In Defence of Another Simpsons Clip Show (aka Detached Tales of Modern Alienation)

Last time, when I gave my run-down on The Simpsons' very first stab at a clip show, "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" from Season 4, I made multiple references to my unlikely position in preferring the show's second clip show, the indifferently-titled "Another Simpsons Clip Show" of Season 6 (Episode 2F33), which first aired on September 25th 1994. To say that this is a minority opinion would be putting it awfully mildly, for the episode is by and far one of the most frowned-upon of the series' "classic" run. Erik Adams, in his review on The AV Club, is polite in his assessment but calls it a "knowingly empty vessel." On the episode's DVD commentary, the production crew joke that it has few fans and in lieu of discussing the episode itself, use the opportunity to take listeners through the writing process. Meanwhile, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide assess it as "as good as a clip show can be", inadvertently betraying their lack of enthusiasm in giving it a near-identical review to that which they'd previously awarded "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show". You won't hear many doting words about "Another Simpsons Clip Show" in general, so I guess I've set myself up to roll up my sleeves and provide probably the only really impassioned defence of this episode that you're ever going to come across.

First though, I want to draw attention to"The First Big Weekend", a 1996 single by Scottish indie duo Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton (better known as Arab Strap), which also featured on the band's debut album, The Week Never Starts Round Here. The five-minute song, which consists largely of a spoken word monologue read out by a half-bored Moffat, was not a commercial hit, but gained exposure via airplay on DJ John Peel's program on BBC Radio 1, where it made it to No. 2 in his coveted Festive 50. A different version of the song, in which the lyrics were heavily modified to spew off various dubious-sounding statistics, was featured in yet another Guinness advertisement in the "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign of the late 1990s (more on that later). In its original form, the song describes a largely uneventful weekend in the summer of 96. Ostensibly, it's a carefree celebration of the delights of being young and up for absolutely anything, but on closer examination the whole thing reeks of a potent existential despair, the wail of terminally idle souls looking ever more desperately for ways to kill time as they sit about waiting for their lives to begin. It's half celebration, half a cry for help. I don't know how much of this was autobiographical to Moffat and Middleton's own lives, but the lyrics are choc full of the kind of painstakingly tedious detail you don't get unless you are picking away slavishly from real-life, so I'm going to assume that it was a pretty accurate reflection of how they were living back then. The weekend does pick up considerably, however, when The Simpsons become a part of it:

"Sunday afternoon we go up to John's with a lot of beer in time to watch The Simpsons.

It was a really good episode about love always ending in tragedy, except of course for Marge and Homer.

It was quite moving at the end and to tell you the truth my eyes were a bit damp."

Although the dates of the big weekend in question are not specified within the lyrics, the song takes place during the European Football Championship of 1996, and at one point Moffat describes waking up to learn that England had beaten Scotland 2-0. That particular match took place on Saturday 15th June 1996, meaning that the Simpsons episode would have aired on 16th June. The Simpsons made its UK terrestrial debut on BBC a lot later that same year (having been held captive for years as a Sky Television exclusive), so obviously Moffat, Middleton and chums would have been watching the episode on Sky One. From his synopsis, it seems safe to assume that "Another Simpsons Clip Show" was the episode they watched, although my neurotic heart still craves confirmation on that point. For a while, I actually tried to get hold of a copy of the Sky TV Guide for June 1996, just to confirm once and if "Another Simpsons Clip Show" had indeed episode aired on the 16th (it would be an interesting twist if Moffat turned out to be describing another episode altogether), but copies of the guide proved to be more elusive than I'd imagined. For now we'll assume that it's "Another Simpsons Clip Show", and if anybody who still has their copy of Sky Guide from June 96 can confirm either way, then great. What's important is that Arab Strap refer to it as "a really good episode", meaning that they share my minority opinion (although I would remind Moffat and Middleton that Homer and Marge's marriage is a tragedy).

