THE SIMPSONS
SEASON TWO (1990-91)

Executive Producers: JAMES L. BROOKS/MATT GROENING/SAM SIMON

The second season of The Simpsons has no serious competition as its finest. This year contains the bulk of the show's most moving moments, but even those who recognize that often fail to remember that this is also most assuredly the funniest it ever truly was. In that capacity, season three is close, but one look at "Blood Feud" is enough to ensure that the concentration Brooks, Groening, and Simon put on characterization paid off in spades in every department. There is just one episode in the entire 1990-91 season that cannot be considered "great" ("Dancin' Homer"); a few others suffer from minor problems ("Dead Putting Society," "War of the Simpsons") but all are staggering in some way. Not only does the sophistication of the episodes here (from the startlingly literate "Bart vs. Thanksgiving" to the devastating emotion of "Lisa's Substitute") stride forward from the farthest reaches of the first season, it stands out from every later season, including those that got the comedy (3) or the characterization (7) right individually. Only Season Two is a total knockout in every department, and Season Two is the way The Simpsons should be remembered. It has not been topped, and there is no longer any chance that it ever will be.

#201: BART GETS AN F
Written by David M. Stern
Directed by David Silverman

Fox was stuck running the same thirteen episodes of their first huge success for months upon months amid the uncomfortable knowledge that a delay would cause the second season of The Simpsons not to premiere until October. For reasons no one seems to understand, the show was moved from a reliable timeslot in which its only remotely threatening rival was America's Funniest Home Videos to one on Thursday nights in which it was head to head with the hugely popular Cosby Show.

It's hard to escape the accidental symbolism of The Simpsons going head to head with Bill Cosby's reliable series. The big '80s sitcom followed the travails a seemingly flawless family designed as role models. The bitterly cynical '90s cartoon was about a working class family with plenty of flaws and plenty to worry about. Both shows could be funny, but only one could be really perceptive and moving. This season premiere, chosen to kick off in the new slot because it's Bart-centric and the kids loved Bart, demonstrates that clearly, and it is a remarkable show. It seems like they pulled out all the stops on this one to create something -- honestly -- that could make anybody tear up before the final scene without ever stooping to incompentent sentimentality or bland stereotyping and moralizing. This is twenty minutes that seem to stretch forever in all that they encompass; the result is as intricate as a feature film.

The stories in this season of The Simpsons are one of the closest matches to date for the "Peanuts" comic strip. Aside from the first few specials and two of the feature films, "Peanuts" was never done really well on screen. The voices were amateurish and the stories lacked the dimension and depth of those in the strip. They are fine what they are, but "Bart Gets an F" evokes "Peanuts" more than most of the Bill Melendez TV specials. What conjures up the most emotion in the comic strip -- stories like the Miss Othmar plot, Peppermint Patty and Marcie quietly admitting to one another their love for Charlie Brown, the Van Pelts moving away seemingly for good, Charlie Brown's crush on the girl Peggy Jean at camp, and Marcie escaping from her intolerant parents at the Browns' house -- is the subtlety, the stinging Diamond/Wilder-like punchlines, the lack of expression of the raw feelings that are undoubtedly in the reader's mind. It's disarming and beautiful because it fails to manipulate. It's difficult to believe that "Bart Gets an F" was not influenced by Charles Schulz in this respect.

But let's not take anything away from the episode itself, which is simply outstanding. David Stern's script is so delicately perfect, and the eye-popping direction quietly strokes us along with secrets, always aiding the nuances of the writing. The performances are magnificent, in particular Nancy Cartwright's Bart, sent on a rollercoaster from start to finish for this one.

There are so many things in "Bart Gets an F" that the series would not begin to attempt today... the literate wisdom of the opening scene involving Martin's intense devotion to a book report and Krabappel eating it up. Bart's clueless Treasure Island session that follows is a familiar scene, I imagine, to most everybody, but not as much as his lovingly executed afternoon of procrastination, wherein one obstacle after another distracts him from studying. A telltale moment has him in front of the TV, his dad ranting excitedly about what they're watching, and Bart belting with wrenching uncertainty, "Oh, well, maybe just one more hour." Many frames in this episode could be paintings, and perhaps my favorite is the image of Bart having fallen asleep on his book after mere seconds of reading it.

It's amusing that people may have pointed to Bart's behavior in this episode as having an adverse effect on kids because it could influence them. I think the more accurate reaction, at least in my case, was "Oh my god, that's me" when the show was first seen. Nearly all the bad things Bart does in this are things I've done. I love the scene of a panicked Bart on the bus begging passengers for answers, and I love the way Stern and David Silverman execute it so that you feel that dread in the pit of your stomach as the bus drives you toward doom. These men understood so intrinsically the value and importance of what they were doing, and all of Bart's misconduct is portrayed and seen so beautifully, as if they want to make a point about the glories of childhood, but what they're really doing is establishing Bart as an incredibly layered, three-dimensional character -- a person -- probably the most sophisticated and well-written on the show, even more than Lisa because his flaws are so much more well-defined. It's hard to ignore how close he seems to real and how much you identify with every last second of his plight... and I don't think that's out of experience, I think it's just that Stern and Silverman have conceived the episode in a way that it is impossible not to be fully drawn into each situation until you feel like you're the one faking sick and suffering all the consequences.

The shot displaying Bart's visit to the nurse's office -- twirling around in the hallway -- is iconic not because Bart is, you know, So Cool but again because he is so human. You don't react to his parents' sympathy with disgust knowing that he is full of shit, you just feel how comforting it is that Homer and Marge are supportive and trusting of him, regardless.

At the close of the very lengthy first act, after Bart fails the test on which he cheated, the Simpsons are called into a meeting with J. Loren Pryor from "Bart the Genius." Pryor suggests that Bart be held back a grade, and you can feel the shatter of the moment, but the real screaming grace is all in his outburst explaining his problems. "Is there something you're not telling us?" Krabappel asks, and Bart explodes. "I know it, you know it, I am dumb, okay? Dumb as a post! You think I'm happy about it?"

To ensure that he can pass the fourth grade, Bart turns to the geek Martin for help but Martin abandons him for greener pastures soon enough. Left without hope and unable to concentrate for even a few minutes, Bart is sent to bed with resignation by his mother; before going to sleep he prays for a snow day... and a passing Lisa hears it, perhaps improving on the words of Samuel Johnson when she whispers "Prayer -- the last refuge of a scoundrel." The second act ends with a gorgeous shot of the Simpsons' home as snow falls, covering the area.

The following day, after it's learned that schools are closed, Bart prepares for a day in the snow, but he's confronted at the door by Lisa, who knows he prayed for this. "I don't know who or what God is, but I know he's a force bigger than Mom and Dad put together, and you owe him big." This is Lisa as she should be -- the naive but conscientious and bright eight year-old -- and Bart as he should be -- the misfit with the same conscience as his sister except hidden away. He agrees with her and goes to his room to study.

Two fabulous and much-imitated sequences follow. First, he tells himself that a day out in the snow probably wouldn't be all that much fun, then he looks out the window and sees everyone having "the funnest day in the history of Springfield," cavorting in the snow and gathering as never before and singing "Winter Wonderland" together. Descending to the basement to avoid all this, he reads a chapter on the writing of the Declaration of Independence; the screen shifts to a dramatization in his mind of the events described in the book, but soon it all falls apart when someone in 1776 looks out the window and yells "Look, everybody! It's snowing!" and all order disappears -- a suffering Bart snaps out of it, and then follows one of the greatest and most telling moments in the entire series. He scolds himself -- "You want to be held back a grade? Concentrate, man!" -- and starts slapping his own face, maybe as punishment or as a wake-up call, who knows. But in a single quick cut with one of the slaps, he shifts from his basement where he is still trying, trying to do something right, to the classroom at school where he has just completed his test. A 59... another F. And finally, the weight of it all comes down on him and he begins to weep. This really is poignant enough to get you head-on, even if you're never affected by this sort of thing, and it's not the scene itself that does it; it's the combination of everything that comes beforehand, all crashing down at once.

Once he's able to recite an obscure fact at random, Krabappel is impressed enough to give him an extra point and let him pass, resulting in an ending both subversive and moving as he runs home triumphantly telling the world of his D- and finally, after it's hung on the refrigerator, telling his parents, "Part of this D- goes to God."

It's courageous, not exploitative, to have a character like Bart, so passionately and knowingly written with lines and situations that are as deeply felt as anything ever seen on television. Maybe it just means a lot to see people highbrow enough to throw in literate references to Samuel Johnson and Ernest Hemingway and such (and brilliant enough to know precisely how to design and frame all of this perfectly to complement so much emotion) can be so understanding toward a person like Bart probably so different from any of them. The warm nature of all this is a big part of what used to make The Simpsons so special.

Today, it's hard to imagine seeing something like this when it was new -- I've never had the pleasure of witnessing something so outstanding and undeniable in primetime. But it's still there for everyone to love and thanks to brilliant acting, writing, directing, animation, and everything else, it remains one of the finest episodes of this show and maybe any ever produced. (A+)


#202: SIMPSON & DELILAH
Written by Jon Vitti
Directed by Rich Moore

It's possible to love this episode without really knowing what to make of it, with Jon Vitti riffing on something that seems so personal in nature that the show growing out of his script is far beyond a hint of the surreal. This story is a strange thing to attempt, but why is it so emotionally effective? Could Vitti -- the best writer to work on The Simpsons -- really be capable of molding statues out of dirt? The plot concerns an insecure Homer buying a Minoxidil-type miracle cure for baldness, regrowing his hair and suddenly becoming a well-regarded businessman and near-socialite. Inevitably, something happens and when the hair disappears, so does the respect. To go back to "Peanuts," this recalls nothing so much as Schulz's own favorite extended story from the strip, in which Charlie Brown becomes a popular leader at camp with a bag over his head, and as soon as the bag is removed he loses all the admiration of his peers and the small power that came with it.

The naysayers who insist that the satire on The Simpsons wasn't in full gear yet at this point are missing so much. The ad for "Dimoxinil" is a note-perfect evocation of the very '90s phenomenon of Rogain -- and the episode as a whole makes some deviously potent points about how we judge people on the surface, from Homer's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE race through the town simply because he's grown hair to Smithers' notable observation that Homer looks "more dynamic, and resourceful." Truly the people peddling this product are out to convince potential customers that hair growth will create a "better life" (as it's called over the intercom), and Homer falls victim to their claims. His secretary in the episode, the suspiciously friendly Karl, insists to Homer that the change came from him deep inside and not his hair, and if this was any other show that might be the end. But life doesn't work that way, nor does The Simpsons.

And the "better life" Smithers talks about of course is a shallow one. Harvey Fierstein's Karl guards Homer against bitter failure only to a certain extent. He writes the eloquent speech for him but a hairless Homer stands without a safety net in the end. "This BALD man has no ideas." Maddening how the episode ends with marital tranquility, never answering any of the questions it poses or allowing us to understand why it asks them... but somehow, how perfect, or at least it would be if future Simpsons generations went anywhere with the possibilities. Out of the things they would never do now, especially intriguing is the sheer oddity of Karl's presence, his obvious homosexuality ("My mother taught me never to kiss a fool"), and his status as seemingly Homer's guardian angel, from taking the blame for his pratfalls to singing telegrams for Marge.

Goodness, Rich Moore's direction is something else and it's probably the plus in the A+. I turned off the TV set and left the audio on to make sure, and I was right. The urgent scene of Homer driving home in the rain lost every trace of its power without Moore's imagination, and his transition following Smithers' frustrated toss of the towel is, no lie, breathtaking. This is back when it took guts to make this work.

There's a substance to the way it crashes back down to a place underneath all the weird, just inescapably goddamn weird story thrust when Bart spills the hair tonic everywhere and we return to the place where we'll be a million more times. "Dad is taking this in a less than heroic fashion" -- I laugh out loud every time. Anyway, I'm still impressed and bewildered at the places this one goes. It's really one you have to see to believe. (A+)


#203: TREEHOUSE OF HORROR
Written by Jay Kogen & Wallace Wolodarsky / John Swartzwelder / Edgar Allan Poe & Sam Simon
Directed by Wes Archer / Rich Moore / David Silverman

Taking yourself out of 2007 context for a second, do not ignore how offbeat and marvelously irreverent the idea behind this was. The Simpsons obviously had more realistic characters than any other situation comedy on the air in 1990, but it was the only one that would have dared to do this, even with budgetary concerns excised. It is three disconnected stories placing the Simpsons characters in alternate worlds in which anything can happen... our affection for them makes this gripping and hilarious, especially the way it is handled here, with gracefully ambitious directing, a stunning set of multilayered scripts, and an unmistakable spirit of fun. The show was rarely more endearingly awash in such gleeful surrealism.

Marge warns us at the outset that kids might be frightened by the episode, a statement in some sense of the conservative side of the public's hesitant reaction to the series. Ever the conscious mother, it's inescapable that given the issues, Marge would probably be siding with those out to abolish The Simpsons... a scenario given life soon enough in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge."

The sardonic wraparounds, concerning Homer listening in on Bart and Lisa's deeply flawed scary stories, are the icing on the cake... but the individual segments, each from a different writer and director, are, more than just satire, deeply imaginative and unique.

"Bad Dream House," an AMITYVILLE-type tale of a vengeful fixer-upper, is the funniest of the three, full of crazed visuals and uprorarious voice performances. The creators of the most grounded animated show ever seen on television go all-out with knife fights and self destructing houses, all executed with profoundly endearing enthusiasm. And of course there's Homer's DR. STRANGELOVE-caliber phone conversation with the realtor -- "You didn't tell me IT WAS BUILT ON AN INDIAN BURIAL GROUND!... NO, YOU DIDN'T!... Well, that's not my recollection."

The most widely-remembered sequence, the abducted-by-"To Serve Man" "Hungry Are the Damned," is probably the finest Halloween bit in the whole series, with the Simpsons taken onto a spaceship by quaintly gluttonous aliens. I am a major advocate of MAD magazine, at least through the mid-'90s, and I think you know I've been very pleased when I say this: The Twilight Zone parody in this Simpsons episode (which actually improves on the original TZ episode, "To Serve Man") is above MAD magazine-caliber, in its brilliant structure and payoff -- How to Cook for Forty Humans -- resulting in a blatantly hysterical ending that fades out not with sinister alien meals but with the family chewing Lisa out for being "too smart." For one thing, this corresponds to the actual telling-tales structure of the episode (Bart's telling this story) which is more than we can say for any other "Treehouse of Horror." Better yet, it flows magnificently, the audience gripped if not duped by an engaging premise that dumps them into shattering satire. In MAD, the mockery is all you get. The Simpsons provides the context of comedic genius at work, still bringing forth sympathetic characters, none of whom are out of sorts here -- and they're being kidnapped by space aliens. You even cry with the aliens before it's over.

