Review: Bob’s Burgers ‘The Gayle Tales’

 

Spoilers Below:

Three-segment episodes are hard to pull off. Unless you’re a Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode, the odds of success are generally slim. Even for other non-Halloween Simpsons episodes, nothing is guaranteed.

Bob’s Burgers attempted this last season, with “The Frond Files,” a disjointed episode which I only scored as a 6.5. There was an improvement this time around, but not by much.

Linda’s sister Gayle showed up at the restaurant and the kids competed for a chance to accompany her to a cat circus, to get out of being grounded. The contest? Writing a short story about Gayle.

Gene’s tale featured a musical duo (Linda and Gene) that were discovered by a record exec (Louise) that only wanted to sign the elder one. Now without a partner, Gene teamed up with Gayle and bested Linda in a local competition, with both of them becoming famous afterward.

In Tina’s, “Lady Chatterteeth’s Lover,” Gayle, Tina, Louise, and Gene were poor sisters in colonial times. Gayle needed to get married before the others were allowed to, and Tina began searching for a mate for her oldest sibling. Bob showed up as a potential lover, and took her to a ball. Whilst dancing, the two fell for each other, and would have lived happily ever after, if it weren’t for Gayle’s true love, Scott Bakula, showing up.

In Louise’s, a Game of Thrones spoof, Gayle was a cat queen who was one day visited by a stranger that stole her cat dragons. Louise, a knight, stepped up to retrieve them. After a face-off with Linda (the thief) Louise & Gayle eventually won.

As for the contest, however, nobody won, because Gayle’s canceled date showed up to take her out & she accepted.

In Case You Missed It:

1) Next door store: A Ton in the Oven – Big and Tall Baby Clothes

2) Burger of the Day: Curd-Fect Strangers Burger (comes with cheese curds),

3) “Men can be named Stacy?! I love America!”

4) Linda’s warm-up lines: “The preposterous ostrich’s legs were monstrous” and “Sally Struthers’ other brother is her mother.”

5) Tina’s colonial dance was called “The Hiney Liney.”

6) Why Gene didn’t want his eyes gouged: “I need them for eye appointments!”

7) The reason for the kids’ grounding: a prank of theirs at the grocery store caused Linda to fall into a display of maxi-pads and fart.

8) Each of the stories needed to involve Gayle, cats, and Scott Bakula.

9) Bob’s Burgers couldn’t get Scott Bakula to voice himself? Lame.

In order to assess this episode properly, let’s take a look at the segments one at a time.

In Gene’s story (which, like his tale in “The Frond Files,” revolved around music) there was once again that separation between fiction and reality of which the Belcher boy is blissfully unaware. It followed a cookie-cutter success story of a spurned music partner who found fame with a new associate, and eventually triumphed over the original one. Gene is obviously very familiar with this type of situation, likely from his endless TV and film viewings, but his detachment from reality was illustrated in both the episodes main arc and segment subplot. You see, Gayle was simply an awful musician. Megan Mullally plays annoying brilliantly (as she is known to do in her career) and yet Gene still ate it up. You gotta admire the creativity and desire for uniqueness in both this story and Gene’s “Frond Files” one, but once again I felt the whole thing was a bit too silly – even by Bob’s Burgers standards. I would have enjoyed seeing a talent that Gayle possessed which surprisingly wowed the audience (after all, these stories are supposed to flatter her) but in the end she simply won because Gene was a skilled songwriter and because he wanted to butter her up.

Tina had the strongest story, mainly because it was authentically her, and she’s one of the most popular and loved characters on the show. It involved butts, her crush on Jimmy Jr., and was the most complex of the episode. In fact, it was so well-structured, that Linda feared that her precious Bobby would end up married to her sister. Well done, kid.

Louise’s, which I had high hopes for, also faltered in the end. The simplest explanation involves the fact that it had all the right pieces for success, but didn’t properly execute them. I think it was mostly due to Louise trying to pander to her aunt, thus sacrificing the elements that make Louise an interesting and entertaining character: her evil ways, her devious plans, and her general obnoxiousness.

As I previously mentioned, this episode was only a slight improvement over “The Frond Files,” and there’s one main reason why: the reveal in the end. In other words, the secret withheld from viewers – the reason the kids were grounded – was a better premise than the chaos during the school’s musical. It’s always amusing to see the kids misbehaving, and it was refreshing to see that the humiliation they caused Linda was mostly her own fault, and in the end she just laughed it off along with everyone else. It wasn’t that big of a deal.

This episode wasn’t much of a big deal either, so let’s just laugh it off and move on.