I will admit that I understand precisely where this episode's critics are coming from. It's an unpopular episode because it's a clip show and, unlike "So It's Come To This: Another Simpsons Clip Show", doesn't provide much of a wraparound narrative to get you at least partially invested in how the proceedings pan out - the family spend the overwhelming majority of the episode at the breakfast table talking about how developing romantic urges caused themselves and various other characters to be royally screwed over. It goes on as such, until it reaches its predictable conclusion, which is that Marge and Homer are still together, so I guess there's hope for anyone. In place of a framing story, the episode has its own unique gimmick that might seem either really fascinating or really odious, depending on your perspective. Very little of the animation within this episode is new - nearly all of the framing sequences were created by recycling and redubbing footage from previous episodes. This is is foreshadowed in an early sequence where Bart and Lisa watch an Itchy & Scratchy episode that Lisa identifies as being assembled, Frankenstein-like, from older material, "but it seems new to the trusting eyes of impressionable youth." Some fans may delight in the opportunity to test their Simpsons nerdom and identify which individual moments came from which episodes, but for the majority this gimmick will likely wear thin quickly, at which point the inclination seeps in to dismiss "Another Simpsons Clip Show" as dull. Now believe me, there was a time when I, too, felt very down on this episode and would let out a groan whenever it aired. What eventually improved my view of it was going back and rewatching "Life on The Fast Lane" (a Season 1 episode I never got a great amount out of as a kid) with fresh, adult eyes and being amazed at how emotionally invested I became in the scenario and characters. That episode instantly got a massive upgrade to become one of my Top 5 favourites. And since "Another Simpsons Clip Show" deals extensively with the events of "Life on The Fast Lane", and with their lingering implications, this episode too suddenly became a whole lot more interesting for me. "Another Simpsons Clip Show" cannot reasonably hope to function as a substitute for watching "Life on The Fast Lane", or any of the other episodes it plunders, but it makes for fine supplement viewing.

"Another Simpsons Clip Show" opens with Marge raising that same old question that she and Homer are intermittently forced to confront regarding the questionable state of their marriage: "Do you think the romance has gone out of our lives?" Specifically, this question is prompted by Marge's heartfelt response to The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel by Robert James Waller, and her realising how much she can identify with its corn-fed heroine. I've personally never read Waller's book, although my parents are both fans of the 1995 Clint Eastwood film adaptation, so I've seen that a fair few times. Assuming that the plot of the book is the same as in the film, then yeah, I can totally see why the book would strike such a chord with Marge, because it's pretty much the same plot as "Life on The Fast Lane", except that here the lusty couple actually do get to home run, there's no bowling and the kids are a lot brattier than Bart and Lisa (I happen to think that "Life on The Fast Lane" does this same story far better). Marge worries that their tepid marriage is setting a negative precedent for Bart and Lisa, so the following day attempts to have a frank family discussion about the value of romance. When the rest of the family struggle to get their heads around the concept (even Lisa isn't going for it, insisting that romance acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogensied and sold off piece by piece), Marge attempts to illustrate it by recounting the most romantic interlude she can offer from her own life - that is, her passionate fling with her erstwhile bowling instructor Jacques (from "Life on The Fast Lane"), for whom she had seriously contemplated leaving Homer. Homer is offended by Marge's example and retaliates by recalling the time that he was infatuated with his female co-worker Mindy Simmons (from "The Last Temptation of Homer") and contemplated sleeping with her while on a business trip. Lisa then recalls the time she gave a pity Valentine card to a lovelorn Ralph Wiggum (from "I Love Lisa"), only for him to read too much into her innocent gesture and to hound her to the point where she angrily rebuffed him on live television. Bart remembers his boyish, unrequited crush on his teenage babysitter Laura Powers (from "New Kid on The Block"), who summoned him to a rendezvous point only to announce that she'd hooked up with local miscreant Jimbo Jones. Realising that all of these romances actually ended in failure, the family grows dispirited, but Marge isn't quite willing to give up on her point and looks to the extended family for better examples, citing Selma's marriage to Sideshow Bob (from "Black Widower", which resulted in...yeah, forget that) and the love triangle involving Abe Simpson, Jacqueline Bouvier and Mr Burns (from "Lady Bouvier's Lover", which resulted in rejection on all sides). Finally, Homer reminds Marge of how they overcame their initial adversity back in high school and became a pair of green young lovers (from "The Way We Was"), reigniting their romantic spark in the present and demonstrating the point that Marge had been itching to make all along (although by this stage the kids have already scarpered back to their Itchy & Scratchy re-runs).

