Here's a riddle for you all - why is watching a clip show akin to eating a Big Mac? If your answer was that both are end-products of blending a lot of random, ground-up crap and squashing them together into something resembling a barely digestible meal...you were only half-right. The answer I had in mind was that clip shows are another textbook example of what George Ritzer would certainly view as symptomatic of our slide ever deeper into what he calls "McDonaldization", a concept outlined in one of my all-time favourite books, The McDonaldization of Society (first published in 1993, although for the purposes of this discussion I refer to the fifth edition from 2008). There, Ritzer argues that the world we're now living in has come to resemble a great fast food restaurant (great meaning large or immense, I used it in the pejorative sense), as more and more outlets and institutions seek to emulate the model which enabled McDonalds to achieve global conquest. Ritzer identifies four key dimensions fundamental to the process of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. The first two dimensions go some way in accounting for why, historically, clip shows have proven an immensely popular staple among television networks. They're cheaper and easier to produce than a regular episode, meaning that you can produce more episodes, and faster. Writes Ritzer, once McDonaldization gets underway, "Quantity tends to become a surrogate for quality." (p.79) More episodes means that a show can dominate the airwaves for longer, and hopefully prompt the viewer to keep habitually tuning in at the allotted time, which is where the dimension of control enters in. Predictability, meanwhile, is the major factor in accounting for why viewers would choose to go along with such a cynical and perfunctory ploy, at least in theory. What it comes down to is that human beings are creatures of habit and we prefer to seek reassurance in what's safe and familiar than venture out into the dark unknown. Ritzer attributes a great part of McDonalds' success to the fact that "Customers take great comfort in knowing that McDonalds offers no surprises. People know that the next Egg McMuffin they eat will not be awful, although it will not be exceptionally delicious, either." (p.14) In short, we like to know what we're getting, and a clip show offers that in spades. To an extent, almost all episodic television operates according to a basic level of predictability, in that there's usually a status quo to be observed (The Simpsons is certainly no exception to this) and there's only only so far we expect our favourite shows to go in pushing their own boundaries. The clip show takes this to an extreme, in that seeks to eliminate the unknown aspect of the new episode altogether, in offering nothing new. We know what we're getting because we've seen it all before and, rather than feeling bored or frustrated with the lack of new material, the expectation is that we'll delight at the opportunity to relive our favourite moments once again, safe and secure in knowing precisely how each individual gag will play out. Clip shows are not traditionally thought of as challenging viewing, and as such should be considered anathema to any series that wishes to maintain the appearance of respecting its audience.
Still, even a series as fresh, innovative and proudly irreverent as The Simpsons could only stave off the temptations of the clip show for so long. On April 1st 1993, "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" (9F17) first aired, and proved a fairly deceptive episode, not least because the actual clip show aspect doesn't kick off until the second act. True, the title is certainly a huge giveaway, but if you happened to catch this episode without knowing any of the finer details, you might feel a tad caught off guard when the total recall gets underway. The framing narrative, which has just enough juice in it to sustain the first several minutes of the episode by itself, sees Homer suffering dire injuries when an April Fools prank concocted by Bart goes awry. As he lies upon a hospital gurney, drifting through varying states of consciousness, an assortment of characters gather around him to reminisce about their past interactions and how Homer has impacted them all individually. The nature of the story narrows down the list of usable clips considerably, in demanding that they mainly be about Homer and his relationships with his family and other Springfieldians. It also proves a good excuse to compile a bunch of clips showcasing the eye-popping amount of physical abuse that Homer had already endured within the first four years of the series alone (let's see, he took a tumble down a gorge - twice - was zapped repeatedly in family therapy and was violently bludgeoned by his infant daughter). Poor guy was always destined to end up in a coma sooner or later.
"So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" came about because the series staff were struggling to meet their episode quota for the fourth season, and the clip show route was accepted as a last ditch solution. As per the episode's DVD commentary, the Fox network was very keen on the idea of making such clip shows a regular Simpsons tradition and having no less than four per season, thinking eagerly of all the money that could be saved in production costs (although they could still sell the syndication rights at full price). That's McDonaldization I for you. The production staff thought better of the proposal, knowing that feeding their viewership the same footage they'd already seen over and over on a quadannual basis would be a surefire way to kill off goodwill. Despite the production crew opting to hold their hands up on this occasion and openly telegraph their embarrassment in the episode's title, they were not above pulling the same stunt whenever their writing staff needed another reprieve later on down the line. "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show" wound up being the first in a string of five different clip shows to be eked out during the series' run, its successors being "Another Simpsons Clip Show" of Season 6, "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" of Season 7, "All Singing, All Dancing" of Season 9 and "Gump Roast" of Season 13 (in addition,"Springfield's Most Wanted", a promotional special that aired on Fox amid the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" hype of 95, might be viewed as a clip show, albeit a non-canonical one). If we take "138th Episode Spectacular", which is actually quite a popular entry, out of the equation (I do think it's a mite unfair to compare the pure greatest hits fests with an episode pooling much of its footage from deleted outtakes and other obscure goodies that would have been near-impossible to find in the pre-DVD age), then fans would generally agree that "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", while not up to snuff with the best of Season 4, is by and far the best of the bunch. I'll specify upfront that this is not my opinion. It'll be a cold, cold day in Hell that you'll catch me defending the likes of "All Singing" or "Gump Roast", but you can count me in with those weird, sick and supremely rare deviants who think that "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is a much cleverer and better-constructed episode than it's ordinarily given credit for. For what it's worth, I think that its predecessor is a perfectly enjoyable episode, and a respectable stab at what is, when all is said and done, an inherently dubious undertaking. The selection of clips is generally stellar and there are some great character moments (including a genuinely touching one, when Lisa plays her saxophone to an unresponsive Homer). It is, however, an uneven and frankly baffling experience, and I've long struggled to put my finger on what, precisely, I find so off about it. It's a strange, insincere episode, and it ends with quite a nasty surprise for Homer and the viewer.