One is reminded especially of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, widely recognized as a horror movie but actually a remarkable satire playing with our perceptions, fed by pop culture and superstition, of creatures that do not exist -- zombies for Romero; he makes them heroes and villains, sympathetic and mocked. Rich Moore's work on "Damned" is, in a word, stunning, featuring some of the most inventive visual work in hand-drawn TV animation, and the directorial decisions are lovably nuts, often black comic punchlines all by themselves. It's clear at this point that so much work was going into every last second of the show, and again I must go back to MAD magazine with memories of how, in its days as a comic book in the hands of Harvey Kurtzman, the panels were filled to the brim with more gags than could even be counted, including plenty it might take you years to catch. Humor is not a lesser emotion in any sense, and the things the Simpsons directors do in this episode are pure poetry.

No pun intended, for the final segment is a harrowing -- I mean that -- treatment of Poe's "The Raven" infused with gags by Sam Simon. But David Silverman, straight off his astonishing work on "Bart Gets an F," really pulls out all the stops for this one; watching it today you can scarcely believe you're not seeing a big-budget animated film. Homer is cast as Poe's protaganist, Marge as Lenore in a wonderfully funny sight gag, Lisa and Maggie as angels in another one, Bart as the raven, all lovingly rendered in a simple but hugely dramatic setpiece that ought to have won every Emmy there is. The tossing around of a poem is anything but elitist -- everybody knows this poem anyway -- for it teaches, if The Simpsons is supposed to teach, the timeless wisdom and value in just about everything -- there's always something to be found, somehow -- but especially visionary work created by renegades like Poe... and David Silverman and, while we're at it, Kogen and Wolodarsky, John Swartzwelder, Brooks/Groening/Simon, et al.

I would feel silly saying that "Treehouse of Horror" can join some sort of league of true brilliance in any medium; you can't predict what will stand the test of time, but you can certainly follow patterns and see that the things that falter in significance never affected you to begin with in the same way as works that become classic. At the very least, in its pioneering status as a class of television able to do things no other show could do in its time, "Treehouse of Horror" is extremely vital, but a much bigger deal is how gorgeous it is today, now that we're able to see beauty in it invisible to us in 1990.

The thing is, the whole idea is goofy, of these anti-continuity Halloween shows. But this is one for the vaults because of that context referred to earlier. The stark insanity and playful dark humor, the complete over-the-top nature of the writing and brilliant direction, mean so much more when the other episodes are grounded, when they carry emotional weight, and in fact so much emotional weight -- so much personal signifiance -- that to see such gleeful fun being had with those same characters is absolutely enthralling. Personally, I've never had that feeling from a TV show at any other time. A good analogy in an entirely different medium is the Clash, whose early work consisted primarily of pungent and funny diatribes on various worldly and social concerns, with awe-inspiring musical invention and finesse, so when they did a simple song about personal emotions, you had to sit up and pay attention because you knew whatever it was had to be big. Their love songs meant more because of what they sat beside. In a way it hurts that The Simpsons lost its scrape with this unheard-of gift so quickly, but it helps to be reminded that what the show did manage in its first two or three years was so incredible that an improvement is hard to imagine.

And how's this for impact -- listen, I agree with Homer as the show closes. I hate Halloween. I don't like trick or treating and I don't like the decorations. Why, I'm not sure. It may be an association with school beginning that will soon pass. But these episodes made me look forward to Halloween, at least back when they were broadcast on time. This was a tradition worth keeping; even if all we did was faintly touch the phantasmagorical glamour of this thrilling half-hour. (A+)


#204: TWO CARS IN EVERY GARAGE, THREE EYES ON EVERY FISH
Written by Sam Simon & John Swartzwelder
Directed by Wes Archer

Whether you had taken The Simpsons seriously or not... as cartoon, as comedy, as television, as a piece of social signifance... up to this point, when this episode about a gubernatorial run from Mr. Burns went to air, you had to sit straight up and pay attention. In an iconic turning point for the show, Sam Simon and John Swartzwelder take on massive topics and come away with a comedic triumph, and a wounding one at that.

At the outset, Bart becomes briefly famous again for discovering a three-eyed fish, a mutation caused obviously by the very nearby nuclear power plant. Threatened with a shutdown after a disastrous inspection, Burns drunkenly staggers out of the plant late one night in a sequence that manages poignancy in a less-than-sympathetic character, and coincidentally Homer has fallen asleep at the wheel and is just leaving when he accidentally falls into a discussion with his boss... offhandedly suggesting, nervously, that a run for governor could help his cause. Burns, of course, loves the idea.

Plenty of CITIZEN KANE ripping -- not to mention a fall-off-my-chair "actor portraying Charles Darwin" -- follows as Burns' political run gets increasingly vicious, but that can't hide the effortless, phenomenal structure of the acting and directing (the whole thing is visually flawless and the first act is especially impressive) and script, even the score and (hell) the foley, all subtle enough to catch you offguard every time. Politics turn first of all into a vehicle for quarrelling, and by the third act, it's gotten personal. To show off his connection with the common man, Burns will be having televised dinner with the Simpsons -- the perfect publicity trick -- complete with choreographed questions from the family. (All of his answers somehow lead to his opposition to taxes and the "bureaucrats in the state capital").

Marge tells Lisa she's "learning many lessons tonight," and so are we. While weighty topics are tackled with quiet commentary, Burns is developing heavily before our eyes, really for the first time. On audio commentaries for the first-season DVDs it is explained that the writers' obsession with Burns' potential as a character began with the prophetic scene in "Homer's Night Out" of his confessions to Homer about his lack of fortune with the fairer sex. This being the first episode written for the second season, we are immediately led into a story centered upon this secondary character and his inescapable impact on the family. Outside of the five principals, he would soon become probably the most significant personality in the series.

There are too many great lines to mention, and the atypically sophisticated subject matter does not stop with KANE and gubernatorial intricacies. Marge is clearly being stifled by her husband, who worries about the impact her support for Burns' rival could have on his job; she is clearly distressed when the "dinner" is announced, complaining that she is not allowed to express herself. An oblivious Homer insists that her vehicles for expression are her cooking and other homemakerly duties. In the third act, the payoff approaches in an undeniably bravura finale, a hallmark TV moment, when she offers the three-eyed fish that started it all as the main course in the big meal in front of all media. Unable to stomach it, Burns is captured in his own hypocrisy and proceeds to throw furniture.

The episode is really an attack on political apathy; Homer supports Burns not for ideological or even especially practical reasons, but because Mr. Burns is his boss. It is team mentality, not particiation in a government. Which is why, regardless of Mary Bailey, Marge's final nonverbal statement of dissent, sitting on a platter, and Lisa's grinning reaction are such a vital glimmer of truth amid all the fluff and circus noise. And also why the closing assertion of Homer's unique, oddball values is a similarly valid self-assertion that brings the couple back together. No longer followers, they have given in to their own responsibilities. And in this extraordinarily "adult" moment for the show, that's beyond subversive -- it's a reminder of real American values that we all represent more than any politician. How astonishing that a cartoon is what comes out and says it. (A+)


#205: DANCIN' HOMER
Written by Ken Levine & David Isaacs
Directed by Mark Kirkland

It would be unfair to criticize this episode too much because of the four straight blockbusters that precede it, but this comes from two writers for Cheers... and it's very very Cheers. That's a bad thing. The plot is nonexistent, some vague nonsense about Homer becoming a baseball mascot that doesn't seem like it could fill a half-hour, and mainly the source for sitcom-style jokes... and not very many, either. There's no story momentum here whatsoever (why the flashback?) and only a few funny moments -- the move to Capital City and the lengthy National Anthem, to name a couple.

Out of context it does work better since there is some warmth buried in it, but watching the shows in order right now it was inescapable that it not only suffered in comparison to the first shows in the season but looked genuinely stupid next to them, "Two Cars" in particular. Reality, insight, and depth give way to sentiment, posturing romance, and fakery. It's like hearing "When Doves Cry" on the radio followed by "Born in the U.S.A."

But the episode actually compensates for a lot of its faults via both Dan Castellaneta's performance -- making all of this more grounded and finding a way to turn it into character development -- and Mark Kirkland's directing, which achieves all kinds of atmosphere in a thin story. I remain unimpressed, but the animation is absolutely excellent. (B+)


#206: DEAD PUTTING SOCIETY
Written by Jeff Martin
Directed by Rich Moore

This one is funny, if it's nothing else. It's sprinkled liberally with painfully hysterical lines and moments; the script is completely disarming. The "Charlene" and "bosom" exchanges are unforgettable. On another side, the wondrous teaming of Bart and Lisa in the second half of the show is one of the first real incidents of the show addressing their subtle rapport. It has a problem, though, and unfortunately a deadly and, as we know now, foreboding one. Homer is grossly out of character and not just in an aloof-screenwriter sense. I would say that his ludicrously exaggerated reaction to Flanders was more a function of the latter character than the former, but then again, Homer is irrationally angry from start to finish and there's no real payoff. I might excuse that more easily if his behavior wasn't funny -- in the first two acts, it is -- and if the barriers Jeff Martin breaks here hadn't tempted the writers to allow Homer to lurch violently out of his own skin in later years.

One person who is executed perfectly as a character in this episode is Ned Flanders. It is understandable why Homer is annoyed by him, but the viewer also can't help feeling for him and the way he tries so hard to connect with his neighbor and is never fazed by the resistance. Ned's the joe-church Nice Guy so we can sympathize with him a bit while joining in the family's joyously private unity in making fun of a letter from Flanders attempting to make peace after the two of them get into an explosive argument. Of course the juggling of sympathies might make more sense if Homer wasn't drawn in such bold strokes, but we're done with that issue, and this other moment is so real that it obliterates the questionable context.

The superb plotting is so uniform for the show at this point that I hesitate to mention it, but it remains startling, especially here with the integration of the initial minigolf sequence and its eventual impact on the plot. The story basically revolves around Homer's rivalry with Flanders and the way it affects his competitive hoarding of Bart as he forces his son into entering a miniature golf contest, and more or less forces him to win to teach Ned a lesson of some sort. Homer becomes more and more of a fascist psychopath as the show wears on; Bart's only solace is in his sister's sympathy and his (and Todd Flanders') eventual ruination of Homer's scheme... but Mr. Simpson just won't quit.

I can condemn the things I dislike all I want, but I can't deny the highlights -- the "Charlene" sequence alone makes this an essential episode. If the later, more boneheaded episodes retained this flair for dialogue I wouldn't come down on them so much, Jerkass Homer or not.

But a jerkass he is, which is unfortunate because a look at "Simpson and Delilah" or "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" or "Bart Gets an F" or any show from the first season confirms that he's much more effective as, well, a person. His lack of grounding lands us in the painfully unfunny final scene and the idiocy of an entire subplot involving Sunday dresses. Even Matt Groening has confessed to this being pseudo-Flintstones bullshit.

Still an A-, though, because of Bart and Lisa. Their comraderie here is touching but unsentimental and incredibly genuine. Surrounded by insanity, they understand one another like nobody else ever could. Combine that with lots of laughs and I can't ask for much more. (A-)


#207: BART VS. THANKSGIVING
Written by George Meyer
Directed by David Silverman

It was this episode that made me realize how wonderful The Simpsons really was. I'd been watching for years and had seen this episode many times without ever thinking much about it. Depressed after a battle with a comrade one night and throwing a random tape in the machine, I found myself confronted with something shattering and warm, and I began to see this former obsession in a brand new light.

There had been one other straightforward holiday special, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire," but I have never begun to see it as effective in the ways this Thanksgiving show manages. An undeniable classic, it follows Bart -- being the cruel, ever so lively older brother -- refusing to apologize to Lisa after destroying her intricate table centerpiece, a "labor of love" that took ages, and hiding from the problem by running away from home and ending up donating blood and dining at a homeless shelter. The plot in itself is subtly revealing, both of its character and of the nature of the whole family, but what really throttles me every time is the sheer amount of nuance. There may be better episodes but not one is as richly detailed.

I know the tiny artifacts from director David Silverman are what make the episode so ultimately moving -- it clearly meant a lot to him -- but what I don't know is why they have that effect. Maybe it's the dedicated portrayal of a real Thanksgiving, of the lazy calm of the show's environment, of Bart trying to help his mom but really not helping at all; of Lisa reveling in her creation along with Maggie, of Marge just walking past the television and looking over casually in a wonderful, inexplicably sublime afterthought; of Patty and Selma bringing food, and Homer imitating them in the car; of Marge's mother's cutting, brutal insults ("I'd say something comforting, but you know... my voice"); of Lisa's mournful fingering of the sax after she's been crushed. And Bart... as in the season premiere, we are subjected to Bart's every grievance and they all feel like our own experiences; the use of Les Miserables in one scene isn't an accident. But more than just a piece of the audience, Bart is a person, a person who is discovering a good deal about himself in this single afternoon. Brooks, Groening, Simon, Meyer, and Silverman have seemingly captured humanity here, and I can't believe more people didn't notice it at the time.

Conventional values, of both television and society, are still turned on their heads. It took years for the irony of the police shooting holes through Marge's "You've ruined Thanksgiving!" to sink in. The episode still isn't sappy or corny or Very Special. It tackles social issues from hunger to (brilliantly) egotism in young and old to simple sibling rivalry, but the quiet, almost haunting realism rushes to the front and shakes you before all else. Nothing else on TV ever was able to feel like this. It's a combination of many things, many people. Even the sound design and music editing achieves rare majesty. Yeardley Smith and Nancy Cartwright are astonishing, even more than usual. And every huge, beautiful background and tiny insignificant detail under Silverman's leadership becomes visual poetry. I can't say enough about the quality of visual direction in this era of the show.

The ending of the episode is among the handful of perfect moments in television history and deserves to be recognized as a slice of, gulp, cinematic genius. From the moment Bart approaches the door and hesitates, we are in a land of material so sublime it seems impossible to be even the same show that just brought us "Dead Putting Society." The gleeful surrealism yet Schulz-like simplicity of Bart's dream sequence -- the whole family and even Uncle Sam blaming him for everything -- is a prelude to the outstanding scene on the rooftop, of lonely Bart consoling himself. "The boy who nobody wanted just won the Superbowl!" Another moment of remarkable animation naturalism is his loss of enthusiasm just afterward. We switch to Lisa writing in her diary, no longer interested in poems or centerpieces, just remembering Bart -- a brother she respects and loves and, of course, hates but above all still loves -- when he hears her and invites her on to the roof.

