Original airdate: January 12, 2014

The premise: Comic Book Guy meets the girl of his dreams, Japanese manga artist Kumiko, but their relationship comes under fire when her father arrives to take her back home.

The reaction: I guess it’s time for Comic Book Guy to get the Moe treatment of making an angry, miserable character look sad and pathetic, and for the writers to throw him a bone. CBG feels like a legacy character whose satirical role is pretty nebulous in modern times. This sarcastic basement-dwelling nerd character was novel in 1990, but at this point, “nerds” in society have branched off into so many different tropes that CBG just feels like a catch-all for everything. He’s a movie critic, a hacker, a gamer, a social outcast, an otaku… and now a husband, apparently. This show has thrown love interests to a variety of our characters over the course of two decades, some very memorable, but a lot disposable, but the lady in question here, Kumiko, is the absolute worst of them all. Not only does she have absolutely no personality, and no motivation to find CBG likable, let alone attractive, but she just says everything she’s thinking and feeling aloud to push the story forward. As usual with this fucking show, it’s tell, not show, and this episode feels like the greatest offender I can think of in recent memory. Kumiko walks in CBG’s shop, and immediately introduces who she is and what she’s doing, pulling out a copy of her autobiographical manga that she’s working on, but apparently is already finished. Why is she visiting America’s saddest cities? Later on during their first date, CBG tries to stifle his critical nature, but Kumiko defuses the tension immediately (“Oh, I don’t mind. If you think it’s stupid, say it’s stupid.” “American nerd snark is the finest in the world!”) Cut to montage, then cut to her moving in with CBG. This goes beyond male fantasy or wish fulfillment, Kumiko is effectively a Relationship Sue. She just really, really likes CBG. Why? Because she says she does. That’s it. The real “conflict” arises when her father arrives at the Android’s Dungeon and takes her away when she finds out she’s living with a gross nerd. So, besides the surface level overbearing Asian father stereotype, what’s this about? What is Kumiko’s relationship with her dad? She gave him the comic book store’s address but apparently never told him about CBG? Did she lie about who he was? Why? Again, none of that is explained. Homer gets Kumiko’s father drunk and he has an epiphany or something, and then the episode ends with him in a robot suit for no explainable reason for his daughter’s wedding. Did they cut a scene explained why exactly he’s in a goddamn motherfucking robot suit? Is it to show acceptance of CBG’s lifestyle? And I guess his daughter’s too? She’s a manga artist, but she and CBG never even talk about comics at all. Or any nerd stuff. Who is she? This show has numbed me a lot at this point, but this episode really does feel like one of the worst I’ve ever seen. A needless relationship that I can’t even call underdeveloped, because that would imply there was any development at all. It’s an episode full of characters talking about things rather than actually showing them. CBG says Kumiko is moving in, but we don’t see their cohabitation. Instead we cut to Marge telling Homer to deliver a housewarming gift, where he can have a conversation with Kumiko’s father outside to review the story we just saw in a montage, and for him to spout out his expository dialogue. None of the characters’s motivations or emotions are necessary to connect with or to understand apparently, as long as you just have them say them out loud, that’s good enough.