Despite being such an ardent "Another Simpsons Clip Show" apologist, I'll say upfront that I do have one serious quibble with this episode, which I already cited in my fawning love letter to "Life on The Fast Lane" - when Homer hears the story of Marge's relationship with Jacques, he's apparently flabbergasted to learn about this previously unknown chapter of Marge's life and has this response: "Marge, I want you to stop seeing this Jacques. You can let him down gently, but over the next couple of months I want you to break it off." Strangely enough, a lot of people cite this particular Homerism as one of the genuine high points of an otherwise lacklustre clip show, but being one who holds "Life on The Fast Lane" to such high esteem, I cannot overlook how it contradicts the implications of that episode, which is that Homer understood all along that Marge was on the brink of leaving him for another man, but never found the words to vocalise it. Marge even reminded him of this historic threat to their relationship (albeit not entirely pertinently) in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show". So for Homer to act as if this is all news to him and come out with such an idiotic response simply rubs me the wrong way. Then again, we were told at the end of the aforementioned clip show that Homer lost 5% of his brain during his seven-week coma, so perhaps I should presume that his memories of the events in "Life on The Fast Lane" were stored within that 5%?

What makes "Another Simpsons Clip Show" a far stronger entry, in my view, than "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", is that it takes a more critical perspective on past material than its predecessor. Whereas "So It's Come To This", was very straightforward in its incorporation of older clips, with characters reminiscing largely for the sake of it and making the occasional fourth wall-tapping reference to the tackiness of it all, "Another Simpsons Clip Show" has a greater interest in scouring the family's history of emotional traumas in order to, as Bart puts it, open up old wounds and examine the uncomfortable loose ends left dangling at the end of those episodes. It takes a glaring look at some of the longer-term consequences which the episodes in question, in their need to wrap up everything tidily in less than twenty-two minutes, inevitably glossed over. There are lots of wry observations within the characters' present-day narration, which range from mockery of the strange contrivances that enabled their previous adventures to conclude as they did (muses Marge upon her fateful drive in the direction of the Fiesta Terrace, along which there were married couples flaunting their commitment left and right, "Thank goodness I drove down that ironic street!") to bizarre, arbitrary detail (Lisa noting that, "It was an unusually warm February 14th, so the children walked home without jackets"). The most biting deconstruction of all, though, comes from Lisa's sad reflection that the family's individual stories are all "tragic and filled with hurt feelings and scars that will never heal." Lisa is right-on. This is a self-aware attack on the glibness with which these episodes were supposedly resolved, and the apparent ease with which the characters assume that they were able to put these soul-shattering incidents behind them and move on. This much is evident in Marge's suspiciously incongruous intentions in citing her time with Jacques as her go-to example of a romantic encounter, insisting that her story represents a closed chapter of her life and that, "I made the right decision to stay with my Homie, and there was no harm done," while wistfully replaying the details to a degree that suggests that she is still half-living in them. It's hilarious, because the first time we see "Another Simpsons Clip Show", we would likely assume that the whole point of Marge bringing up the events of "Life on The Fast Lane" is to get to the end of the episode, in which she reunites with Homer and their married bond is triumphantly reaffirmed, as her example. But no. She stops before she even reaches that point, hurriedly concludes her story, and summarises, "if you mentally snip out the fact that I already had a husband, that's my idea of romance." So it was Jacques to whom she'd been referring all along. It's as clear as day that Marge is still enamoured with Jacques (ha! I knew it!).