The two actors outdo themselves, and so does Silverman; Bart is presented as dismissive of his sister's complaints. "I don't know why I'll do it again!" Then she begs him to find something inside him, and selection of dialogue that should be stilted and forced is as natural as anything imaginable, and the moment when Bart has his revelation -- you can pinpoint the frame, just like Ralph's broken heart -- is overwhelming. But so so tiny. Everything that's really overwhelming seems tiny if you're not paying attention. They make up, beautifully, and the Simpsons sit down for their real Thanksgiving dinner, just leftovers and sincerity. It never shoves itself forward, just allows the truth and the humor to flow forth slowly.

It may not be entirely unnatural of Bart to be malicious toward his sister in the beginning; after all, what's Marge's family's excuse? He is serving a function as brother in ways that he may not be able to help. But because he is a complex person -- and Lisa knows it -- he cannot help relating to another person as complex as Lisa, who misses him terribly, and as we close they have bonded not just as family -- which is inevitable and, in a sense, superficial -- but as people and as friends. Charles Schulz's hysterically bitter I Need All the Friends I Can Get has virtually the same ending. Charlie Brown wonders if he has any friends in the world and seeks out the definition of "friend." "A person whom one knows well and is fond of," he reads aloud. Linus: "That's me!" Charlie Brown: "What?" The most touching expression of that most comforting and reassuring of all emotions, the knowledge that someone else is there, couched in stinging humor and all the more affecting for it. Because the food is all leftovers but the emotions are still real, and the more you think about it, the more that means. (A+)


#208: BART THE DAREDEVIL
Written by Jay Kogen & Wallace Wolodarsky
Directed by Wes Archer

Add me to the list of fans of this one, perhaps the most popular early episode, but I don't think I have the same reasons as a lot of people. The nature of Homer and Bart's relationship in this show does not appeal to me and I don't think much is done with it until the very end. I also am thoroughly unmoved by and actually not really familiar with the daredevils of the sort depicted in this show, but I saw enough of them perform at my school to know they're some sleazy motherfuckers, so I was a bit taken aback to find that the writers thought of it as a tribute of sorts.

What I love about this one is how funny and full of life it is; the first act is a gem, from the hysterical commercial for the monster truck rally to Homer's weeping at the dinner table to (especially) the scene at Lisa's recital, where she plays her first solo.

Bart's attempt to fashion himself as a daredevil comes after he sees the rally's performance of the great Lance Murdoch, a classic corrupt southerner full of trashy showmanship who tells "especially the little children" in the audience, with no evident irony, to "buckle up." He's to ride his motorcycle over a huge tank full of sharks, piranhas, electric eels, and the king of the jungle, an African lion.

Aside from "Call of the Simpsons" this might be the silliest episode yet, but it gets plenty across about the nature of cultural influence on children and eventually the need for them to live up to their own individuality. Personally I think the point the show makes about kids imitating what they see is absolute bullshit, certainly in the case of someone as intelligent as Bart, but it's certainly true that pathetic performance artists like Murdoch court the adoration of the young. These days it's probably much harder... and the moralists would have you believe the increased cynicism of children is a bad thing!

The episode's a harmless breeze, full of laughs, but there's a kind of sad glimmer to the final scenes of Homer begging Bart not to try to jump across Springfield Gorge and falling himself to his near-death. It's a bizarre turn of events and not so much funny or affecting as just off-the-wall and basically random, and that applies to the episode as a whole, but I won't take away from it as comic perfection, even if it is the most basic comedy the show has to offer. (A)


#209: ITCHY & SCRATCHY & MARGE
Written by John Swartzwelder
Directed by Jim Reardon

This episode has always fascinated me for a number of reasons. I wouldn't say it's one of the best, primarily because it eventually reduces Marge to a stereotype [Note: Screening the episode again two years later, I no longer felt this to be true, and in fact found no flaws with the episode and believed it to be more clearheaded and moving than ever, so it is now an A+]; however, it's one of the most eloquent treatises against censorship I've seen, because it's more Clockwork Orange than straightlaced Animal Farm. By challenging the artistic quality of the material Marge indicts as well as her own motivations, John Swartzwelder makes the right points, and many of them, instead of a single lazy one.

I'm sure you've seen this, but just in case, Homer gets bashed on the head by Maggie after she sees an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon in which such an action takes place. Marge, attempting to be the classic caring parent, takes this on as her calling to become an activist against cartoon violence.

Growing up, I always assumed this had to be a reaction to all the hubbub over The Simpsons that I vaguely remembered from the early '90s, but this in fact is an episode that aired before the show had even been on for a year, and the idea for it, sprouted before viewer reaction to the series had taken hold, had the infamous 1988 write-in campaign against Fox's Married... with Children as its inspiration.

Censorship is a personal pet issue and has been since I was a preteen, but one of the wonderful things this episode confronts us with is the absolutely flawless good intentions of the protaganist. Marge truly feels that this material she's seeing her kids exposed to on television is ghastly and considers it a mission of family welfare to protect them from it. Of course, where she goes wrong and where so many others have done the same over the years is with her assumption that every other family must have the same value system. Nevertheless, she is never presented with a lack of sympathy. She believes what she is doing is right. Don't we all. And she's so devoted to this cause that she loses sight of what we know really mattered to her to start with, her own family. There's no time for pork chops, she has things to do.

What this leads a person to believe is that in a way, Marge is thankful for this animated controversy because it has given her a life outside of her home, something she seeks throughout the series even as she is continually thwarted. The angle is not played up in this episode, which makes it a lot more interesting than, say, "$pringfield," in which every tiny personality quirk becomes explicitly stated, and overstated. It seems like a somewhat underwritten character like Marge is rarely allowed to have opinions, much less express them, as mentioned in an earlier episode this season, and that she relishes the opportunity regardless of context. And she especially adores the chance to Make a Real Difference. SNUH, her tiny organization, her protest marches, and her write-in campaign pay off eventually and Roger Meyers elects to change "Itchy & Scratchy" to suit a changing world.

It's worth mentioning here the appeal of I&S to begin with. A bloody renovation of "Tom & Jerry" (and not really that different), it's funny precisely because it isn't funny at all, and in fact hilarious because it's so blatantly unfunny. I don't mean that its wit is buried as with the deadpan layering of Mike Judge's humor, I mean just completely awkward nonsense, and in the context of The Simpsons, it's excruciatingly funny. The gorier, the funnier. The more pointless the ending, the better.

But I think maybe the funniest I&S cartoons ever written for the show are in this episode, after Marge forces the complete overhaul in technique. The sight of the cat and mouse sharing a glass of lemonade on the porch, reading each other bedtime stories, and waltzing is a real scream, and of course the kids all hate it.

All of a sudden something incredible happens, and this is where the show moves in for the kill. Instead of portraying Marge's obliquely-enforced censorship as a bad thing, it follows the children as, for once, they turn off the television and go out and play. In a beautiful long sequence, Beethoven plays while they rediscover the outdoors and each other and live it up like never before. Marge seems to have changed everything for the better; the kids are more polite and life is so much more pleasant.

Unfortunately, nothing is so simple; Michelangeo's David is coming to town, for some reason, and Marge's fellow busybodies are up in arms over the statue's flaccid cock. Marge loves the statue and goes on TV for the second time in the episode to say so. Marvin Monroe finally provides the ultimatium, expressed perhaps too directly: how can she be opposed to one form of expression and not another? It's a question that should be asked of most everyone. What's interesting -- and what makes it real and not a PSA -- is Marge's resigned defeat. She talks about her disappointment but admits she's wrong, yet in her final concession -- "I guess one person can make a difference, but most of the time they probably shouldn't" -- is something more personal than the tail end of a censorship argument.

One has to applaud the writers for taking the path they took, by showing how the ceasing of "Itchy & Scratchy" material was nothing but good for the community, how nobody even missed it, and by showing the sleaziness of the people who made the cartoon -- at one point they turn Marge into a squirrel character disembowled on the show -- and a lot of its supporters (Roger Meyers' main argument is that there was, in fact, violence before cartoons were invented), and especially how much we come down on Marge's side throughout the episode. It seems like the only way to get across the excellent point -- that, yes, things aren't pretty but in order to live any kind of decent lives, we have to take the bad with the good -- is by showing things as they are, that freedom of expression sometimes hurts, that there's no defending some media but it still has a right to exist, that one person cannot control the intake of another's life.

If the kids in Springfield sacrifice their childhood to watch a violent cartoon, it is still worth it to allow that violent cartoon to be made. If we assume for a second, and I think it's horseshit, that movies and television and videogames cause violence and evil, then it's still an irrefutable truth that if children are killed in a school shooting by somebody who played too much DOOM, it is still worth it to ensure the freedom to create and think and act any way we want. I know it sounds terrible to weigh the importance of videogame manufacturing over the lives of people, but it is true. Obviously what I'm getting at is that no easy answers about this are clearcut, but plenty of difficult answers are, and we have to accept those difficult answers.

Because life has no easy answers. Afterschool specials and greeting cards have those. The Simpsons makes its alarming but life-affirming points because there's nothing clear-cut or simplistic about it. Like life itself, as the family itself would later acknowledge, "it's just a bunch of stuff that happened." Like your average day, the Simpsons' situation here had no obvious underlying moral or meaning... which is precisely why it means so much. (A+)


#210: BART GETS HIT BY A CAR
Written by John Swartzwelder
Directed by Mark Kirkland

The striking moment here for me has always been the wonderful scene at the trial during which Bart and Mr. Burns each recount their ridiculous takes on the eponymous incident. Both are delightfully funny, and of course neither is true. That says something, I think.

The rest of the episode is amusing and the satire is often potent, but the story leads to a surprisingly superficial ending with Homer questioning his love for Marge due to the loss of a lawsuit over Bart being hit by a car and mildly injured by Mr. Burns. Everything hinges on Marge's testimony but she feels an obligation to tell the truth, which is that the Simpsons had been taken in by two shady characters -- the brilliantly executed crooked lawyer, Lionel Hutz (whose business card is on a sponge), and doctor, Nick Riviera -- and that Bart's injuries had been largely faked. Despite Julie Kavner's excellent performance, the final act doesn't make a lot of sense; there's no way to stage such a turnaround in Homer's emotions in so little time. With more room to breathe and fewer verbal shortcuts, even the ending could be brilliant, as shown by Marge's exemplary "I'd like you to forgive me for doing the right thing."

Everything before that is ace, and a lot of ground is covered. Even the fantasy (from the early portrait of the afterlife to Burns' otherworldly mansion) seems real. Bart ends up in Hell in a showstopping sequence at the beginning, and scenes at Burns' mansion and Riviera's office (Nick is "the only person" in the room "who even comes close" to being a doctor, Hutz says). I understand the attempt at grand emotion in the final sequence, but this is one case where they miss the mark; of course it doesn't negate the excellent work in the rest of the episode. There are too many great lines not to love it -- "no, that's trauma!" -- but I can't help thinking another couple of rewrites could have pushed it over the top. (A-)


#211: ONE FISH, TWO FISH, BLOWFISH, BLUE FISH
Written by Nell Scovell
Directed by Wes Archer

This is one of the most moving episodes of any television show ever, and perhaps the most starkly dramatic moment in any animated series. What's impressive about this one and only episode written by Nell Scovell, who later created Sabrina: The Teenage Witch, is the way that the achingly real tragedy grows out of the comedy, itself a constantly surprising exercise in ironic minimalism. Every sequence is significant, every moment is a highlight.

It's intriguing to note how differently the premise is handled here from the way it would be approached by any other TV comedy, including The Simpsons after 1996 or so: Homer accidentally eats potentially poisonous blowfish and is told that he has twenty-four hours to live. At the end of the episode, of course, we discover that Homer narrowly escpaed death and will go on living "life to its fullest." Not only is it a familiar idea, it's a cloying and false one.

That's because this outline leaves out what makes the episode both poignant and comic. It leaves out the fact that Homer goes and eats his fateful dinner at the sushi restaurant because of his daughter's insistence on "meat loaf night" that the family is stuck in a rut. It leaves out Homer's generating of a list of the things he intends to do during his last day on Earth. It leaves out the fact that he can't do half of them because he sleeps late, gets stuck catching up with his father ("Just a quick game of hackysaaaack!"), then is thrown in jail. It leaves out the incredible balance of stunningly precise sadness that instills itself everywhere: The episode never cops to either whimsy or sentiment. Not a second of it is in any way cheap. Every laugh is earned, as is every tear.

In the first scenes, the character's reality piles on the irony in the impressively devised, ludicrously and hilariously cruel setup. Homer has to be talked very heavily into going out for sushi, and loves it when he does, but has a sharp comedown when he's told that his life is now in danger.

It's easy to remember the second and third acts as almost entirely serious in tone, but what really makes them work is the growing of core emotion out of comedy far sharper than anything that would be on the show now. There is no simple-minded satire or forced college-hipster mockery; all of the humor comes out of characterization and observation. All of the drama seems to lift a veil from in front of the television set. The cartoon world has grown its own reality, a reality more real than ours.

Almost any given scene in this episode is a good way to show just how much almost everything else on television, ever, cheats its audience. One could go on for pages. Would anyone allow a moment as heartrending as Homer's apparent final bonding with Lisa to grow out of his lack of understanding of her talent? Of course not, and therefore the stunning end of that scene -- Homer's ecstatic wailing of "The Saints" -- would be a cheat because nothing about it would be a reflection of the personality of the protagonist whose life may soon be over. Would Homer's goodbye to Bart end with the desperate, hysterical, but undeniably sweet "I like your sheets"? Would Homer cut off his father before the latter was fully satisfied with their day together? Would such a jumble of emotions -- the Larry King bible, the final slump in the chair -- exist in the death scene? And would Homer's final run home -- nodding to more than parodying THE GRADUATE -- have the urgency of a race through coals? How would we care this much about people unless we knew them? We know these people, and it's in this way that The Simpsons is able to so nonchalantly gain this kind of enchantment.

The most striking moment in the episode is a brief one: After he has been bailed out, while Barney drives him home, Homer has his head out the window to feel the breeze for a last time. Attention is not called to it, it just happens and is quickly dropped.

On another show, the list of tasks for the last day on Earth would simply be the butt of a lot of jokes, no one would really believe he was dying, and if any serious thinking on the matter of what he is leaving behind were to be attempted, it would be in the most offensive form, tears cried, hearts on sleeves, sugary music piped in. The point being that "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" takes no shortcuts. And it has a sense of actual danger and death.

