Original airdate: October 4, 2020

The premise: Homer and Marge’s squabbling at a museum prompts a curator to regale them with the tale of the Roman Obeseus, an ambitious slave who rose to greater and greater stations in life at the urgings of his power hungry wife.

The reaction: The non-Treehouse of Horror trilogy episodes are always pretty dull to me, even the earliest examples like “Bibles Stories” and “Tall Tales.” I just don’t really care that much about seeing these characters in fantasy scenarios, and it especially grows tiresome when it’s the length of the entire episode. I felt the same way here as I did with the season premiere a few years back “The Serfsons,” where despite the extra amount of work by the animation team to create a new reality for one episode, I’m just left wondering what I’m supposed to get out of it. Who cares about Homer and Marge’s Roman analogues? The episode certainly didn’t make me care. The fantasy is prompted by Marge complaining about Homer not going to a training seminar at work, rightfully upset that he’s been stuck in the same job for a decade and wishing he had greater ambition to better financially care for his family. An eavesdropping museum curator relates their argument to the famous Roman Obeseus (Homer), a slave-turned-gladiator who ends up impregnating, later marrying his master’s daughter Marjora (Marge). Through the episode, Marge acts as the worm in Homer’s ear, getting him to expand his business, become senator by killing one to earn himself a seat, and later taking it upon herself to murder the emperor, only to place their son Bartigula (Bart) in his place after Homer balks at her power-hungry ways. Marge is basically playing the Lady MacBeth role, a woman using her husband to commit awful deeds to advance herself, a dynamic we’ve already seen over a decade ago in season 20’s “Four Great Women and a Manicure” where Marge urged Homer to kill all the other actors so he could take the lead in a “MacBeth” play. The twist in that segment was sort of fresh, but here it’s just played straight in a new setting, and it’s just boring, as we see Homer and Marge rise to a new status, Marge gets greedy, and then they rise again, repeat. Also, this is supposed to be a story reflecting modern day Homer and Marge’s disagreement, so Marge wishing Homer take his job more seriously for the sake of the family’s financial security is mirrored with Marjora manipulating and murdering people to seek the highest position of power in the country. In the end, the Simpson family squabble about the moral of the story, leaving the curator to lament with the final line, “When will humanity ever learn to stop letting stupid people into museums?” But honestly, what’s the point of these episodes? Do people really like them? They feel like such pointless exercises, especially in this case given they’re redoing a story they already did over ten years ago, and in a third of the time.

Three items of note:
– One of Obeseus’ slaves, Carl has a couple lines in the third act, but he’s performed by Hank Azaria. This episode is actually right before “Undercover Burns” in production order, so maybe that’s when they made the official change, and I guess they didn’t feel like paying Alex Désert to loop a few lines.
– When Obeseus’ family moves to the richer side of Rome, we are treated to a musical montage set to the theme from The Jeffersons sung in Latin, complete with on-screen lyrics. It took me a couple lines to even get what they were going for. The Jeffersons has been off the air for 35 years now, and we’re doing a reference to it now? But I feel like I always make the same point when talking about the show’s approach to pop culture parodies. I complain if the reference is too dated and irrelevant, but in the case of something like The Avengers or Succession, it’s still coming too late after the Internet or other media content with quicker production cycles have gotten in all of their jokes on the subject. But regardless of all of that, these jokes would still work if they were funny, and the majority of the time, they’re not. Of course, this is all subjective, but what’s the big joke here? That they rewrote the lyrics to the song in Latin? Are there other jokes in there that I’d have to translate the words to find out? Who cares?
– Bartigula’s ruthless reign as emperor contains obvious allegories to Donald Trump’s presidency, with him stoking xenophobia, putting up a wall, refusing to cede power and some pretty obvious on-the-nose dialogue (“He’s just an entitled little psycho! Society must come to its sense and overthrow this madman!”) I mean, it’s not like Trump is the first leader in history to do these sorts of things, to be fair, but it’s all very clear what they’re doing. It reminded me of those short digital Trump shorts they’ve been putting out over the last three years or so. I’ve only seen two of them, and they are maybe the worst content this show’s ever produced. In addition to being poorly animated, as I assume most if not all of their production is done stateside, it’s on the level of Saturday Night Live-grade putrid neoliberal “satire” where it’s all just the most simplistic, softball jabs at Trump that every other late night show or other venues have been beating to death. I’m sure there’ll be some kind of election-related cold open before whatever episode airs November 1st, and I can’t wait to cringe myself out of existence watching it.