There's nothing, meanwhile, to suggest that Homer still harbours feelings for Mindy, but he has a disturbing new epilogue to add to his story, when Bart asks what became of his Michelle Pfeiffer-voiced co-worker. "She hit the bottle hard and lost her job." Whoa, seriously? That's actually horrible.* While there is something undeniably mean-spirited about the inclusion of that line, the sheer casualness with which Homer spits it out and Marge's vindictive response of "Good", it nevertheless serves an important function in calling attention to the plot points that are left unresolved and flat-out ignored at the conclusions to both "The Last Temptation of Homer" and "Life on The Fast Lane". While it's nice that Homer and Marge were able to reaffirm their marital bond on both occasions, we would do well to remember that each episode also ends with the third party having to deal with the bitter sting of rejection. It's one of the reasons why, although it will forever be one of my all-time favourites, the ending to "Life on The Fast Lane" does strike me as a tad disingenuous - in part because I'm not convinced that Marge makes the decision she actually wants so much as caves into what's conventionally expected of her (and after seeing "Another Simpsons Clip Show" I'm even less convinced), but also because of the ending's rather callous disregard for Jacques. It gets around the problem that he ends up alone by avoiding the issue altogether; Jacques does not reappear following his bathroom mirror sequence, and his relationship with Marge receives no closure. If you consider the story from his perspective, it must have been a terribly crushing blow to him when Marge failed to show up to the Fiesta Terrace and no longer wanted to continue with their bowling lessons/brunch liaisons. On top of which, it seems doubtful that Homer and Marge themselves would just be able to pick up and carry on as normal after what they had each been through. Knowing that you came this close to betraying your significant other is the kind of emotionally-devastating experience that has the potential to really mangle your relationship and your self-perception going forward. I find it hard to believe that Homer and Marge wouldn't be intermittently torn up inside by it all; the guilt over the irrecoverable damage they nearly did to their marriage, guilt over the hurt they most certainly caused Jacques and Mindy (and Lurleen, although her particular woeful tale isn't brought up here), and the occasional regret in contemplating the road not taken. These are hardly the kinds of anecdotes you'd want to dig up and casually trot around whenever you've a nostalgic itch to be scratched. But that's what makes "Another Simpsons Clip Show" such an ingenious episode. Whereas "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" was about the sweetness of nostalgia, of retreating into one's personal history and going in search of long-lost summers (albeit juxtaposed with the disturbing sight of one of the family in a coma), "Another Simpsons Clip Show" trades in looking to yesteryear to find only the pain and contusions of one's poor decisions and moments of weakness staring back at one. The characters are suddenly confronted with the consequences of past interludes which both they and the viewer had presumed were long buried.

Ironically, I think it's actually Lisa's story that, of the lot, ended the most clemently in its original form. "Another Simpsons Clip Show" stops Lisa's account at Ralph's televised humiliation and does not show anything from the third act, in which Ralph and Lisa manage to make amends and accept one another as friends. Of all the jilted romantics to feature in these tales, none were rejected half as publicly as Ralph, however, so it doesn't surprise me that there'd be lingering remorse on Lisa's part. As for Bart's story, "New Kid on The Block" has a superficially upbeat ending in which Laura gives Bart a much-welcome self-esteem boost, although one does have to feel aggrieved on behalf of Jimbo, who gets rejected because he cried and begged for his life when a knife-wielding sociopath (hey there Moe) burst through the door and threatened to violently butcher him (toxic masculinity much?). The irony there is that Bart had a much more bitter tale of unrequited puppy love right around the corner, in which he fell head over heels for an emotional abuser (voiced by the actress who played the corn-fed heroine in the aforementioned The Bridges of Madison County, oddly enough).