Homer is characterized beautifully for the duration of the episode; his varied reactions to the situation he's been placed in (still yelling at Bart, but still recognizably a responsible father and husband). He is strong and good, and at the rare moments (extremely rare, in fact) when the audience isn't identifying with him, they have a sense of respect for him that is difficult to gain for a cartoon character.

The episode approaches something grandly provocative in looking at the end of life, on more than one level. For one thing, Homer's impressively mature attitudes in his last twenty-four hours are a knowing assessment of how a man deals with his inevitable demise, the way he buries himself in sadness, mischief, and the moment, the way a person lives through dying or even through being sick. Second, the episode's final sardonic scene of Homer "living life to its fullest" allows the line to be blurred between life and death, suggesting openly that the very human anxiety about the end of life is a waste of time, that eternal life is only to be achieved through the immersion in now. Whether you spend your time sticking your head out the car window or watching bowling tournaments, the floating through is what matters. That is freedom. The episode is not about living each day as if it's your last; it's really about freedom, and about how much more of it we have than we think. It is, all in all, staggering. (A+)


#212: THE WAY WE WAS
Written by Al Jean & Mike Reiss and Sam Simon
Directed by David Silverman

Why should anyone care about how Homer and Marge Simpson met? It's something the writers seem to be asking over and over again in this episode, cutting away a number of times to Bart in the role of Grumpy from the Seven Dwarfs as he tries repeatedly to insist that the story being told in flashback by his parents is of no relevance to him. In fact, it's not merely an interesting show but a hugely impressive one. It operates very differently from the previous installment but works for many of the same reasons: It relies completely on character-oriented writing and, in fact, character-conscious animation. For most of the half-hour we are seeing designs we have never seen before, of Marge and Homer as teenagers, and yet the show to this point has been so immaculately well-written, as is this one, and so distinctively designed that they are always recognizable. Enough is achieved with the people that very little has to be pulled off to make the "period" convincing; that's all secondary. There aren't simply a bunch of jokes about the '70s strung together with talking heads reciting artificial lines they could just as easily be saying in present day, the same people with younger faces.

What the writers and director manage here in terms of attaching the young Homer and Marge to the adult versions is not simply amusing but revelatory. Marge is a Ms.-reading women's lib teen with upward mobility, seduced in the end by cutesy domesticity; it's sweet, real, and sad, just like the long-suffering Homer, who yet again seems a reflection of an actual personality here. He is more self-aware than Bart was in "Bart Gets an F" (despite his classically clueless line "Guess who's got a date to the prom!"), but his plight is nearly as sympathetic and absorbing. By the time he has his photo taken alone at the prom, you're ready to send him your heart Fed-Ex. He tries so gamely but he happens to be the sort of person whose best will perhaps never be enough. That's the Homer I love: oafish but not stupid, sad but never despairing, and never willing to give up. But his persistence toward Marge is not creepy or even slightly ambiguous, as in almost every initially-unrequited love story of this nature; his cards are laid so visibly on the table one can never look upon him as anything but earnest. A formula like this is just what once made the series as a whole work so well; whatever happened, your four lead characters were completely trustworthy.

One of the most criminal cuts of the syndicated Simpsons prints is in this episode: a heart to heart between Homer and Abe that changes the tone of the episode and their relationship. It's one of our scarce chances to see Abe as a good, tough-minded father rather than an empty-headed geezer, and it furthers a point raised by the prior episode, that the series wasted an opportunity by so rarely using the chemistry between Homer and his father.

"The Way We Was" is funny and knowing, but it's marked mostly by more charm and sweetness than any episode to date. There isn't really anything preventing us from having Lisa's reaction just before the closing credits, because yet again, so much work has been done to set up the Simpsons as real people, right up to that last stinger of Bart's less noble take on the matter. Of course, there is The Simpsons' usual mockery of fakers, in this case Marge's prom date and pseudo-intellectual squeeze Artie Ziff, brilliantly played by Jon Lovitz (his reading of "It would damage the town to hear it" is a highlight of the series). If the lead characters were not conceived so well, an attack on an egotisical loser like Ziff would be simply annoying; he would just be another face in the crowd rather than a natural enemy. The strangely consuming reality of the entire show makes it all fit together, folding onto itself and extending out on all sides. A million different kinds of humor are covered by "The Way We Was," and none of them are simple. More significantly, none of them fail. (A+)


#213: HOMER VS. LISA & THE 8TH COMMANDMENT
Written by Steve Pepoon
Directed by Rich Moore

Insightful, good-hearted, and incisive, this is one of the highlights of the early Simpsons, which is saying a lot; it's significant because of its ambiguities and its lack of a clear-cut message, giving it a ring of unmistakable sincerity. Most impressively, it tackles the damages of faith on an eight year-old, the budding of morals, and the insipid nature of cable television with (!) equal conviction and effect.

"8th Commandment" is one of the only Simpsons episodes that seems at first glance to come from an identifiably Christian perspective (it was, indeed, written by one of the few men of faith on staff, Steve Pepoon). That isn't to say that it's confined to a specific audience; it's at least as secular as Bill Melendez's A Charlie Brown Christmas, and whether accidentally or not, comes off as a plea against what Richard Dawkins has considered the worst form of child abuse, religious indoctrination, even as it tackles the question of ethics with admirable maturity.

The episode follows the rocky history of Homer's illegal cable hookup, picked up from a door-to-door opportunist kicked out of Ned Flanders' house, soon comsuming the Simpsons' lives with its constant stream of subpar entertainment. Lisa begins to have her doubts after she is told at Sunday school about the nature of Hell that awaits those who break the "shalt not steal" commandment. Although she arrives at the conclusion through fear and cruelty thrust upon her, she in fact is struggling from the beginning simply with herself, as is Marge, and is simply contending with the role of innocent bystander while she tries to live by whatever book has been offered as her text. In short, she is desperate to be good; she might very well have been insecure about the "evil presence" in the house, but her conviction for dubious reasons ends up reflecting even more of her innate eight year-old sweetness, something missing entirely during her shifts to vegetarianism and Buddhism, the latter idea particularly false and ignorant of characterization.

What's integral to the approach regarding morality here is the separation of logical morals from their counterparts. The episode opens with a gag about adultery, which in the opening fantasy sequence about Moses' reading of the commandments is in fact consensual adultery and therefore not adultery at all. One is reminded of the insipid talking point that the Commandments are the basis for all Western laws, when in fact only two of them, the two good ones (killing and stealing), could ever be laws. It isn't just Hell that Lisa sees forming around her father and seemingly everyone else in the society she's able to witness, it's the slow decay of their own self-respect, the heightened awareness (to reach its peak in "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington") of the hypocrisy practiced by virtually every adult she encounters.

None of this excuses the methods with which morality is drilled into Lisa, and here is one of the most provocative and truthful aspects of the episode. As Hell is described by the Sunday school teacher in her usual ambiguously menacing terms -- "If you actually saw Hell," she proclaims, "you'd be so frightened you would die" -- Lisa finds herself cast off and disturbed; that afternoon she watches, in the first of two brilliant and serious-minded fantasy sequences, her house turn to rubble as flames rise all around, Satan sitting on the couch inviting her over. No more succinct statement has been made, perhaps, of the cruelty forced on children by the cancer of religious belief.

This only adds to the universal nature of Lisa's plight, her stinging silent protest, those eyes wavering over an increasingly uncertain Homer as more and more of his vices come to light in the course of the half hour. Her knowing, disappointed stare haunts him, as it should. By the time he is sitting amid the crowd of people he's invited over to watch a boxing match, he stops denying the gravity of what he's gotten himself into (a condition foreshadowed by his barring of every window in the house), and drifts into a stunning awakened nightmare (another moment indefensibly cut by incompetent fools for the butchered syndication version, in which the denouement makes no sense) of criminal court and total isolation. He spins around and grapples desperately for his family through the living room window (they're now outside protesting), suddenly back to reality. It's one of two moments that stand out as distinct examples of brilliant direction -- even more than usual for this period in the series -- by Rich Moore, the other a startling transition of Lisa from Sunday school to the car, emotionally shattered, initiated by a simple turn of the head.

As in so many episodes of the second season, the characterization is almost miraculously perfect. Bart's frivolity -- his own interpretation of the Hell diatribe, his charging for admittance to the house to watch a porn channel -- is maintained expertly to the last seconds, when he is urging Homer not to cut the wire. Marge is, as ever, attempting to please everyone while trying to reach Homer in the ways Lisa can't, and failing. The episode belongs to Lisa and Homer, obviously. Except for a single unfortunate line (when the cops come to the door, he claims his wife was the one who stole the cable; the Homer presented elsewhere in the show wouldn't say that), this is one of the single best Homer episodes. His climb to euphoria ("Nothing a month? Yeah, I think we can swing that!"), weak justification ("When you had breakfast this morning," he asks Lisa, "did you pay for it?"), paranoia, and slow descent into guilt and dread are both staged and performed with depth and intelligence, completely believable, funny, and wounding. Lisa's journey is less complicated but no less arduous, and it's gratifying the way that we sense her respect for her father coming back in the final moments after being stomped on for weeks. It's likely, though, that Homer has learned more about Lisa than the reverse. "She's so moral!" he exclaims halfway through, but by the end he's aware that he's simply not, she is just observant, and he is dealing with the logistics of raising a child who will expect him to practice what he preaches, something all parents must contend with eventually.

Meanwhile, the importance of the comedy in this episode is not to be ignored. Homer's own consumer-whore enthusiasm for cable television is amusing enough (along with the way his doubts about whether stealing cable is "OK" are immediately thrown off by the pamphlet "So You've Decided to Steal Cable," which informs him that cable companies are "big faceless corporations"), but the pointed satire of cable itself is significant for its vitriol as much as its truth. The stand up ("don't you hate it... when you go to the bathroom... and there's no toilet paper?"), the "pro wrestling from Mexico," the repetition of movies ("this is where Jaws eats the boat!") all remain depressingly accurate. Many more excellent comic moments come from unlikely places; take note of Lisa's conversation with the reverend, a classic sequence. She asks if it's stealing when father takes bread to feed his family. "It is if he puts anything on it." Burns, too, is able to provide some memorable lines, both about his vision of the working class family and in his initial act of greeting a man he does not realize is not Homer. I'm also a great fan of the reactions of the room full of ten year-olds to the Top Hat channel, and even more to Milhouse's shout of "It's a raid!" when Homer walks in.

For the most part, though, "Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment" (which won a deserved Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program) is one of those episodes held in such contempt by the latter-day staff, those pesky installments that are not about quirky far-fetched situations, jerkass insults, or surreal travelogues. It's about beliefs, and it's about people. Most of the best lines, however quotable, are reflections of personality, not just what sounds funny at a certain time. Bart's "I wish I was an adult so I could break the rules" is painfully on target. Homer's grudging embrace of The Right Thing opens memorably with "I hate to interrupt your judging me" and ends with "I'm not very fond of any of you," both lines too smart for the writers to allow Homer to say now. And it's not a funny line, but Marge's statement to Lisa -- "When you love somebody, you have to have faith that in the end, they will do the right thing" -- says a lot more than it initially seems to. The same may go for the incredibly apt final joke of the episode, when after all is said and done, Homer cuts the wire and the screen degenerates into static. (A+)


#214: PRINCIPAL CHARMING
Written by David M. Stern
Directed by Mark Kirkland

One of the many things that seemed to wreck The Simpsons in its later years was the crowding of its cast, the way that unimportant side characters took center stage and were too simplistic in nature to hold the weight. The staff never seemed to learn how to add characterization rather than "quirks," which they can and do pile on as if in desperation. But this early and impressive episode is proof that something better is, or at least once was, possible.

Homer (returning a favor, even though he protests that "that was just an idle promise!") is dispatched by Marge to find a man for her sister Selma, increasingly middle-aged and lonely. After some confusion, Homer picks a good one, Principal Skinner, but the success is short-lived, as Seymour falls for the wrong woman, Patty, and falls for her hard (the school soon goes to hell; Bart notes that "he works for me now!"). It's a dreamlike match -- "Isn't it nice we hate the same things?" -- but Patty is wracked with guilt, as Selma is only becoming more shattered and disillusioned with time.

The use of the twins has historically been a problem on the show. Selma is frequently humanized, and in this episode, Patty is as well, and in those situations they are well-written and Julie Kavner's voice work is excellent. But this only happens when the writers feel like it. The rest of the time, they are cardboard, but good cardboard; they work as well as background annoyances for Homer as they do as people. The problem is the juxtaposition. It is never once acceptable that the Patty and Selma seen here and in season four's "Selma's Choice" who can have relatively civilized conversations with Homer can be the same people as those in "Bart vs. Thanksgiving" or "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" or, later, the unimaginatively titled "Homer vs. Patty & Selma" who seem to ooze disdain for not just Homer but nearly everyone else.

That said, this is never a problem in individual episodes, only in the series taken together, and Patty and Selma are both surprisingly full characters here in both script and performance. Though Lisa's joke about the unlikelihood of a fortysomething woman finding a partner is now glaringly dated, the portrayal of the two women in the episode is human and realistic. Selma's expressions of regret after attending an attractive acquaintance's wedding are sensitive without being overwrought, as is her scene with a sympathetic Lisa, who asks if Selma thinks she will ever get married. It's balanced well with an even better later scene with Bart; in a moment of hardened depression, she asks Bart to keep her company and wonders what he learned in school that day. "Principal Skinner is gonna ask Aunt Patty to marry him!" Selma's response is appropriately sarcastic, but the animation of ash falling in symbolic dread from her cigarette makes the stronger (and funnier) statement. Marge's larger-than-life wish for a husband to her sister who will be "honest and caring and well-off and handsome" has obviously crushing connotations of fantasy in the end. Selma's dolled-up (with such products as Gee! Your Lip Looks Hairless) date with Barney makes a horrendously uncomfortable conclusion, but the character still holds her own nicely. As Homer says, "There's plenty of fish in the sea. We just don't have any bait."

Patty is introduced to the episode with appropriate unflattering realism, with an extraordinary drawing of her sleeping and snoring on the couch. Skinner brings out something new in her, the suggestion that love does not have to be the thing that has kept her away from human contact for so long. The contact with Skinner crushes Selma, but Patty indulges herself more than she probably would if the episode were made now; Selma, for her part, lives vicariously, encouraging her twin from the start. "Your first date in twenty years is a little more important than playing bridge with mom." (The facade breaks a few seconds after, when she buys an assload of lottery tickets.) Patty is taken aback by Skinner's marriage proposal but stays in character in a surprisingly warm and seemingly accurate way, the juggling of principles and vices, the affair between people too polite to do the damage of falling in love with one another. In a peerless moment, Selma asks her "Are you really throwing away your last chance at happiness just for me?" "Yes," answers Patty in perfect deadpan.

