I honestly don’t give a shit about how these two characters met and fell in love. They’re the slack-jawed yokel characters, they’re the last people I want to be emotionally developed! Also, in yet another instance of this show feeling out of time, it feels really strange doing jokes about hillbillies in 2022. Cletus takes Homer to the “Hillbilly Pica-ture Palace” museum (Sponsored by Mountain Doo), featuring an exhibit on mullets and an exhibit on Hillfolk in Media (featuring busts of Hank Hill and Bill Clinton). I can’t even think of a contemporary example of hillbillies in media. What is this satire of? Cletus was created as a joke in “Bart the Elephant,” and kept around because Hank Azaria did a funny voice, and it was funny seeing him randomly pop up every now and again. But now I guess I’m supposed to be emotionally invested in him (“I want you to look at me not as a hick or a bumpkin, but as a human being, with feelings just like you!”) Sorry, Cletus, but in your words, I cain’t. I simply cain’t.
– Homer makes it up to Marge in the end by actually completing his neglecting home renovations, and as a cherry on top, he got “Elton John back, and he’s here to play for you again!” Except in “I’m With Cupid,” Homer usurped Elton John from arriving in Springfield to play for Apu and Manjula, who he ended up serenading at the end of the episode anyway. Ah, who gives a shit. Sir Elton is actually Lenny behind a piano, obscured in shadow behind the curtains. Also, it felt a little confusing that we go from upstairs where Homer’s fixed the big bedroom window, and cut immediately to the living room downstairs window. I had to remind myself that they had switched locations, since the windows appear the same and Homer and Marge are standing in the same place in both rooms.