Three items of note:
– To make CBG feel like a loser, they bring back Milo, the owner of the cool comic book shop from “Husbands and Knives,” an episode from over five seasons before, then voiced by Jack Black, now voiced by Maurice LaMarche. But don’t worry, on-screen text pops up to remind you who this guy is, in case you forgot. I remember being annoyed that that episode featured a first act of their rivalry resulting in CBG closing the Android’s Dungeon, but that plot being completely abandoned in favor of another stupid Homer-Marge bullshit story. This is their attempt to modernize their nerd stereotype, but with Milo talking about his “comic-tolerating” girlfriend, and that Comic-Con nets an 8% female audience, it still feels stuck in the past. CBG is left to stew in his own sadness… sigh… in song (“The only thing that could make this moment more cliched is if I started to sing about my feelings… and here I go.”) So, again, they know it’s terrible, but they do it again. They have to know how bad this shit is. And the song is just awful, par for the course with the recent examples we’ve seen. Milo gets in a verse as well, so I’m assuming they definitely wanted to get Jack Black back for this, but I guess he was busy. Or he read the script and threw up in disgust. They should’ve gotten Jess Harnell in to do his Jack Black impression, like for the last episode of The Powerpuff Girls.
– CBG and Kumiko have their first date at Chuck Dukewagon’s All-American Chow Lounge, a set piece that feels like a pale imitation of America Town from “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo.” Also, seeing Pimply Faced Teen dressed as Guy Fieri fills me with many rage-filled emotions.
– Homer and Kumiko’s father get drunk of rice wine, which leads to a two minute joint hallucination where their surroundings transform into a Studio Ghibli tribute, featuring recreations of iconic characters and moments from their movies. It’s another self-indulgent set piece of the show just imitating a popular thing or someone else’s style, in the hopes that they can get some positive Internet buzz and a bunch of articles of “The Simpsons Pays Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki and It’s Amazing!” But, as always, there are no jokes. It just comes off as nonsensical and pandering. Why “parody” something if you have absolutely no take on it, other than we love this thing and we want to animate a sequence like this thing that we love. Who gives a flying fuck?

One good line/moment: The Radioactive Man sequence at the beginning was mildly entertaining. Even if it also was full of characters just spouting exposition, it felt a little less hackneyed in that context. It features some above-average animation for this show, and certainly was much more enjoyable than that reboot nonsense we saw in the last episode.

Original airdate: January 5, 2014

The premise: Irritated with the noisy theater experience, Homer takes up pirating movies and screening them in his backyard, but Marge’s guilty conscious ends up getting him in hot water with the FBI.

The reaction: Internet piracy wasn’t exactly a new, hot button issue when this episode aired. Hell, South Park did their Napster episode over a decade before this, and their take felt more biting and was funnier than this. But most importantly, it had a point of view, whereas this episode dances around the issue and ultimately crumples, culminating in a parade of celebrity guest voices taking good-humored jabs at each other and the entertainment industry. Homer is sick and tired of people using their bright tablets and being loud at the movies (all while being incredibly loud himself), and starts a movie screening club in his backyard. I thought the point was to avoid noisy people? If the show had developed this argument, or any salient rationale to defend Homer for what he’s doing, there might have been a point to all this. The middle part of the show is a countdown to Marge admitting that she unintentionally ratted on Homer, and I guess we’re supposed to feel bad about it. But why? Even if there were emotional weight to this, it still would stand in stark contrast to all the other nonsense of the wild, incompetent FBI agents and the family hiding out at the Swedish consulate. Homer’s trial features Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan to deliver some Hollywood insider jokes, right before we get to our big dumb conclusion. Homer pleads his case by talking about being an underdog, working against all odds to fight the man, a hackneyed plot conceit that the Hollywood bigshots immediately lap up and throw themselves on Homer for the movie rights. First, if they framed this better, and by better, I mean at all, this might have worked, but I was never clear on Homer’s motivations and why he cared so much about this, that his speech is just hollow. Plus, the show does what it always does now, like we saw with Lovejoy’s speech last episode, we have to keep cutting away to people saying their reactions in between Homer talking. Writing dialogue that is convincing and makes sense is too difficult. Let’s half-ass it and have other characters react to blatantly fill in the blanks for the audience. It’s just that easy!

