Review: The Simpsons “Girls Just Shauna Have Fun”

Overview (Spoilers Below):
When Lisa joins the high school marching band, she finds an unlikely mentor in Shauna Chalmers. Meanwhile, Homer becomes a craft beer brewer.

Our Take:
You better dust off your instruments because this week’s episode is marching its way to hilarity. We’re at the final stretch of the season, so I might as well get that introduction out of my system. But that doesn’t mean I won’t make up any more of these in the future.
In this episode, we see Lisa getting a taste of high school life when she is invited to join the marching band at Springfield High School. She encounters Shauna Chalmers, a typical ill-mannered high school teen who babysat Lisa and Bart. They later bond as sisters when Lisa discovers that Shauna is also passionate about music and an incredible drummer. Unfortunately, things take a massive turn when they get invited to a high school party by the football team. While this is going on, Homer enters the world of beer brewing thanks to Shauna’s father.
The episode oozes with jokes that poke fun at teenage personalities and even high school sports, particularly a marching band. You got your immature teen schtick from Shauna and a teen party that automatically gets crazy once the beer arrives. It’s a story that humorously reflects on high school from an elementary student’s perspective, particularly Lisa, leading up to her getting caught in a formulaic teen party scenario. However, the problem with that is that it offers nothing else beyond that. It’s a formulaic and miscalculated episode that relies heavily on its high school tropes instead of using them to craft a convincing story.
The episode’s plot is admittedly fitting, as it represents Lisa’s love for music, mainly the saxophone. So when she’s offered a spot in the high school marching band, she sees it as an opportunity to play with the big boys. However, the story’s primary focus is the sisterhood between Lisa and Shauna due to their love for playing music. Unfortunately, this happens to be my least favorite part of the episode.
Shauna is a despicable sarcastic teen who’s constantly mean to everyone, including her father, but does show tiny bits of respect to Lisa in her own way. Sadly, I had no respect for her because her personality was too annoying for me. I don’t mind rude characters as long as they have enough charm and development to make them tolerable for me. However, Shauna lacks the charisma needed to prevent me from punching her in the face. Not only that but the ending involving Lisa and Shauna reconciling after Shauna abandoned her at the party wasn’t executed very well.
Overall, “Girls Just Shauna Have Fun” is a fitting episode dedicated to Lisa’s passion for playing music. However, it later succumbs to the ordinary high school tropes it’s satirizing. As a result, it became a mildly uninspired episode filled with predictable elements and Lisa’s unlikable “big sister”. It isn’t without a few chuckle-worthy moments, including a nod to James Corden’s Late Late Show and a visual gag involving a movie that somehow reminds me of the 2019 film “Five Feet Apart”. Other than that, this episode is nowhere near as fun as I thought it would be.