As surprisingly well as Patty and Selma come off in this show, Seymour is what carries it, and it's a stark contrast with the flat and insipid characterization given to him in later years. Instead of just being the proverbial isolated Norman Bates-ish forty year old virgin, he's a man whose entire life is simply informed by his profession, "but these pants come off at night just like everybody else's." He is unnaturally impressed with the school cafeteria's tater tots, has a knack for the melodramatic phrasing of minor crises assumed so easily by school administrators ("the victims are the innocent blades of grass"), he devotes time away from work to screening movies for local angry parents, takes Patty to a date on the school playground, and when he finally tries to kiss her, insists "I don't have cooties!" It's adorable in a way; he isn't hopeless or prudish, just inhibited, and faultlessly cheery: "Food tastes better when you're revolving." His infatuation with Patty is pathological but sweet.

The only negative point of the episode is, besides the lack of principal (NPI) characters for much of the second half, a parody of VERTIGO that lasts only a few seconds but seems bizarrely out of place. A later goof on GONE WITH THE WIND works with the story and is therefore far better.

Three more specific notes: The animation of Bart reacting behind Homer as he asks Skinner to come to dinner is brilliant. So is Harry Shearer's performance as Skinner throughout the episode, as impressive as the roles he'd played in any of his movies. And finally, Skinner's exit from the episode -- fading and shrinking in Patty's rear view mirror as he waves sheepishly -- is perhaps the most moving sequence granted to any side character in the run of the show. (A)


#215: OH BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
Written by Jeff Martin
Directed by Wes Archer

"His life was an unbridled success until he found out he was a Simpson."

Probably the most curious endeavor of the first three seasons, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" is an unapologetically pessimistic, bitter Simpsons episode, but it's indicative of a vitality that the show would lose all too soon. It relies on the Simpsons as eternal screwups, as a working class family doing their best and still failing miserably. In the first Halloween special, the most fanciful premise the family had been confronted with yet ended in rejection: "It chose to destroy itself rather than live with us." Homer bears out the morbid suggestion of that sequence by meeting his long-estranged rich half brother who is an indestructible millionaire... and promptly destroying his life, simply by doing what he is asked.

A superbly directed montage introduces Herb Powell, an illegitimate son of Abe's whose existence has never been revealed to Homer until his father suffers a mild heart attack. Homer then sets out on a moving but lovably inept quest to find his brother, who naturally turns out to be very, very rich, the owner and operator of a major automobile line.

Herb, voiced adequately by Danny Devito, is a rapid favorite of Bart and Lisa; while the three of them get to know one another, Herb becoming a child and Bart and Lisa being indulged like never before, Marge worries about spoiling the kids and Homer is set to work -- with a hefty paycheck -- on designing "the car for the common man." Herb won't listen to his staff's resistance about Homer's strange and passionate requests (foretold by his relentless fascination earlier on with the ability to order pork chops in the middle of the night) for gigantic cup holders and horns ("You can never find a horn when you're mad") that play La Cucaracha; he won't even listen to Homer's own doubts about his ability to put the car together. But when it is unveiled and bombs, Herb is quick to pin the blame on the fat bald screwup half-brother. Suddenly Homer -- waving and smiling vacantly to the crowd -- is as much alone in the universe as he was when he thought he had twenty-four hours to live.

It's as bleak as it sounds, Herb the classic fair weather family member: he issues a slap in the face to individualism, the very thing he unwaveringly promoted. The Simpsons here offers one of its most uncompromising messages, a far cry from the goodness and light of "The Way We Was" or "8th Commandment": people don't mean the vast majority of what they say to you, especially people in positions of wealth or power. "Be yourself" is as empty as "Nice weather we're having." The only person who really passionately cares whether you "are" yourself is probably you. That goes double for moguls; if you give your heart to a corporation, expect to have it sold back to you. As well it should be.

The unfleeting honesty and cynicism of the episode is its primary virtue, but also its failing in the context of the series. Herb is believable in a superficial way, but any attempt to get inside his head (his "lonely guy" speech is pure calculation) is unsatisfying. He comes off as an asshole; his reaction to Homer's car is simply unreasonable and mean-spirited. It's probably quite truthful, but there is a sense in which television or film, especially animation, has to be more real than reality. The episode as it stands is high satire but low Simpsons.

There are plenty of laughs: the opening McBain film, Bart and Lisa's table sign language, Homer's "Oh, Dad, you and your imagination," his incredible scene at the adoption office, Marge's exasperated "empty threat" remark, "You're the richest man I know"/"I feel the same way about you," Herb's pep talk to Homer, the classic "opposite of what you told me" sequence, and my personal highlight: Herb asks Marge to tell him about herself. She says "I met Homer in high school. We got married and had three wonderful children." Herb laments the amount of catching up they have to do. "Actually," she answers uncomfortably, "I just told you pretty much everything." Marge doesn't get many punchlines, but in this episode she gets one of the saddest ones in the series.

Those moments (and the on-target characterization of the family members) forgive the shortcomings, along with the overriding clever sendup of populism. Herb's committed to making a car "for the people" is so absolute it becomes romantic instead of practical, a terrifying error that runs across every industry. Anarchy is a cruel beast, and not at all what it's cracked up to be. The schism this episode brings to light is that between satire and pure characterization; it does all come together in the end. Although Bart's closing line is very sweet, Marge is the one who saves the day. Herb grumbles "I have no brother" dramatically, and Marge consoles Homer with "Maybe he was just saying that to make conversation." The pessimism is not filtered, but it's at least a little easier to take. (A-)


#216: BART'S DOG GETS AN F
Written by Jon Vitti
Directed by Jim Reardon

Jon Vitti was not put to particularly strong use in the first season, his strengths not yet apparent to the rest of the staff, but beginning here, nearly all of his episodes stand out as, in short, The Simpsons living up to its total potential. This has to be pinned down to Vitti's abilities as a writer, as much as a few of his scripts may have been shaped by James L. Brooks and others. The best evidence for this lies with John Swartzwelder, the second greatest writer on the staff, who is much more of a conformist; his strengths are as obvious as Vitti's, but he was -- at least initially -- more willing to bury his gifts and roll with the tide. With Vitti, even in flawed shows like "When Flanders Failed" and "Mr. Plow," something extra almost always seems to be happening that seldom showed itself elsewhere in the series. "Bart's Dog Gets an F" inaugurates Jon Vitti as the greatest writer of The Simpsons as an ensemble cast, the writer who understood them the most as individuals and their synergy as a group, therefore most assuredly the finest Simpsons writer.

Allow me to engage in a horribly geeky fantasy for a moment. I would love to screen this episode in front of Mike Scully, Ian Maxtone-Graham, Al Jean, Tim Long, Matt Selman, Matt Groening, and anyone else who honestly believes that The Simpsons in 2006 is still a piece of quality product. If they actually had to watch this -- not talk over it or about it, just watch it -- I have to wonder how they would not cringe and melt into their seats.

Everything in this episode is done properly; everything in it is inspired, affecting, unforced, brilliant. Every single major player is perfectly characterized and in top form; all of the character relationships are convincing and correct. The incidental characters introduced within the show are distinctive and strong. The jokes are great, the timing is incredible, the emotions are rich. And it all hinges on nothing more than obedience school.

The basic story is of Santa's Little Helper, increasingly unhinged and destructive; in a storyline that deliberately echoes "Bart Gets an F," the most misunderstood member of the family (well, one of the most misunderstood) does his worst to the neighborhood, to a quilt, to a pair of sneakers, to a big cookie, and must be sent to obedience classes, where nothing seems to get through to him. The threat of separation between SLH and Bart, the forfeit of a connection well beyond verbal limitations, is fully tangible, threatening, and impossibly sad. But it's a sadness earned, not a cheap sadness on the order of the later "Dog of Death" or the miserably maudlin Futurama episode "Jurassic Bark."

The examination of why this is such a remarkable episode comes down to individual characters. Homer is perfect Homer throughout: He's childlike but not clueless, angry but not an unfeeling jerk, fatherly but not condescending, and his many character flaws are totally unconscious and free of malice. Dan Castellanetta's performance during the scene of Homer's argument with Ms. Winfield (when he fully believes SLH to be tied up in the backyard) is breathtakingly human, especially at the moment when Homer realizes he is screaming at the wrong individual. Homer also is actually clever; he's allowed to give punchlines instead of being the butt of them ("Mr. Universe takes a walk"). And his obsession with, inner conflict about, and justification of purchasing Assassin sneakers (just like Ned's) reflects the overgrown child syndrome, as does his grudging acceptance of their destruction and the finding of solace in a cookie. (One of the most hysterical moments has Homer calmly consoling Marge after the Bouvier family quilt is destroyed, then spotting a crumb from his prize and wailing "MY COOKIE!" with earth-shaking abandon.)

Homer the father is also well-realized; watch the scene in which Lisa calls him from home while sick with the mumps. His communication with her is entirely believable, sweet, and understanding despite a certain degree of parental displacement, very much like their "thanks for knowing I mean well" conversation in "Moaning Lisa." We also have a dead rebuttal to the idea that Homer completely lacks appreciation of his daughter's intelligence when he breaks down after she gives her pro-dog speech. We get Homer the easily wounded middle American man when he's buying teenybopper magazines for Lisa, and we get Homer the con artist when he attempts to pass of Santa's Little Helper as "world's most brilliant dog... says 'I love you!' on demand." So ready to drop the dog from the family unit, Homer -- in a moment that recalls Grumpy's tearful release near the end of SNOW WHITE -- is the one who, after grumbling at first, slowly becomes extremely enthusiastic, clapping faster and faster at the obedience school graduation. The writers, directors, and performers never let Homer slip away from being human, and that makes a world of difference in the story and the comedy.

Marge has a number of wonderful moments as well, even though a number of them lean inordinately on the heretofore-unmentioned Bouvier quilt as a plot device. Her "major purchases" rant to Homer is very real, and the connection he establishes with Lisa on their time off strikes the right balance, with good use of the mundane for fodder. An especially amusing scene has them watching a soap opera together, the brilliantly insipid dialogue of which is matched by Lisa and Marge's tired commentary. "Is it always this good?" "Mm, I dip in and out." But the most striking Marge bit is her seeming cluelessness as Lisa attempts to explain her passion for music; it's innocent enough but does bring up memories of Anne Bancroft's classic "art" line in THE GRADUATE, pointing forward therefore to "Brush with Greatness," probably the finest episode ever to center around Marge aside from "Life on the Fast Lane."

The mumps give Lisa an opportunity to be a little girl, something that's always welcome; in these early shows, the writers strike the balance between Lisa's youth and her wisdom, an ability they lost rather quickly, turning her within a few years into a caricature. Even in this episode, one of the better examples actually works due to a third party: Dr. Hibbert's condescension to Lisa is bitterly ironic, particularly when confronted with Yeardley Smith's strikingly sweet and mature reading of "arithmetic." She may love math, but she also reads Teen Dream, Teen Scream, and Teen Steam. Her palpable chemistry with her father, of course, is altogether different, before the conflicts between them became one of the only major story arcs in the series' run. Her moments with Marge -- learning to sew and watching soap operas -- are equally realistic but less intriguing.

If "Bart's Dog Gets an F" belongs to any one member of the family, and it really doesn't, the perspective shifting with great ease throughout, it is probably Bart. Two of the most important Bart episodes are referenced fairly directly here: the first-person perspective used in certain places for Santa's Little Helper is a quote from "Bart Gets an F." And the random quiet of the first act recalls "Bart vs. Thanksgiving." However much the rest of the Simpsons suffer in this episode, Bart runs the widest emotional gamut; like those two shows, this one exposes the complexity of his character. His pleading that SLH may stay in the family if he "becomes a perfect dog" is immediately moving, almost a shortcut to emotion but still surprisingly real, especially in the way Nancy Cartwright's voice breaks.

Bart is at his best in his interactions with the superb guest character of obedience school instructor Emily Winthrop, played by Tracey Ullman and saddled with numerous excellent lines ("You've earned a toffee," she tells Bart after he demonstrates rolling over to SLH), a monologue about "my time" riddled with details in movement and voice alien to most TV animation. She's a strict one: "the world does not need another college graduate," she insists, "who doesn't know how to sit." She advocates the use of the "choke chain" ("the two most important words you'll ever learn"). Bart refuses to "correct the dog" (the first time, he asks "Is my dog dead, ma'am?" and she notes how commonplace the question is) until a chilly confrontation in Winthrop's office; as he watches Santa's Little Helper visibly suffer, he mutters what is listed in captioning as "I'm sorry, boy; you can't help being dumb" but sounds uncannily like "I can't help being dumb," a much more interesting and deeply touching line.

Boy continues to attempt to reach dog until Lisa comes and tries to convince them to spend their last hours together enjoyably instead of attempting to cram; the expected montage arrives and is, of course, very sweet, but it becomes actually moving when Bart begins to cry and summarizes the situation unforgettably: "We're gonna have to say goodbye because you don't understand a single word I say."

For all the juggling dealt with above, the show remains to a surprising extent on the ground and within the world of Santa's Little Helper; his perspective, as mentioned, recalls Bart's. Like Bart in the season premiere, he hears every word a human puts to him as "blah blah blah blah." The show finds other and subtler ways to reach the dog's perspective, most through aggressive realism -- the marginalia of the Krusty doll, playing with the television ("Yours is the only show I'll do" has always been a favorite line of mine), the wandering down the road and into the Kwik-E-Mart, the idle consumption of an insect, and the effective menace (juggling in high gear) of his devouring of quilt and cookie. Externally, the dog remains quite sympathetic; watch out in particular for the "beef wellington" scene. And when he's in danger of being sold, one naturally has a fear and dread of the potential buyers (enough so that one might miss the first hundred times the brilliance of "People think only mules can pull carts... Impatient people think that"), a trick the writers cheaply tried to recreate in the awful fifth season episode "Bart Gets an Elephant."

Impossible though it seems, Santa's Little Helper's sudden understanding of Bart's language at the end comes off much better than the similar trick that closes "The Crepes of Wrath," because there is a purpose behind the random change: it almost seems as if Bart and SLH's connection finally closed a gap, as if love could really do such things. And who wouldn't want to believe that? The wonderful final scene has a cutting line from Emily Winthrop that makes the point well: "You son of a bitch. Good show!" (A+)


#217: OLD MONEY
Written by Jay Kogen & Wallace Wolodarsky
Directed by David Silverman

As early as "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- aired weeks before "Old Money" -- Abraham Simpson was being presented as a caricature more than a human, the human hinted at in "Bart the General," "The Way We Was," and "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish." Though very little has been said about it, the staff seems to have had nearly as much trouble pinning him down as they did with Marge. But "Old Money" fulfills every promise, and it is most likely the finest showcase of Abe as a character in the series.

