Less than a year before they landed their own series and gave Dr Marvin Monroe an electrifying taste of his limits as a family counselor, the Simpsons had an encounter with another unfortunate therapist in one of their last ever outings on The Tracey Ullman Show, with much the same results. "Family Therapy" plays like a proto "There's No Disgrace Like Home", only here, in lieu of smiting his family by pawning the beloved television set, Homer has lured them to counselor's office with the false promise of Frosty Chocolate Milkshakes (remember when those were a staple of The Simpsons universe)? Tensions within the family have clearly reached a breaking point but, as with "No Disgrace", the Simpsons rediscover their sense of family unity through the joys of redirecting their internal anguishes at an unsuspecting stranger. Like "No Disgrace", there is also the suggestion that Homer's brutish discipline tactics are the root cause of the family's dysfunctionality.
"Family Therapy" is an unsettling Simpsons short for multiple reasons:
- Homer's head disappears at multiple points throughout the short (see above). Pay close attention during any shot where Bart is raiding the mint bowl and you'll notice that Homer becomes momentarily decapitated. Freaky.
- Bart eats too many piss-mints and regurgitates them back into the bowl. This, needless to say, makes for a thoroughly revolting visual gag, albeit not quite as vile as Homer's fishbait sarnie in "Gone Fishin".
- Lisa kicks the therapist in the shins and gets called a "borderline psychotic" for her troubles. Yes, you read that correctly, and you'd do well to remember that Lisa was quite the angry young punk back in her earliest incarnation. Overwhelmingly, the Ullman shorts tended to focus on Bart and his relationship with Homer, and Lisa didn't really get a whole lot of character development in all of that - her primary function was either to butt heads with Bart or to back him up as another rowdy urchin out to undermine adult authority in all its guises. She did come off as the more intelligent of the two older siblings (albeit not in an intellectual sense) and there was the occasional hint that she was more morally-grounded than Bart, but it wasn't until Season 1 of the series proper that the writers actually took the time to establish who Lisa was. The decision to give Lisa a saxophone seems to be the major turning point in terms of defining her character - her passion for blues music paved the way her more artistic, melancholic personality, and the incongruous sight of an eight-year-old girl wailing tirelessly through such an unwieldy instrument revealed her as a powerhouse with hidden depths. In her pre-saxophone days, however, Lisa's only means of self-expression was to violently gnash her teeth and pound innocent strangers in the shins. I think there's a lesson here about the value of encouraging creativity in children.
This therapist, B.F. Sherwood, is less odious than Dr Marvin Monroe, so you do kind of feel sympathy for him in having to deal with the Simpsons' primordial antics (note: his name is an obvious nod to behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, who is famous for his operant conditioning studies on rats and pigeons and is sometimes erroneously thought to have raised his own daughter in a laboratory apparatus - the Simpsons crew clearly have a fascination with Skinner, for they also named series regular Principal Seymour Skinner after him). What's really noteworthy about the character is the vague resemblance he bears to Homer, which may or may not be intentional - he's got Homer's trademark five o'clock shadow, but then it's hard to distinguish between what's a meaningful nod and what's yet another of Matt Groening's generic early character designs. Still, it makes sense in context for him to be another of Homer's doppelgangers. One of the running gags emerging throughout the Ullman shorts, which never really took off in the series proper, was that the Simpsons lived in a universe that was populated by Homers. There are still remnants of this in the series itself. Krusty the Clown, one of the few non-family characters to be introduced in the Ullman shorts, was deliberately designed to look like Homer in clown makeup (a fact that was never exploited or even acknowledged in the series until "Homie The Clown" of Season 6). Similarly, Bart's favourite comic book hero, Radioactive Man, looked like a buffer Homer in superhero garb. The underlying gag was that Bart had a propensity for idolising people in his father's image, unbeknownst to himself. Sherwood could pass for a slimmer, more successful version of Homer (in other words, he's a precursor to Herb Powell). Ostensibly, he's the voice of calm and reason, but it only takes a bit of capering from the Simpsons children to blow that facade and reveal the simian rage lurking underneath. And yet, Sherwood's most withering comment comes when he calls Homer out for his own failings as a parent: "Now you gonna bully me like you bully your kids?" In reaching out into the outside world and finding it filled with like-minded souls, Homer discovers not solidarity, but self-loathing, his every indiscretion reflected back at him in the accusatory glare of his mirror image. Sherwood sees through Homer, because underneath he's a Homer himself. Still, he redresses the problem that the family came to him for, namely that they don't know how to laugh any more. The Simpsons may have grown weary of one another, but finding themselves mutually cast out by authority, they find reaffirmation in each other's company; more importantly, in their shared understanding that the greatest pleasures in life are to be found in exposing the dysfunctionality that underpins every corner of upright society. The wider world rejects them, not because it's above them, but because it's every bit as prone to the same eccentricities, and truly, that is something from which to hone validation.
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