Review: The Simpsons “You Won’t Believe What This Episode is About – Act Three Will Shock You!”

Overview

After a trip to the dog park, Homer accidentally leaves Santa’s Little Helper inside of a hot car. Fortunately, a firefighter comes to unlock the locked car but the social damage has been done and now Homer is a pariah.  Even Homer’s own family is turning against him so when a reputation doctor known as Theo (Kumail Nanjiani) introduces himself as a popular solution, Homer jumps at the chance. We come to find out that there are a number of people in Theo’s group with similar public disparages and that Theo has a new software solution that can help eliminate all instances of public embarrassment on the internet.

Theo convinces the members of his group to break into a data center but when Homer learns of Theo’s ulterior motives, Homer reverses course and opts to read an apology letter from Lisa. Theo gets punished.

Our Take

The Simpsons are playing 4-D chess with this week’s episode. For starters, the episode largely focuses on cancel culture and somehow convinces Kumail Nanjiani (who was part of The Problem with Apu documentary) to be the guy who helps those who have been canceled for making mistakes. Very interesting. That said, this week’s episode shows the pluses and minuses of how the producers of this show has reacted to the aforementioned documentary up until now.

For starters, this week’s episode has marked the first in the history of The Simpsons to have every animation creative lead staffed by a woman in animation. The episode is written by Christine Nangle and is directed by Jennifer Moeller, joined by assistant director Debbie Spafford, lead timer Esther Lee and background layout lead HeeJin Kim. That’s a plus. This week also featured the debut of Jay Pharoah as the voice of Drederick Tatum, once voiced by Hank Azaria who opted to remove himself from all roles from The Simpsons where he voiced a BIPOC. This would be a negative for two reasons. One, Jay’s portrayal of Drederick non-withstanding (it wasn’t great), I wish the show would have instead gone the way of Family Guy and get Jay to voice brand-new characters that would’ve been just as serviceable as the “blink and you’ll miss” line that Drederick gives very early on in the episode. The other negative, is again, the needlessness to have voice actors of any race, gender, or background, only subscribe to the roles that are exact depictions which kind of defeats the purpose of acting in the first place. To be fair, that isn’t in the control of the producers, but rather it’s now “woke” actor Hank Azaria.

Overall, season 33 has been a strong one for The Simpsons, however, this week’s episode feels like mish-mash message on a hot topic that doesn’t quite get to the point as to what it wants to say. There was a time when The Simpsons didn’t apologize to anybody, and for the most part, this “era” is considered the high point of the franchise. If The Simpsons truly is in a renaissance period, then, is it really The Simpsons anymore? I think this episode perfectly encapsulates a lot of the struggle that the show’s producers are fielding about that very topic. We’ve seen better responses in the past.

Oh, and don’t leave your kids and pets in hot cars.