By the time we get to the events of "Lady Bouvier's Lover", Marge is clearly scraping the barrel for an example of a positive romance story, for you would have been hard-pressed to find a more comprehensively sour entry into the Simpsons canon at this stage in the series' run (in context, it was lightened somewhat by a B-story in which Bart blows a wad of Homer's cash on an unimpressive-looking animation cel). It ends with Abe crashing Burns and Jackie's wedding and making a last ditch effort to win Jackie back into his arms. This fails, but Jackie also decides that she doesn't want to marry Burns either, which Abe triumphantly declares is good enough for him. Make no mistake, Abe isn't taking commiseration from the fact that his rivalry with Burns resulted in a draw (Burns still has his wealth and power to go and cry on, after all), but that Jackie, having crushed his hopes and aspirations for a renewed purpose in life, willfully surrenders her own along with it. The two characters end up wedded in their mutual resignation to the exact same fate of watching Matlock re-runs in a derelict retirement home while awaiting the inevitable. This is underscored in the episode's surprisingly chilling closing sequence, which mirrors that of Mike Nichols' 1967 film The Graduate (perhaps the most brilliant detached tale of modern alienation of them all), as Abe and Jackie flee the aborted wedding and board a senior transportation bus - unlike Ben and Elaine, whose elated laughter fades to silence as they contemplate the uncertain road ahead of them, Abe and Jackie find themselves headed right back to the gloomy future of oppressive certainty from which they had yearned to escape, while a Paul Simon soundlike taunts them with reminders of their isolation and impending mortality ("Hello Grandpa, my old friend. Your busy day is at an end..."). I get goose pimples every time I see it.

Ultimately, I think that what most contributes to the rather musty reputation of "Another Simpsons Clip Show" has less to do with it being a clip show than it being a purposely feel-bad clip show, in which past narratives are deliberately reevaluated in order to eliminate all sense of redemption (assuming there was a sense of redemption in the first place, which is not the case for "Lady Bouvier's Lover"). It's a clever episode, but by design not an especially fun one. Even the superficially uplifting ending, in which Homer looks back to the beginnings of his relationship with Marge and concludes that not all romances are destined to end in heartbreak, does little to take the sting off. The moment from "The Way We Was" in which a teenage Homer tells Marge that he'll never let her go is undeniably sweet, but lacks substantive catharsis when you haven't seen the full story leading up to it. It's also somewhat negated by the fact that we've just heard both parties brazenly swap stories about the times in between when they seriously contemplated an extramarital relationship. I'm not convinced that their marriage did have such a happy ending. The fact that Homer and Marge are still together after all this time is not, in itself, proof that their relationship is a healthy one. Erik Adams, in his aforementioned AV Club review, criticises the episode for taking as long as it does to arrive at the obvious, asserting that, "Perhaps it’s because so much of the conversation around the dinner table is centered on fantasy versions of love and romance, but the Simpson kids needn’t dig for so long to find the ideal of a committed, loving relationship." But then I'd say that's rather the point. The episode opens with Marge questioning if the romance in their relationship is long dead, and throughout it's pretty much treated as a given that their days of passionate doting are behind them. Marge's breakfast table discussion has less to do with instilling values in her children, we suspect, than her need to seek validation from external sources, given the uninspiring state of her own love life. Yet all it takes is a meager flashback to the time when their relationship was young, fresh and hopeful to convince her that there's life in their unity yet. The ultimate challenge of  "Another Simpsons Clip Show", then, is in deciding whether or not, after twenty-odd minutes of mercilessly pummeling the facileness of conclusions past, it too succumbs to the sin of the glib resolution, or if it somehow earns its happy ending after wading extensively through past traumas in order to discover that the validation Marge sought was right there inside all along; that she and Homer are a bedrock of stability in a cruel and chaotic universe. I suppose it comes down to the age-old question the series continually keeps on posing as to whether Homer and Marge actually a good couple. My brain, heart, eyes, ears, gut and stomach all tell me very definitively that no, they are not, and yet there is arguably a certain laudability in how their relationship abides and endures, regardless of whether or not you think it makes sense. So wrong it's right? Perhaps it's best off being left as one of life's eternal mysteries - episodes that attempt to get to the bottom of what makes their relationship functional (such as the Season 5 finale, "Secrets of A Successful Marriage") usually fail to come up with a satisfying answer. We just know that love always ends in tragedy, except for Marge and Homer, apparently. But then they do have the status quo on their side.

* Having said that, this is at odds with the fact that we do occasionally see Mindy as a background character at the power plant (eg: she was seen lining up for a Fleet-A-Pita in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"), so we probably should take Homer's statement with a pinch of salt.