Instead of the senile and pathetic Grampa shown in later episodes, Abe is dignified, strong-willed, and even funny in this episode, opening the episode with an immediate punch: "What could be more fun than today's trip to the liquor store?" Abe laments the labored boredom of his monthly trips out of the retirement home with his son's family, but he finds unexpected solace in a new recruit to the establishment, a Bea Simmons (voiced by Audrey Meadows). Newly confident, Abe is shown as self-aware, classy even, shopping for Bea's birthday gift with Herman (who notes that her DOB is shared with "the Battleship New Jersey"), suggestively popping pills with her, flirting with sheepish enthusiasm.

The tragic detour to Discount Lion Safari on another miserable Sunday is -- however hilariously over the top, with lions eating a zebra atop the Simpsons' car -- less of a joke than it might be because it represents a violation of a character's personal space; Abe is not a punch line, he's the man of logic, the put-upon teenager, the man in love who must escape to see his girlfriend on her birthday. Bart opines "Did anybody notice this place sucks?" but Abe gets the laugh, attempting to unhatch the childproof lock on the back door.

Bea isn't on the screen long enough to be adequately defined as a character in life, although Abe's imagining of her in death in amazingly rich and full and is the most moving sequence in the episode. In the early scenes of their courtship, it's significant (especially in contrast to "Lady Bouvier's Lover") that the age of the couple is only pointed out in favor of realism, not as a source of jokes, their endless coughing funny but not in a malicious way. Outside of that, Abe's first move could be that of a teenager (something he even points out: "You'd think this would get easier with time"). Bea gives her outlook for the evening as "sitting alone in my room" ("Oh, you've got plans already.") Abe asks if they could go to "the same place at the same time." They do, and there is romance and dancing, but while Abe is stuck in the Simpsons' car on the discount safari, Bea dies.

The end of the first act brings one of a few cheats of reality in the show that are its only serious flaws. Abe's statement that Bea died "of a broken heart" is forced and obvious, and more importantly, something no one in his situation would actually say (fortunately, the silly notion is instantly forgotten).

When Abe discovers he has inherited a fortune from Bea, things get interesting. For one thing, it's an excuse for an appearance by one of the few genuinely great secondary characters, crooked attorney Lionel Hutz. ("You must spend one night in... the haunted house... Just kidding!") It also affords an opportunity for one of the most artificial and therefore unsatisfying moments of the episode, when Abe tells off a Retirement Castle official after the later makes a bid for Bea's fortune. But there is a certain level of payoff for this at the finale.

Abe's life after Bea is as empty as his life before Bea. He is a bit more digified, picking up what Herman says is Napoleon's hat and wearing it everywhere he goes for most of the remaining episode, and he attempts to force himself to enjoy life, memorably proclaiming "Yeah!" in half-hearted tone after each stunt he pulls. This amusing sequence leads to an emormously touching scene involving Abe on a rollercoaster, where he finds himself speaking to Bea, who demands to know why Abe isn't enjoying the money she left him and suggesting that he use it to bring something to others' lives. Abe's own common sense and resilience is again implied here, as well as a generally comforting and truthful notion: He asks her what death is like. "Not as scary as this!" she yells as the coaster plunges.

In a classically ridiculous Simpsons scenario, Abe sets up a line of people to apply for use of the money. All of the Springfield quacks are in the line, special note given to Marvin Monroe, who wants to build "The Monroe Box" and trap a child in it to see if he "harbors a deep resentment toward me," and to the first and best appearance of later-overused Professor Frink, who has invented a death ray. When Abe questions the valid use of such an instrument, Frink chuckles. "You know my wife will be happy? She's hated this whole death ray thing from day one." Finally, Lisa comes and -- in a lovely shot from above -- gives her lip service to Springfield's unfortunates (and its lack of library equipment!). Again, Lisa is in top form, offering the voice of reason and reaching Abe like no one except Bea has, but still ensuring that her grandfather knows she wouldn't mind a pony. Abe takes a long trip downtown and observes the squalor, the condemned library, and the run-down conditions all over, and decides to take action. It's a gritty montage that stands out as a good example of an idea expressed in the series that is entirely serious.

The highlight of characterization in the episode comes in a late scene which pays off a relatively underdeveloped subplot. After Homer causes Abe to miss his final hours with Bea, he proclaims at the funeral "I have no son!" Up to this point, Homer has, in fact, been more of a cad than usual. His crazy eyes when he bursts into Abe's room on Bea's birthday are undeniably amusing but they do sadly foreshadow things to come, as does his ceaseless patronizing of his father, implying that Bea is imaginary, later lamenting his dad's "loss of hearing" after Abe pretends not to notice he's speaking. It's an unfortunate effect, it would seem, of Abe generally being so distant from the family, so that their lack of time together prevents the Simpsons writers from developing a full level of chemistry among the family when he adds a sixth body. Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening scenes; when the family is in the car with Grampa, it's uncomfortable. As soon as he leaves, the Simpsons are the Simpsons, with delicious overlapping dialogue, irreverence, and ample heart in the cynicism, coming together as they do over the mockery of an aging relative. Likewise, once Abe is alone, dumping the day's beef jerky into a drawer full, he comes a compelling character himself, not merely the cast off old man.

But once Abe disowns Homer, we begin to see glimpses of the relationship hinted at in earlier episodes, and by the end we hit the height of their comraderie on screen. When his father stops speaking to him, Homer is far more depressed and torn up than he was when he thought he had 24 hours to live. We've really never seen him so upset, and it's a quiet but heartfelt mood in his eyes and voice that bring a sense of relief to know he really does think a lot of his dad. But Homer, in the meantime, is so down that he resorts to "Marvin Monroe's Anxiety Line," instantly turning an infinitely sad scene into a hilarious one without one-upping or negating the emotion; such were the abilities of The Simpsons in those days.

Once they have made up over a family dinner, and once Abe is determined after his lonely walk around the sreets of Springfield to give money to "everyone," the elder Simpson heads off to try and make even more of a fortune by going on a gambling binge. Homer catches wind of this and the role reversal of father and son is quickly in full effect. Despite a quick stop for food, he catches Abe in the act of betting everything on a roulette wheel. Abe will not listen to reason but after Homer persists, he rattles off a bit of Rudyard Kipling's "If," and rattles it beautifully, Dan Castellaneta catching every word with even greater ease than he displayed in "The Raven." People all over the casino gather around and listen to the speech: "If you can make one heap of all your winnings / And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, / And lose, and start again at your beginnings / And never breath a word about your loss; / ... / Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!" Not a beat of silence, and Homer shakes his father and screams "You'll be a bonehead!" and pulls him away. In all of pop culture, there can't be many moments that squash romance as rapidly, effectively, and eloquently as that; it would be so easy for Abe's speech to be something fake and superficial, for Homer's rebuttal to therefore come as not half as much a surprise. Instead, this is one of the greatest assumption-shattering moments in TV ever.

It dawns on Abe after he nearly loses all that he must stop, and in another poignant scene, he watches his peers pile slowly onto a bus and realizes where his money is going. The choice he makes is a fine one indeed. (A)


#218: BRUSH WITH GREATNESS
Written by Brian K. Roberts
Directed by Jim Reardon

The Simpsons shows its versatility here, in an episode that's almost painfully funny but driven completely by the knowing portrayal of a frustrated impulse, Marge's stifled creativity. Given the odd, lopsided story structure in the episode's script, it's fair enough to say that it turned out far, far better than anyone on the writing staff could have expected, and stands as both a brilliant highlight of the season and an excellent example of "characterization" not necessarily meaning "straight drama," two terms many fans of later seasons use interchangably.

Without Marge, "Brush with Greatness" simply wouldn't work, and moreover, with the Marge of, say, three years later, it would be a dull copout. But this is uncorrupted Marge, not the anonymous flake we later grew to know and hate so well. It's a constant irritant that Marge is the only one of the four principal characters the writers never really figured out to begin with, but episodes like this prove she once had great potential. As much as in "The Way We Was," she is allowed to be a person here and not simply a wife and mother.

The person comes out after Homer discovers a series of semi-steamy old paintings of Ringo Starr by Marge in the attic. They date from her crush on the Beatles in junior high school, and Lisa wonders what made her mother stop painting. This brings another elegantly directed flashback, to Marge's damning criticism from a distinctly Largo-like art teacher, who applies his critical eye to the pieces his students bring in rather than actually grading them (a good target for satire, but of course, so is the opposite, as we shall learn). Evoking fond memories of their bonding in "Moaning Lisa," Lisa encourages her mother to take a night class for painting.

It's here that we meet the miraculously friendly (but enjoyably contemptible) adult art instructor Mr. Lombardo, played by Jon Lovitz with typical verve. The framing of their scenes together is delightful because he's so much shorter than she is. He praises Marge's portfolio highly (then immediately thereafter makes clear that he has positive things to say for everything, labeling the handiwork of a man painting a handrail "brilliant!" and a generic advertisement sign "another triumph!"... then later telling Marge in gruff tones "I don't take praise very well!") and encourages her to submit her best work -- a lyrical examination of Homer asleep on the couch, beer in hand -- for the Springfield Art Exhibition, where she wins first prize, thus capturing the attention of -- who else? -- Monty Burns.

The involvement achieved in the short running time here is quite impressive, with not one or two but three stories skillfully integrated; the major component of the plot, Burns' need for a portrait to be unveiled at the wing of the local museum that's named in his honor, isn't introduced for twelve minutes. Burns hires Marge to paint him, to find his "inner beauty" (the shot of him in geometric shame form, as Lombardo taught her to observe, is truly unnerving). Seeing Burns and Smithers in the Simpsons' home is nothing new, but it is handled with special grace here, when it becomes clear as it would only a few other times that there is validity to Marge's final analysis of Montgomery as a frail and lonely man whose power, anger, and influence are all hot air. We see Burns more than ever here as a person deflated to simplicity, reading the funnies with Smithers ("Ah Ziggy, will you ever win?" is one of his all-time greatest lines), bellowing darkly "Once again, the wheel has turned" after something altogether quite minor has happened (with sinister background music assisting him), indulging himself by calling his participation in the creative process "male modeling." And of course, we see Burns in the nude when Marge accidentally opens the bathroom door while he's preparing for a board meeting, and suddenly he's shriveled to something so far from the man of stunning wealth who rules his plant with an iron fist. Director Jim Reardon, Marge, and the viewers all take great note of the fact that what's significant in this scene -- and the reason Burns is angry at the intrusion -- is not the fact that he is stripped of clothing but the fact that he is exposing himself as a mere mortal, far away from business suit and desk.

This is also one of the few times that Waylon Smithers is a character and not a joke. His best moment in the series may be his ridiculous knocking on the Simpsons' door, his monologue about Burns being his "best friend" is sad beyond belief, his charming explanation of the Beatles to Mr. Burns is straight off the back of a Capitol LP ("pop combo"). And his faint is a total success.

To get back to "uncorrupted" Marge, the writers allow her to get angry in this episode, thus letting Julie Kavner really perform as Marge in a dramatic but ridiculous scene of her knocking whipped cream out of Homer's paws and proclaiming Mr. Burns a "mean little SOB." "I thought there was some good in everybody until I met him," she moans, aware of the herculean task ahead of her. It's at this highly opportune time that a letter comes from Ringo Starr, who has finally received the painting Marge sent to him in the '60s and has "hung it on me wall." This gives Marge the boost to stay up through the night and finish her now-scrapped painting, running through idea after idea while a brilliant cue of "It Don't Come Easy" plays. But the montage is nothing compared to the mischief of Marge and Homer's exchange after the letter from Ringo comes. Homer prods her on to keep going, and Marge says sweetly "Okay, Homer. If you think I can..."

Not touched on in this review so far is the first act of the episode, the first of many "Homer is fat" stories, but a very good one nevertheless which brushes neatly with the central plotline but never really integrates with it. It has a number of great bits: The Mt. Splashmore jingle screamed by Krusty and his audience ("I want to go to Mt. Splashmore / Take me take me take me take me now! / NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!"), Lisa telling Homer the seat is back as far as it will go, Bart and Lisa using an apparently tired and true method to cut in line, the legendary shots of Homer getting caught in the waterslide, Marge's attempted softening of the blow ("You do have big bones"), Homer's dieting attempts ("Hello, taste?"), and his exercise methods, frightening the cat as the weights he's trying to lift fall off one by one. Even though this story opens the episode and it's quite good, despite a notable lack of closure, it is an unfortunate early example of the later trend of placing two unconnected stories in a single episode, and moreover of the even less appealing tendency for the first act of an episode to have nothing to do with the rest.

Nothing to forgive, but all is forgiven anyway by the final scene, when Marge's painting is unveiled. What's impressive about the scene is that it isn't funny. The strangeness of Marge's painting isn't played for laughs or even sheer eccentricity; it's an active link to and extension of what the audience has witnessed, the presentation of Burns at his sickliest and least inflated. It's also a typically astute Simpsons portrayal of people dealing in fickle ways with their reaction to what they see. ("He's bad, but he'll die. So I like it.") And as solidly absurd yet serious as the sequence is, there is a punch line. A good one, too. (A+)


#219: LISA'S SUBSTITUTE
Written by Jon Vitti
Directed by Rich Moore

Hard to know where to begin talking about something like this. If any single episode most clearly reflects the creative passion and enthusiasm for characterization that went into the early part of the series, this is it. And there's no way around what may come off as hyperbole: It's the fullest, most emotional, most painfully truthful, and best episode of the series. And probably not just of this series. I could make convincing arguments that certain episodes of other series might be serious competition as the best bit of dramatic television ever, but I doubt it's worth the trouble; this show has the wallop and complexity of few feature films. Critic Richard Corliss even included it in his top ten movies of the year for 1991, and he did so with good reason.

The episode contains the least diluted picture of both Bart and Lisa as characters that we are ever likely to receive. Both are feverish nonconformists, both startlingly mature in markedly different ways, and each is more or less incapable of understanding the other... yet. But one of the many things "Lisa's Substitute" underlines with its Bart-runs-for-class-president subplot is how much the two of them are actually the same. Bart's accidental ambition, his conviction and carefree onslaught (the signs are priceless) against opponent Martin "I'm aware of his work" Prince, and his total command of those around him ("What have I told you about encouraging him?") are a joy to witness, and frequent pans up above to Lisa's parallel experiences of equal or greater bliss are revelatory, as is the final bitterness of Bart's defeat, an interesting comparison to Lisa's much more shattering climactic disillusionment. What was it Bleeding Gums said about real problems?