Original airdate: September 27, 2020

The premise: Discouraged when he discovers his employees don’t like him, Mr. Burns goes undercover in the plant as an average Joe named Fred thanks to a robotic body suit, and ends up reveling in his newfound friendship with Homer and his chums.

The reaction: Any episode featuring Mr. Burns actually caring about what normal people think about him is a non-starter for me. The man relishes in being in an elevated position from lowly commoners, barely treating them like fellow human beings. Despite that, I think it’s possible to craft a story that believably shows Burns appealing for actual human connection, but from “Monty Can’t Buy Me Love” to this latest outing, these episodes ain’t it, chief. The inciting incident setting Burns off is finding unflattering graffiti of himself in the dirty men’s bathroom, which shocks him (“They hate me!” he gasps). To rectify this, he does what any normal person would do: put on an expensive robotic suit and ingratiate himself within the plant, posing as normal employee Fred Kranepool. Homer, Lenny and Carl quickly take a liking to him, and Burns quickly finds himself swept up in the new sensation known as friendship. But as usual with this show, none of it actually feels impactful. The guys become best buddies with Fred because that needs to happen for the story to continue, not for anything he really does to connect with them. But I guess that’s not the point, it’s about Burns experiencing friendship for the first time, which we see mostly over a montage, and then through turning the plant into a worker’s paradise, with health benefits, lunchroom options and extraneous benefits abound, running the company at the brink of bankruptcy, much to Smithers’ chagrin. Like I said before, an episode where Burns learns to be a decent person might work in another context. Perhaps he hears that creating a more comfortable work environment leads to happier workers, leading to greater efficiency, so Burns becomes more personable and giving only because the plant will be more profitable, but then grapples with having actual human emotion for once. Instead, Burns loses himself in his alter ego (“There is no Mr. Burns. Only Fred!“) and ends up having to battle with its fractured exoskeleton like out of a Terminator movie or something. It’s pretty darn stupid. In the end, Burns still laments, “Why can’t I be loved and feared?,” but I still don’t buy it. Again, Burns wakes up with a smile on his face each and every morning because he’s in a position of ultimate power above the average man. It’s a core part of his character’s DNA, and if you’re going to tweak it, you need to give me a compelling motivation, not because he saw some scribblings on the bathroom stall that made him go cry cry. A sad whimper of a premiere.

Three items of note:
– Over the summer it was announced that the show would no longer use white actors to portray non-white characters, so here in the season premiere, we have our first replacement, Alex Désert as the new voice of Carl. It’s not perfect, but he definitely captures the basic essence of the character, and presumably will get even stronger as he makes more and more appearances. I don’t really want to talk a whole bunch about the larger issue of performers voicing outside their own races, but just like the Apu “controversy,” this whole thing shines a strong light on this series being really out-of-place still being around in 2020. I’d see people making lists of characters needing to be recast, and they were either incredibly short or padded with characters we haven’t seen in over a decade. Of the hundred or so majority recurring characters on this series, maybe seven of them are non-white? And that makes perfect sense, this is a show from the 1990s that’s still creaking and scraping along three decades later. I guess recasting is a nice gesture… I guess? But at this point, in season 32, really, what does it matter? Outside of maybe Apu, the other major POC characters are secondary at best, and they don’t appear all that often, would it matter that much if Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer just kept doing the voices? For brand new shows like Big Mouth or Central Park having main black characters voiced by white actors, I get the problem, but in this case, it feels a bit more pointless, just because The Simpsons is an ancient dinosaur that no one really cares about outside of the few diehard fans still clinging to this show until the end, and dopes like me that have blogs bitching and complaining about it.
– Speaking of voices, I got incredibly sad hearing Marge speak for the first time. Julie Kavner’s voice has been on the downward spiral, but she just sounds so grated and tired here. I don’t know if this is a result of her recording from home rather than a studio, or maybe it feels “worse” because I’ve been watching the first couple seasons of the show lately, but it’s just a real bummer to hear. Having just turned 70 this year, Kavner’s been an absolute trooper through the entire series, and presumably she’s still in pretty good shape for her age, but Marge really is sounding more and more like her mother with each passing season.
– Mr. Burns finally breaks from his Fred character due to Lenny openly mocking and insulting Burns in front of him, but there’s two issues with this. First, in all the time they’ve all spent together paling around, there’s no way the guys haven’t shit talked the boss in front of their new “friend.” Second, this all happens after Burns has given the employees everything they’ve ever asked for and more, so Lenny and everyone else should be loving him at this point.