Three items of note:
– The opening features Homer desperately trying to avoid spoilers for the new Radioactive Man reboot. Making fun of comic book movie plot twists is fair game and all, but it was just scene after scene of the same joke. It also felt weird that we got barely one line out of Bart for this whole opening, considering he’s the one that reads the comic books. They could have used him to comment on bringing “nerd” culture mainstream, with him being an old guard fan and Homer being the ignorant mass media consumer who looks down on him or something. Later, Homer gets set off into his movie theater tirade after reacting angrily at a scene in the movie ending up becoming a giant advertisement. Is this supposed to be a take on all the product placement from Man of Steel specifically? Surely there were dozens of jokes they could have made about the look, structure and plots of superhero movies, it felt weird that they went with that one.
– The scene on the prison bus of all the other prisoners reacting gravely seriously toward Homer for his movie piracy crimes felt the most analogous of South Park‘s piracy episode. In that show, the police chief takes the boys to celebrity homes a la A Christmas Carol telling them their tales of woe, of Lars Ulrich having to wait a few months to afford a gold plated shark tank, and Master P being unable to buy his son his own Polynesian island (“I see an island without an owner,” a brilliant driving home of the Carol connection). In this episode, it’s pretty much what you’d expect, except nowhere near as funny or clever as South Park did over a decade prior.
– Judd Apatow takes his lumps, kind of, as Homer introduces “Life is Funny,” clearly taking on Funny People (“It’s based on his life, starring his family and ad-libbed by his friends. So for the next three-and-a-half hours, enjoy.”) It honestly feels like a line an actor would read off of a cue card at the Oscars. Bringing in Apatow, as well as Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (Apatow’s wife) to voice a “joke” scene from the movie, is basically the show making sure there’s no hard feelings. We didn’t mean it, look, you’re in on the joke! Funny People was an overindulgent, bloated snooze-fest, so seeing this kiddy glove take on it was particularly annoying to me.

One good line/moment: As Bart is about to give his father the step-by-step to downloading movies online, we cut to the FOX logo, with an announcer saying they have to censor this part of the show to prevent people from learning how to pirate, and instead show some NASCAR footage. It was a little over-explained, but it’s a cute idea. It reminded me of hearing about how super paranoid FOX was about the medical marijuana episode, and that they were forbidden from showing Homer actually placing the joint to his lips; it could be an inch away, but it couldn’t make contact, otherwise, kids would know how to smoke pot! As with all actually humorous things this show manages, they bring it back a second time, at the ending to cut off Lisa when she tries to weigh both sides of the argument and make some sense of what the fuck the episode was even about. That reminded me of the stupid surfing ending of “The Great Money Caper,” not the best episode to bring up memories of.

Original airdate: December 15, 2013

The premise: When Springfield is overrun by tourists seeking out the only town in America having a white Christmas, Marge looks to make some extra cash for the holidays by renting out the house. Meanwhile, Lisa attempts to buck the crass commercialism of the season by giving gifts from the heart.