The true matter of importance, of course, is Lisa's story: her introduction -- after Ms. Hoover is taken ill with Lyme disease -- to miraculously inspiring substitute Mr. Bergstrom, a wild and charismatic fireball out of left field. Lisa, who is established beautifully here (the episode opens with her glued to a book while chaos reigns around her), is immediately smitten. He has an obvious effect on the class a whole, but he does something to Lisa. It's that rare moment in the teacher-student interaction. He reaches out and they connect.

It isn't an unusual story. Crushes on teachers are a more than regular sitcom plot device. Even if that were all this episode was, it would be impressive simply due to how perfectly the writing and performing (Yeardley Smith gives one of the best voiceover performances ever in this episode) of Lisa strikes the balance between premature adulthood and blushing youth. There's something inherently poignant about unrequited love, particularly as impossible as that for a teacher; Linus' infatuation with his beloved Ms. Othmar is one of the funniest and most quietly moving storylines in "Peanuts."

But this episode builds on the idea in two ways. To begin with, Lisa's connection with Bergstrom results in large part not from her romantic feelings for him (which do exist) but because of her lack of a father figure, her isolation from and disgust with Homer, which is one of the major continuing conflicts of the series. Second, by the third act it becomes apparent that the episode has little to do with Lisa having a crush and plenty to do with Lisa's loneliness in her family and everywhere, her continuing need for a kind of nurtured individuality that no school can provide. While naturally she is in a loving family, she is already finding it difficult to relate to them, and generally in ways that are not as pat as later writers strongly wanted them to be. It isn't about eating meat or being Christian or being a small-minded nuclear family. It's about outgrowing her own home. One of the foremost strengths of "Lisa's Substitute" is that it is obviously a component of a continuing story. Even though everyone is all smiles in the last few scenes, virtually no closure is attempted. It can be seen now that the episode forms the middle of a trilogy that began with "Moaning Lisa" and ends, beautifully, with "Lisa's Wedding."

During the first act, an explicit notification of Lisa's budding feelings for the teacher is not given, nor is it necessary. It's in Lisa's voice in the very first scene, its hauntingly real combination of the naive and disarmingly mature. As Bergstrom circles the room playing a guitar and singing "Home on the Range," Janey passes along a crude but hilarious drawing of Bergstrom as "the singing dork." Of course, it's in Lisa's hand when the sub spots it and he wants to know if she drew it. Her answer is a classic moment of universal recognition, the attempt to be older and more cool-minded than anyone ever could be in such a situation: "I would never do anything like that!" she explains. "It was just one of those immature people who instead of building themselves up --" Before she can finish, Bergstrom expresses his great fondness for the drawing and Lisa admits she's beginning to wish she had drawn it. It's astoundingly accurate flirtation not filtered out through the cartoon world but completely direct, whatever the limitations of the Korean animation house may have been. That's a trend for the course of this episode in particular, the total lack of obstruction between raw emotion and audience. This comes to light most obviously in three other sequences, all of which have the ability to sober with their power, something that could never in a thousand gazillion years be said for any episode of The Simpsons post-1996.

The first sequence of the three comes at the end of the first act, after Lisa's complete identification with Bergstrom is made obvious when Charlotte's Web reduces them both to tears. (Note that in later seasons, the writers wouldn't have dared to show Lisa enjoying a children's book; much too normal.) The Simpsons then proceeds to do the same thing to its viewers. Bergstrom goes around the classroom asking everyone to show off their "talent." He comes to Lisa and sees her saxophone case and asks her to play something; her response is like that of a frightened animal. "Please don't make me do it." Bergstrom is eventually persuaded: "Okay, but you owe me something special." That afternoon, after Lisa overhears (in a brilliant GRADUATE parody) Bergstrom rebuffing the advance of Mrs. Krabappel, she gives him something special indeed: She goes out to the baseball diamond and plays beautifully for her new hero; he reaches the window and, once again, they connect. The lighting and staging of the scene is beyond words. And I want to digress for a moment to talk about something else connected with this scene.

This moment -- one of the most deeply affecting and important in the run of The Simpsons -- is cut in American syndicated prints. It ruins the flow of the story, ruins the pacing, removes one of the emotional highlights, and of course further serves the contingent that wants The Simpsons to be nothing but nonstop laffs. There's a reason fifth-season episodes are not hurt by the syndication cuts; there was enough dumb and pointless shit in those episodes that you could take out a few more minutes without hurting anything. (Horrible episodes like "Bart Gets an Elephant" and "Homer Loves Flanders" may have actually been aided by cuts, since they are now shorter and thus considerably less hellish.) But the butchering and compression of something like "Lisa's Substitute" is incompetent and horrifying. The episode without this scene is not the same episode. You can fall in love with it anyway... but that does not give an excuse to disfigure it.

Act two begins with another unforgettable sequence of very human Lisa, as she explains to her mother her crush on Bergstrom (the last thing she thinks of when she goes to sleep, the first when she wakes up) and is dismissive and annoyed by Marge's claims that she feels the same way about Homer. (Lisa has another wonderful moment with Marge later when Marge mentions that Bergstrom can come to dinner and Lisa has a thousand questions in response.) Shortly afterward, the Homer element is introduced when Bergstrom compliments Lisa on her homework and asks if her father "helps" her with it. It's as if the chasm between the two adult men in her life has never been more evident; suddenly Lisa speaks as if she is incredibly bitter toward her father, implying that the only purpose he serves in the world is to "burp." She is nearly as disdainful of Bart as she and her idol watch his theatrics from a window, and seduced by Bergstrom's promise to her that there is a place she will go someday where she is fully appreciated, that she will then miss her brother. "I believe everything you say," she replies.

The bulk of the second act takes place in the Springfield Museum of Natural History, where Homer takes Lisa in the weeks ahead of its closure due to lack of funding. Nearly every shot and line during this long sequence is telling (exposing the stunning economy exhibited by the writers and directors on staff at the time). By coincidence, father and daughter run into Mr. Bergstrom, and the three of them all reach tipping points. Homer mistakenly believes he is being charming as he embarrasses Lisa, then only becomes worse once he belatedly realizes he's doing it, clearly insane with jealousy of Bergstrom (jealousy that manifests itself in a noticably different way than it might several seasons later). Lisa grows ever more disgusted with her dad, and ultimately is isolated from him almost entirely. An intriguing series of shots has Homer and Bergstrom each holding one of her hands, then Homer lets go and teacher and student walk away. Bergstrom casts Homer a worried glance after this happens, then gets him aside at a table in the museum to try and talk him into some degree of sense about the person his daughter is becoming. Homer is deliberately oblivious to the seriousness of Bergstrom's insight, but his over-the-top response gets surprisingly close to the truth (without quite the right emotional pathway): "She looks around and sees everybody else's dad with a good education, youthful looks, and a clean credit record, and thinks, 'Why me?'" The eternal struggle of Homer's life, it seems, is the responsibilty of being needed. It isn't simply a matter of Lisa's rejection of her father, but more so Homer's neglect of someone he doesn't understand as well as he should. All very familiar in one way or another to anyone, I would think. The seriousness of the conversation is intensified by the fact that Lisa, though far in the background, can obviously hear every word. As this would imply, director Rich Moore's job all through the museum scene is exquisite.

The second act closes with Lisa, bow in hair, preparing to ask Bergstrom for a dinner at the Simpson home; she opens the door to discover Ms. Hoover, gravely erasing Bergstrom's name from the blackboard. She's completely lost as class begins, in much the same way Bart was when he and Lisa went to see "Sideshow Bob's Cavalcade of Whimsy" a season earlier. Hoover predictably complains that Bergstrom didn't follow her lesson plans, and asks "What did he teach you?" Lisa's nonconformity reaches its peak when she screams "That life is worth living" and runs out of the classroom, to Bergstrom's now-empty apartment, and then to a train station, where something wholly remarkable happens.

The train station scene cannot hope to be summarized. By its very nature, in fact, it begs not to be. It's not humorless but it is more than likely the most starkly dramatic sequence in the run of The Simpsons. Every line is heartbreaking, some on paper and some in the way Yeardley Smith and Dustin Hoffman read them.

Bergstrom: "Hey, Lisa!"
Lisa: [out of breath] "Hey Lisa, indeed!"
Bergstom: "What? What is it?"
Lisa: "Well... I mean... were you just gonna leave? Just like that?"
Bergstrom: "Oh... I'm sorry, Lisa. It's the life of the substitute teacher. He's a fraud. Today he's wearing gym shorts, tomorrow he's speaking French or pretending to know how to run a band saw or god knows what."
Lisa: [crying] "You're the best teacher I'll ever have."
Bergstrom: "That's not true. There'll be others."
Lisa: "Oh, please!"
Bergstrom: "No, I won't lie to you, I am the best. But... they need me over in the projects of Capital City."
Lisa: "But... I need you too."
Bergstrom: [regretfully] "That's the problem with being middle class. Anybody who really cares will abandon you for those who need it more."
Lisa: "I understand... Mr. Bergstrom, I'm gonna miss you."
Bergstrom: "Look, I'll tell you what." [begins writing note] "Whenever you feel like you're alone... like there's no one you can rely on... this is all you need to know."
Lisa: "Thank you, Mr. Bergstrom." [the train is boarding] "So I guess this is it. If you don't mind, I'll just run alongside the train as it speeds you from my life."

Bergstrom shouts from the window as the train races off: "It'll be okay! Just read the note!" The note is opened slowly; it reads "You are Lisa Simpson." If anyone hadn't fallen apart by then, that probably did it. The roughly two-second shot of that piece of paper is total devastation, so despairingly personal but unwaveringly true. To digress again, in an episode of the fifteenth season called "Smart and Smarter," the note is brought back for the sake of a cheap joke in a show that has reduced Lisa to a painful stereotype. It is as offensive as anything The Simpsons did in its later years, and basically the equivalent of vomiting all over an acheivemet as sterling as "Lisa's Substitute," which so unmistakably proves a committment to dramatic characterization the staff now denies. Perhaps Al Jean and the rest of the staff a decade later could be more readily equated with Bart in the Thanksgiving episode throwing Lisa's centerpiece into the fireplace. But that's probably giving them too much credit since Bart did show some redemption for what he did. If "Substitute" brings such bile flowing in a ridiculous way, it's a product of the passion instilled by the show itself. If they don't like being compared to this material, they shouldn't keep trying to make the show.

The final scenes of "Lisa's Substitute" are mature in another way, with Lisa finally erupting against Homer at the dinner table. On the internet, Homer's reply to the announcement of Bergstrom's departure -- "Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand" -- is frequently quoted as if it's a cute or witty remark. In fact, Homer is deliberately saying it to hurt Lisa; it's a line one is supposed to be repulsed by, which is why it's always confused me that fans have turned it into a catchphrase.

Lisa makes certain, for her part, that when she calls Homer a baboon at the table, it is known that she means it, and that when she runs upstairs, she is inconsolable by anyone... except Homer himself, a fact which Marge immediately picks up on ("You're not allowed to have hurt feelings right now"), ordering Homer to run to the one who needs him. In the third of the scenes of true completely unobscured beauty in the episode, Homer's attempts at consolation fail miserably. He wonders if Lisa is sorry for what she said, which she is not, though she offers to forgive him if he'll go away. After he's reached bottom -- breaking her dollhouse, a goofup which she can only marvel at -- he turns on a music box (the music itself is enough to wreck the already emotionally exhausted person watching) and shows that he actually does understand and does care. "You'll have lots of special people in your life, Lisa," he says in a line that's permanently ingrained in my mind. "There's probably a place where they all get together and the food is real good and guys like me are serving drinks." Sensing that her dad grasps the situation, Lisa begins to relent, and then Homer strikes a home run by giving maybe the most sincere self-appraisal he will ever offer: "Maybe I can't explain all this... but I can fix your dollhouse for you. At least I'm good at monkey work." They connect in their tentative and strange way again, but the episode thankfully stops short of allowing Homer to fill the hole Mr. Bergstrom left. Lisa still misses him, still probably let Homer off because she loves him and not because she actually feels he deserves it (which, to be fair, he does not). This gave the show a continued complex situation to deal with between the two characters before resolving it in "Lisa's Wedding" four years later.

I don't know how well I've stated everything about this episode, which means a great deal to me and which I'm really at a loss to review. I've known it so well for so long, and have such fondness for everything in it, that it's hard for me to know what to say and what not to say. And there are so many things I missed above. Some of Ralph's earliest lines and some of his few genuinely funny ones: "You have Lyme disease. We miss you." Bart's wonderful "You're right, Mom; I think they're drifting apart" when Marge begins to bug Homer about his relationship with Lisa and Homer looks to Bart as an out. Bart on class prez election day as the classic populist -- "Voting's for geeks," Nelson opines. "You got that right!" Bart happily replies. And finally, Mrs. Krabappel's ridiculous enthusiasm for Martin as the president. "Would you like another recount?"

With my own marble-mouthed confusion, I have to look to the past for a moment for a circa-1991 reaction to the episode that summarizes it perfectly. "One of the important themes of this show was to respect people as they are and not try to mold them into the ideal images that we want them to be. The main example is of course Lisa's need for understanding throughout the episode. However, just as important, except slightly more hidden, is the fact that she must accept her parents and brother as they are." Acceptance and the pain of rejection are understood by The Simpsons to be as vital to an eight year-old as to an adult.

I began writing these second season reviews hoping that I would let the episodes speak for themselves and not start comparing them to the mutated claptrap of later years, but looking at something like this it's hard to see the creators' constant statements that the show is as good as its ever been as anything but self-conscious denial. I'm open to people having whatever opinion they wish, but I really don't know how a person could watch "Lisa's Substitute" and not react as harshly as I do to The Simpsons as it stands, grotesquely and malignantly, in prime time today. They can dismiss those who stick by the early years as "nerds" however much they want; it's just a display of how willing they are to run away from the realization that creating a TV show isn't supposed to be easy, that The Simpsons was not intended to be a wacky comedy, and that they have already taken their characters as far as they can go without obstructing them. Basically, that they can work and work and work for a hundred more years and will never create anything as sublime as this stunning half hour of television. That they don't need to; this would be enough for all of them to be remembered forever. It will stay in the minds of the audience for decades after "Saddlesore Galactica" fades into obscurity. And god fucking dammit if it still doesn't make me cry the four hundredth time. (A+)


#220: WAR OF THE SIMPSONS
Written by John Swartzwelder
Directed by Mark Kirkland

Any episode after "Lisa's Substitute" would be something of a letdown, but "War of the Simpsons" holds up the series with as much consistency as can be expected. Much like "Dead Putting Society," it can't be taken seriously as a great model of characterization (Homer is oddly venomous and irresponsible in the second act), but it is still as much a work of great comic imagination and energy as any of the best second-season shows.

