Review: The Simpsons “Full Heart, Empty Pool”

Overview

Homer and Grampa team up to create a new sport that rivals pickleball , until Homer kicks Grampa off.

Our Take

Coming up with random ideas for sports are all of the rage right now thanks to TV networks looking for more live programming and gambling websites letting you bet on anything that moves. The likes of Carjitsu, Pickleball, and slap fights, and competitive jump roping are just some of the one-time leisurely activities morphed into actual sports that you can find on both TV and social networks. Matt Stone and Trey Parker made a whole movie about this called Baseketball that is becoming increasingly ahead of it’s time in a lot of ways and now The Simpsons are checking in on with their take on the subject.

Unfortunately, I found that literally every beat of the episode was more or less lifted from Baseketball. Everything from the formation of the sport in backyards to the original creators (in this case Homer and Abe) having a squabble after one of them sells out to an organization that turns out to be evil seems to have been lifted from the aforementioned movie that was made in 1998. I usually expect a lot more originality from Jeff Westbrook-written scripts, but it wasn’t to be had here.

There were SOME bits of good news from an overall pastiche premise. The dialogue was well-written and the cameos from Andrew Luck, Megan Rapinoe, and Blake Griffin were solid. A special kudos should go out to Robert Smigel in the role of Razelton of which I hope is the first in a long line of recurring roles that Robert can contribute to the longest running animated sitcoms in primetime mainly because this is a guy that can deliver comedy in spades and can maybe even come in with scripts and punch-ups that could really help the show down the road.

This week’s episode really felt like a penultimate “just throw this one out there ” type of an effort that really didn’t deliver in the originality department but did in other ways. In fact, I actually preferred some of what was going on with Andrew and his white dad voiced by black voice actor Kevin Michael Richardson (I thought this was a no-no boys?) and would’ve enjoyed a whole episode that would’ve also explained why they keep changing this fucking kid’s name. Like wasn’t he Jeremy at one point?