The reaction: Another one of those episodes with no real plot or conflict; it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens. A flurry of out-of-towners causes all the local stores to inflate their prices, which worries Marge, but opening her house up to paying tourists will give her the dough to have a merry Christmas. That’s her motivation for doing it. Do we see her do anything with the money? Nope. Not at all. The house guests, none of whom are characterized whatsoever, are just a bunch of nags. She ends up having a minor blowup at them, then she apologizes before they all leave. And that’s it. Midway through the episode, that story kinda gets nudged aside as we see Lovejoy perform a stirring Christmas sermon, inspiring Lisa to buy gifts for her family that actually mean something. Or something. What eight-year-old goes out by herself to buy presents? She gets Bart the book Treasure Island, which he is incensed by (“You’re smart! Why would you give me a book?”) Giving Homer a bunch of radish seeds and Maggie a kit to wean her off her pacifier, Lisa’s plan is not so much to reject commercialism, but to buy gifts to try to help her family be who she wants them to be. But in the specific case of her brother, why in the world would she think that Bart would react any differently? The conclusion to this story is that Lisa gets Bart a tablet instead, which you can use to read books, as well as play with stupid apps. Which of these do you think Bart will spend 99.9% of his time? I’d say this feels like a bunch of Christmas skits, but it really doesn’t. It’s so hard to tell nowadays when a plot starts, where it’s going, or even when it’s over. Nothing feels like it means anything. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Three items of note:
– The Lovejoy scene is just horrible. He stresses out about writing the perfect sermon to wow the out-of-towners, has a stroke of inspiration, and then we go to his big performance. At this point, I thought this was going to turn into an episode about him, but I guess it didn’t. Instead, he just delivers a very generic speech about the season being about love and generosity, with repeated cuts to the crowd murmuring and shouting what they’re feeling (“You’re losing us!” “Wow! What a showman!”) There’s no reason the crowd should have that big of a reaction. It’s like watching a show featuring a stand-up comic and everyone’s laughing, but you have no idea what the fuck they’re cackling at.
– They give a joke to Marge where she gets irrationally agitated when people get to the second verse of Christmas songs and they get too religious-y for her. They even end the episode on it; her family and the house guests are having a good time singing as she blocks it out with blender noises. I get the joke they’re going for, but it seems very weird coming out of Marge.
– There’s a sequence where a kid is playing a video game that ends with a homicidal snowman slashing away at a rack of Christmas videos. Each time he swipes, two or three videos fly at the screen, the frame holds for two seconds, and then they go away. This happens ten times. Ten. What an insane exercise in excess. I’m sure some of those were kind of amusing, but they went by so quickly, I couldn’t read any of them. I understand these are freeze-frame gags, but I should have enough time to read at least some of them. The best counterexample I could think of is whenever the family goes to the movies, we see the marquee. There might be eight titles listed, but it’s up long enough that you can read two or three, thus motivating you to pause to go back and read the others. With these tapes, they move in place and leave screen so quick, I just can’t register the jokes that quickly.

One good line/moment: We see a montage of out of state license plates over the end credits that are kind of amusing. The only thing this show seems to semi-consistently excel at are one-off sign gags.

Original airdate: December 8, 2013

The premise: Principal Skinner barters a field trip on a nuclear sub off to the most well behaved students. When Bart tries and fails to pass his overly strict criteria, he teams up with Homer to get revenge by making Skinner think he killed his mother. Meanwhile, Lisa saves Krusty from bankruptcy by convincing him to license his show out to foreign markets.

The reaction: Boy oh boy, what a spectacle this was. Skinner starts the episode drunk with power as he spends over a minute on this belabored setup: he’s giving all the students a clean slate to get a chance to take a trip on a submarine, but one slip-up and you’re out. While an actually authoritative Skinner is at least a little pleasing to see, it all feels pretty meaningless. Bart pathetically sucks up to him, but Skinner busts him for a small transgression anyway, and no amount of sad puppy dog eyes from Bart will sway him. It feels so vindictive for no real reason; even if Skinner had said this was to stick it to Bart for the years of torment, it would be flimsy. So Bart wants his revenge, and boy does he get it. Skinner awakens one morning to find Agnes lying on the kitchen flood in a puddle of blood and a giant combat knife lodged in her back. Homer and Bart arrive to witness the scene, so now they’ve got him by the balls. I’ll say this plot twist certainly jolted me from my usual state of half paying attention to these episodes. Good thing Skinner didn’t bother to check if his mother was still breathing, or touch the body at all, or be able to tell the difference between blood and jam, or any of the multitude of things that one would do to be able to easily tell that she’s not dead. Also, why does Skinner automatically assume he did it, and not think his mother was murdered? I assume the combat knife may be from his army days and that his prints are on it, but why do I have to make that assumption? The episode feebly attempted to set this up with an earlier phone call where Skinner angrily hangs up on his mother and stares daggers at her picture (“Some days I wish I could just kill you.”) But these are like the tinest of breadcrumbs I’m lapping up here. A better twist would be that Skinner is thrilled to be rid of his mother, and gleefully assists Homer and Bart with the disposal of her body, throwing them off guard. Maybe that would be too grim, but when you’re at episode 537, why the fuck not? Instead, Skinner becomes the spineless limp noodle he’s known for nowadays, going along with the stupid scheme, wearing a crazy disguise and being carted off onto a bus in a potato sack. He returns to face the music for his crime, but Marge randomly puts a stop to the whole charade and reveals Agnes is alive. Agnes first appears heartbroken, but it was actually just a setup for a joke to end the show on (“But when I just heard you say you were glad to see me dead, I thought now I’m gonna be meaner than ever!”) Nothing gained, nothing lost. What an insane episode. Sorry, that’s one letter too many. Inane episode. That’s it.