The story is the major weak point, seemingly lifted from the annals of The Honeymooners or, for that matter, The Flintstones. Homer gets drunk and makes an ass of himself at a party that Marge is holding up as an important token for their social lives. The kids are sent to bed (even though Lisa wants to hear "the witty banter of sophisticated adults" and Homer would like Bart to show off "that thing you do that's so cute") and Ned shows up to mix drinks. Within a couple of minutes, Homer is toasted, ranting and raving at a man he doesn't know, staring at Maude's tits, and worst of all, being cheered on by Barney! He's face down on the floor by the end of the night, and Marge, predictably, is livid. They go out to the car to discuss the problem with the Mexican Hat Dance playing loudly so that the kids won't know they're fighting (Bart: "They're fighting again" Lisa: "That music always sends a chill down my spine"). In the most inventive scene of the episode, Homer recounts his own memories of the previous evening, leading into a brilliantly formed Algonquin Round Table parody that slowly dissolves into an all-too-real accusatory reenactment of what actually happened. (Later attempts to recreate the excitement of this sequence, such as the muscular-Homer dream in "$pringfield," are feeble by comparison.)

Homer actually retains some amount of dignity for the early part of the episode. In fact, this being a party at which alcohol is served, the reactions of the guests are probably less reasonable than Homer's slightly outlandish stunts. He just goes a little too far and away from consciousness, but he is a man about it; he goes and tells Bart not to follow his example, then follows Marge to church. Nevertheless, Marge's anger at her husband's actions are quite reasonable (though one would not mind the marriage being portrayed as a bit less one-sided; this is emphasised by the funny but silly later scene that has Marge spending hours reciting all of the things Homer does wrong... if it's that bad, why bother?) and her suggestion that they attend Rev. Lovejoy's marriage retreat "at Catfish Lake" are not out of line.

On the way to the lake, Homer learns from "those weirdos in the worm store" all about the massive General Sherman. It's an amusing sequence, but the most unsatisfying component of the episode is actually Homer's sudden obsession with fishing, which seems to have invented just to serve the episode's very sitcom-ish purpose. It plays with rural clichés and does so more than adequately, but Homer's determination to catch the enormous catfish to achieve "fame and fortune," nor is the way that he finally does it. In fact, the scenes that have Homer unable to focus on what Marge is saying to him as she chides him after discovering his plans to catch Sherman (to be fair, his apology is as out of character as his initial behavior) and the moment when a fishing pole "accidentally" pulls him out to the lake are probably the most ludicrous moments in the second season. On the other hand, the wrapup of the fish story is quite sweet. Homer throws the fish back and exclaims "I gave up fame and breakfast for my marriage, and you're telling me this marriage is in trouble?" It's completely ridiculous, as if some such simple action could repair something as big as a relationship, but the strangeness of the idea helps itself out; if you've accepted the rest, you may as well accept the conclusion.

The marriage retreat itself is funny to a point, but Homer gets most of the best lines and does by far the most acting. His sarcastic "bowling phrases" remark in response to Lovejoy's catchphrase-mongering is wonderful, and his reactions to Marge's tirade are believable and well-executed. Ned and Maude's contributions are pathetic, and Helen is introduced then completely wasted (and it should be remembered that Helen could actually offer a counterpoint to Marge's endless list of Homer's imperfections, since she's the only character who actually saw Marge with Jacques in "Life on the Fast Lane"). The parody of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? is too obvious and less successful than the similar scene in the later episode "Brother from the Same Planet," though the voice performances are hysterical. And the symbolic grace of the "fall backwards and let your partner catch you scene" is inescapable, since Marge has to ask if she must do it considering that Homer has gone missing.

Homer continues to get an unusual proportion of good lines up to the conclusion, and all are well in keeping with his personality, which is odd because the things he's doing are so unlike him. He thinks as he gets close to catching Sherman about the fish making him famous, so that he'll be "right up there with... the bald guy on the cable fishing show." But the juxtaposition is startling. He sounds like the Homer we know, but what the hell is he doing here? It's surprising how apt it seems when, at the close of the episode, the man at the bait shop describes Homer as a legend: "seven feet tall, with arms like tree trunks!"

While Marge and Homer are gone, Abe is left in charge of Bart and Lisa, or vice versa, and this subplot ends up having a monopoly on the episode's best moments. From the first thing Grampa says ("I can dress myself"), it's quite perfect: Bart bosses Abe around, taking advantage of what he perceives as his clueless frailty ("you're allowed to smoke cigars?") and by the grocery store scene, even Lisa is taking advantage of him. The coffee scene has one of the best pieces of Bart acting ("FOR THE LAST TIME, YES!"), and the wild party he throws later is chaos of a more refined and enjoyable nature than the emotional turmoil at the marriage retreat, which has too often the feel of going through the TV show motions. Nothing in the A story has the endearing spontaniety, for instance, of Nelson for no apparent reason stealing one of Homer's ties (the episode does introduce Nelson's "ha ha," which, though an amusing hook, is an ominous sign of the later over-reliance on superficial characterization). The party closes with the great classic moment of the entire episode, when Abe -- again, as in "Old Money," showing himself as not a wrinkled stereotype but a full and rich character himself -- fakes crying to make the kids guilty, thus convincing them to clean up themselves. When they learn the truth at the end, after Abe gleefully announces, Bart's stunned "I'll never trust another old person" gets closer than anything else in this episode to honest comic bliss, and it's the most earned laugh of all. (A-)


#221: THREE MEN AND A COMIC BOOK
Written by Jeff Martin
Directed by Wes Archer

This, on the other hand, is an episode that earns every laugh, and does so with a fervor and abandon new to The Simpsons. Although a cousin of episodes like "Lisa's Substitute" and "Bart Gets an F" in its character-driven aspects, the episode in tone resembles "Bart the General" much more closely, as it provocatively and unflinchingly infiltrates the private world of a ten year-old boy, with shocking aplomb and considerable self-assurance. And it can be accurately stated that everything that works in the episode works because of Bart.

This is not an "ideas" episode. The situations it is built around are almost threateningly basic: Bart spots a copy of Radioactive Man #1 which is $100, Bart decides to do whatever is necessary to buy it, Bart works for a nutty old lady for a week but only raises fifty cents; Bart finally collaborates with two others in the purchase of the comic; the three, after reading it, are enslaved in a bitter dispute over who will take it home which descends to violence and tying someone to a chair. Everything that occurs is in some way an outgrowth of Bart's very real growing pains; the humor is markedly different from that which is now associated with The Simpsons, wringing its comedy out of more grounded and substantial things that can be a source of much more than mere simple laughter. There aren't many jokes per se, just hilarious details. For instance, Mrs. Glick, the old lady Bart slaves under while trying to earn money, is made funny by the conviction of the script and animators, and most of all, of Cloris Leachman, who provides a remarkable voice for the role.

The final act, with co-conspirators Bart, Milhouse, and Martin turning against one another in Bart's treehouse, manages to gain both menace and painful humor not from exaggeration but from an absolute committment to realism. This is handy because it shows that the early fixation in The Simpsons with the illusion of truth could cut more than one way; the episode, unlike other installments like "Moaning Lisa" that work with heightened reality, does not stun with its raw and multi-dimensional characterization. Instead, it offers a sense of danger, a profound awareness of how Bart as a character is affected by his surroundings and by his own (at times shallow) determinations, and points ahead to the impressively willful and sustained insanity of the astonishing "Blood Feud." Through the writers' close and careful identification with Bart (and by extension the audience), they make every turn of events, every funny sideline, and every frustrating situation in "Three Men and a Comic Book" feel natural in an almost subconscious way. It's potent like few documents of pained youth, a fact the staff indulges itself in pointing out with a brief Wonder Years parody, emphasizing the juxtaposition of the alarming sincerity of The Simpsons with the posturing and forged emotion of that slick and acclaimed show.

Aside from Bart, the star of "Three Men and a Comic Book" is director Wes Archer, who illustrates a total solidarity with the script and characters, like a great actor turning out a definitive portrait of a particular role. Archer's first great achievement here is the design of the episode as a product entirely of Bart's perspective, which is a big part of what sets it apart from equally impressive but less internal and more dramatic shows like "Lisa's Substitute," which ably juggles perspectives with considable frequency for an entirely different effect. "Three Men" runs start to finish in Bart's universe, and this is reinforced by nearly all of Archer's shot compositions and many of his editing and pacing choices. (Watch the Mrs. Glick scenes in particular; the shots of Bart on the roof and the NOSFERATU "iodine" bit are good examples.) Archer enjoys an equal awareness of when not to be anonymous, enlivening the nighttime treehouse confrontation with a seriousness that could only be accepted thanks to the episode's singular devotion to Bart. This potentially over-the-top scene is instead here an outgrowth of Bart's universal pains, as the treehouse triad approaches themes of power, dominance, rivalry, and even sexuality. Homer's dismissal of the seriousness of what's occurring in the treehouse is played off as a joke but feels close to a confirmation that this is a moment when Bart is reaching in some small way for adulthood, that he is now truly on his own, and all an outgrowth over nothing more than a comic book.

If anyone had been tempted to dismiss the treehouse scenes as a mere satirical joke, the final sequence -- and the official capper to the second and greatest season of The Simpsons -- would give the lie. Using shadows and ethereal lighting in a manner never seen in the series before or since, Archer offers an elegant and beautiful aftermath to a stormy horror tale. More has happened to Bart than anyone realizes, himself included, portions of his mind and behavior exposed that were new to him and to us. Now, he is a child again, but... for how long? (A+)


#222: BLOOD FEUD
Written by George Meyer
Directed by David Silverman

If "Blood Feud" is less affecting in many ways than "Three Men and a Comic Book," that is the price it pays for being an adventurous, surreal masterpiece, one of the most unprecedented and brilliant achievements in the history of The Simpsons, and a genuine oddity in itself. Appropriately, it was scheduled outside of the second season as a summer "bonus" episode (with two problematic shows -- both more flawed than almost any regular season two episode -- held over to the following year). The episode, closing perhaps the finest season of any television series, is a payoff for the rigorous work done throughout the year on characterization. It is an application of everything learned through logical extensions of the show's premise in the twenty-one prior shows. Like "Bart's Dog Gets an F," it features every character played out perfectly, every secondary character depicted with simultaneous flatness and realism. It earns its comedy and, in contrast to the episodes of the first season, no longer has to rely on the endearingly mundane to do so. It's able to take an unlikely situation and make it real, then press forward in another direction (with dreamlike logic) with increasing strangeness, but is devoted to its story and characterization and pushes it with such conviction and consistency that the final, almost dadaist insanity with which it ends is made plausible. The Simpsons essentially does impossible things together, fusing the otherworldly with the firmly grounded.

Everything in "Blood Feud" has resonance and all the comedy blindsides the viewer because of all the tireless polishing of characterization over the course of the season. It's through that single-minded obsession with character above all else -- above story, above comedy -- that an incredible episode like this could have the potential of not only being made but working perfectly.

The show opens with fairly unusual excitement; Mr. Burns is dying, and only Bart can save him; he's persuaded to do so thanks to Homer's cynical opportunism when he discovers that Burns and Bart share a blood type. Homer is carefully kept human here; the violent lurches of character observed in "Dead Putting Society" are judiciously avoided. Bart is scared, uncertain, and it no longer has to be emphasized to be clear. Even the Mr. Burns witnessed here could not be plausible without "Brush with Greatness." When Burns' life is saved and the Simpsons receive nothing more than a thank-you note (leading to the priceless "Do SOMETHING!" "Yes, dad" water sprinkler scene), Homer is enraged and, with Bart's help, composes a vitriolic and juvenile letter to his boss alleging, among other things, that Mr. Burns possesses "bony girl-arms."

As Bart says, Homer is "an emotional guy," and the well-established theme of his rapid changes in temperament is harnessed brilliantly for a dream sequence that begins with Homer strangling Mr. Burns and ends with him eating dessert. The change of heart does not impress his son, who has already sent the letter. A mad dash follows to recover the note before Burns sees it; in the course of the operation, Homer hoses down a mailbox, kicks a mailbox, poses as Mr. Burns, and sneaks into his boss' office, all to no avail. Burns sees the letter and, now hard at work on his autobiography Will There Ever Be a Rainbow?, sends Simpson off to be brutally beaten. What happens after that is so intoxicatingly weird it's virtually pointless to try and recount verbally. It is the cartoon equivalent to Talking Heads' "The Big Country" or Yo La Tengo's "Blue Line Swinger." The hardened investigation of the Simpsons' reality becomes so bleak that the only way to escape is through insanity.

The family shown is not only in character as individuals but as a group. The same overlapping dialogue, palpable comfort and rapport, and ease of relation glimpsed in the car scene of "Old Money" is repeated here, yet again -- in one case -- in the worst of circumstances, here with Homer egging Bart on as he suggests lurid insults to put in the letter to Burns, returning to the show's working class comment on the unity discovered in the unwholesome. More like the Waltons, indeed. (But if anyone doesn't find the "blood type" sequence with Marge and the kids more touching than anything ever on The Waltons, I give up.)

In the shorter term, "Blood Feud" is simply hilarious. Taken with the whole of the first three seasons, it's a revelation and probably the most innovative episode, now as then. It proves single-handedly to idiots like Ian Maxtone-Graham that cartoon comic craziness can be achieved on The Simpsons without so much as a slight compromise or breach of character. Not a false note is hit in the piece, and it goes as far out on a limb as any of Mike Scully's weak Simpsons travelogues. With the final two Brooks/Groening/Simon episodes in dire illness from which they never truly recovered, this is the summary of their work on the show. It's a dress rehearsal for the third season's brilliant application by Al Jean and Mike Reiss of character depth to pure comedy. Even Jean and Reiss, whose work that year was magnificent, had a hard time living up to the potential of something as stunning in such surprising ways as "Blood Feud." The Simpsons looks into an abyss here that television tends to avoid, that hazy and dangerous area of wondrous, almost musical disorientation in the vein of the final episode of The Prisoner. Maybe "Lisa's Substitute," "Moaning Lisa," "Bart Gets an F," and "Life on the Fast Lane" -- their four finest episodes -- would be enough to prove this, but "Blood Feud" as a final triumph shows with little doubt that Sam Simon and James L. Brooks were the most gifted individuals The Simpsons ever had the helm, and surely the ones who understood it the most. If only they could have stayed on forever. (A+)

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