Three items of note:
– The B story starts when Lisa just so happens to ride her bike by Krusty’s mansion, and Krusty just dumps all his financial problems onto this little girl she doesn’t recognize. Lisa gives him the idea to sell his image to overseas markets, because of course she would know about that, as she handily whips out an iPad that had a foreign version of SpongeBob set up and ready to play, a time-killing segment which I don’t even really understand. This would almost be a rip-off of “Homie the Clown” if the plot were developed further and I could understand what was going on. We get a tortuously long section devoted to Jamaican Krusty and their Itchy and Scratchy equivalent, The Itchem & Scratchem Blow, complete with a whole new theme song. I don’t even need to tell you what the new lyrics were, or what the content of the cartoon was, I’m sure you can make an educated guess. The ending is almost an afterthought, played at the very end of the episode. And it’s not even an ending, the foreign Krustys chase Krusty and his lawyer in a golf cart and that’s it.
– We open with a daydream of Skinner as a Wild West sheriff, complete with his own theme song that plays throughout the episode. Just over and over again. Between this, the Jamaican Itchy & Scratchy theme, “You Only Live Once,” Burns’s song from the wrestling episode… songs on this show used to be so damn catchy and memorable and funny. Now it’s just like, where are the jokes? Plus, it was a little disconcerting seeing Skinner dream about blowing up the heads of his students (graphically and on screen), and then seeing Sherri and Terri in saloon girl attire, and have one faint at the sight of Skinner. Weeeeeeiiiirrrd and creeeepyy.
– There were a few small jokes at the beginning that bothered me, so I’ll condense them here. First, the submarine video ends with a context-free “YVAN EHT NIOJ” on the screen, one of the most transparent instances of fan service the show’s ever done. The joke is, “I remember that episode!” At the end of the assembly scene, Bart aborts mission on his prank by freeing his piloted drone. Then we see it flies all the way up to space somehow, passing by Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and the busted space station from Gravity (“Help! I’m trapped in space with a man I don’t like!”) As the movie had just released this fall, it felt like the show trying to quickly crowbar in a topical reference last minute. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was animated well after the fact of the episode itself. And it’s not even a joke. That line feels more like giving context to make sure the audience recognizes that it’s Gravity and not just two random astronauts in space. And again, this is fucking Family Guy level shit. I KNOW WHAT GRAVITY IS SO I CLAP NOW. Lastly, Homer goes to Moe’s after dinner, but can only leave if Marge blows into the breathalyzer for him. What a sad, sad scene. This poor, poor woman enabling her husband to drive drunk to a bar where he’ll get even more drunk, and then drive back. This is like frat boy shenanigans, not something I would expect Marge fucking Simpson to put up with.

One good line/moment: Irish Krusty got a chuckle out of me (“Me ma, she had twelve children, but only three lived, then they closed the mill. …hey hey.”) But then they use him two more times and the joke gets less and less funny. But that’s standard procedure with anything halfway decent nowadays; if it worked once, it can work five or six more times!

Original airdate: November 24, 2013

The premise: Lisa befriends new student Isabel, but is horrified when she discovers that she’s a conservative. The two run against each other for 2nd grade representative, which the Springfield Republican Party tries to rig in Isabel’s favor.

The reaction: A big part of Lisa’s character degradation was when the writers seemed to forget she was a child. She became the show’s liberal mouthpiece, the smug, self-satisfied voice of reason on a number of political and social issues that no eight year old should have any concern over. But over the last few seasons, I feel like her character has taken a different turn that feels just as aggravating to me: her desperation for attention. Lisa is now a sad, lonely nerd girl who craves recognition from her classmates, even if it’s on a superficial level. We’ve seen it a few times lately, particularly in the Facebook episode, of her bending over backwards to be included by bitchy girls like Sherri and Terri. Lisa was always a loner, but she was never pathetically yearning for any kind of interaction. At the start of the episode, she mournfully sings the Harry Nilsson song “One” to herself (forty whole seconds of it, without music), then she gets hit with a spitball, and coos, “Well, at least I’m getting some attention!” What’s that about? Anyway, this episode merges these two awful characterizations with Lisa’s pity party being broken thanks to her instant kinship with Isabel, a new student, but she quickly is disturbed to find out she is a Republican. There’s nothing more natural sounding than two eight-year-old girls discussing their political views, is there? But they don’t really even do that; when they do talk at all about their beliefs, it’s very vague and surface-level tropes of liberal and conservative mindsets. The episode is mostly focused on their school election, with Springfield Republicans courting Isabel to indoctrinate young minds with their platform. Seeing their castle headquarters, Dracula being used for gag after gag… everything just feels so much more blunt and less inventive. Or fun. This is another episode where it seems like nothing really happens. In the end, Isabel wins (though, as she’s a guest voice, she’ll never appear again), but Lisa still feels vindicated by the feedback by her classmates, rhetoric that sounds eerily familiar to our last election (“53% of people said they’d vote for a liberal. Just not you.”) A meaningless election with a meaningless new friendship featuring a meaningless one-off character. Next!

Three items of note:
– Lisa’s first meeting with Isabel is so bad (“That’s a reference to the Bronte sisters!” “You got my reference to the Bronte sisters?”) They agree to do their presentation on FDR together, where Lisa first finds out about Isabel’s viewpoints. So, what, did they write two separate papers and neither of them talked about them at all? Terrible, terrible writing.
– This episode is seemingly political, but, like I said, it’s really not saying anything. We get two giant time-killing chunks indicative of this. First, Marge tries to placate her daughter by taking her to the attic and revealing that in the 80s, she went through a Republican phase as a Reagan supporter. But then it just becomes a minute of I Love the 80s where Homer and Marge play around with their cassettes and VHS tapes and old classic music. And whatever the Super Bowl Shuffle is. The second time-killer is later on with Lisa’s nightmare about Democratic losers featuring Bill Clinton and John Kerry. I’m not even sure why it’s there story-wise. They predict Lisa will lose, and then she does. Just an excuse to trot out a Clinton impression again, I guess.
– The Republicans take Isabel to Phineas Q. Butterfat’s, a classic show location that hasn’t been seen in ages. Isabel is firm in her beliefs (“You couldn’t buy me with a wheelbarrow full of ice cream!)” Pimply Faced Teen, wheeling said barrow in the background, immediately turns around and walks off. That was the Mt. Bellyache, of course, from “Lisa’s Pony.” I was wondering, does that count as fan service? What a stretch. But the scene ends with her leaving, and Teen returning with an entirely different ice cream concoction. He drives in on a little Zamboni, and it’s called the Yum-boni. You see? So what’s the joke here? The parlor is seemingly known for their elaborate and huge sundaes? It just felt like another example of the show not only feeling disjointed from scene-to-scene, but in same scenes themselves. It’s just throw whatever you want at the screen, regardless of what came before or after it. Gotta fill twenty minutes somehow.

One good line/moment: A two minute opening sequence paying homage to the classic Silly Symphonies Disney cartoons, featuring our Springfield cast as living instruments. I feel like David Silverman had a sizable hand in this one, and it’s a really nice piece of animation isolated from the terrible episode.