Some viewers argue that "Clip Show" succeeds as an episode precisely because of its glaring artifice, which they interpret as being entirely calculated. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide give the episode their approval, lauding it as, "About as good as a clip show ever gets and, as the title suggests, refreshingly upfront about itself." Certainly, there are a couple of points where the episode gets particularly self-referential about the blatant crumminess of the venture. In one instance, Bart refers to an old Itchy & Scratchy skit, apropos of nothing, and when Marge questions the pertinence of his contribution, Bart responds, "It was an amusing episode...of our lives," stopping only a hair's breadth short of winking at the camera. Later, Abe assures Lisa that Homer is not suffering through his coma, and that the experience is actually a wonderful opportunity to scratch one's nostalgic itches: "You relive long lost summers, kiss girls from high school...it's like one of those TV shows where they show a bunch of clips from old episodes." This time it's Bart's turn to be stumped by the fourth wall chipping, as he budges the discussion back into regular proceedings with a pointedly awkward "Well, anyway..." For much of the time, though, the segues into recollection are played more-or-less straight, and the characters veer into them on an uncanny kind of autopilot, almost as if they are being willed by a force beyond their own control. For example, when Homer confides to Marge his fear of ending up as "some vegetable watching TV on the couch," Marge produces the back-handed reassurance, "Society's loss, I suppose," and then adds, "But our marriage has been through hard times and we always pull through." Cue the grand finale of "Life on The Fast Lane", where Marge wanders through the power plant to the theme from An Officer and A Gentleman and reunites with Homer before a whooping crowd of nuclear technicians. It's a great sequence (I have my reservations as to how well it works as a resolution to the episode in question, but I cannot deny just how singularly lovely it is), and very worthy of its place within a run-down of past highlights. It isn't exactly relevant to this particular scenario, however, or to the specific fear that Homer just articulated.
One unique opportunity that a clip show does offer is the chance to reexamine old material by removing it from its original context and synthesising it into brand new sequences in order to generate fresh meaning. I'd say that "Clip Show" is less successful at this than the much-maligned "Another Simpsons Clip Show", which gets greater mileage out of highlighting the contrivances and improbabilities of past adventures, and the overall glibness with which all of these scenarios were eventually resolved (one of the most insightful moments of that episode is when Lisa, right before recounting the events of Season 4's "I Love Lisa", remarks that the family's individual tales of failed romances are "tragic and filled with hurt feelings and scars that will never heal", belying Marge and Homer's naive insistence that they were able to just pick up and carry on with their lives after the respective events of "Life on The Fast Lane" and "The Last Temptation of Homer" - and one of Homer's lines implies that Mindy tragically didn't). For the most part, "Clip Show" seems content to go the "Remember when this happened? And also this?" route, and the results are by turns fascinating and infuriating. Fascinating because The Simpsons had already accumulated so many wonderfully inspired moments by this point (in addition to the Officer and A Gentleman parody, other high points on offer include Homer's ill-fated gorge jump and his "Land of Chocolate" fantasy sequence), and it is genuinely interesting to see the series look back at its own rich history and pick out some of the key moments that had led it to where it presently stood. Infuriating because there are multiple points when I honestly struggle to discern if the ramshackle, artificial nature of the episode was purposely designed to befuddle fans, or if really was that shoddily-constructed. There is at least one clip in the line-up which any Simpsons fan worth their salt could immediately identity as having no logical business being there - namely, a sequence from the Season 2 episode "Treehouse of Horror", in which the family are abducted by cycloptic aliens Kodos and Kang. First rule of Simpsons Club is that whatever you see in a Halloween episode stays in a Halloween episode. The stories are non-canonical, which permits them get a little wilder and more fantastical than usual, and while the first "Treehouse of Horror" has a framing story that I could at least accept as canon, it doesn't involve Marge and there's no rational means by which she could possibly dredge up this moment from personal memory as an example of Homer's ability to remain calm when confronted with the unexpected. Did the production crew simply overlook this while pooling the clips they wanted to use, or did they purposely throw it in, possibly to annoy ardent fans and confuse newbies who weren't familiar with the series' Halloween traditions (imagine seeing this clip without having seen "Treehouse of Horror" and having no idea of its original context)?
Amid the non-step reminiscing, we get the occasional sequence that, rather than provide set-up for another shoehorned-in flashback, leads into an entirely legitimate gag that would not have felt out of place in a regular episode - notably, a scene with Moe and Barney that turns into a somewhat twisted parody of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, in which Barney, unable to bear the sight of a beer-averse Homer, attempts to smother him with a pillow and then "escapes" the hospital by hurling a water cooler through the window. Professor Frink also puts in a likeably left-field cameo, in which he proposes a radical Fantastic Voyage-esque cure for Homer's ailment which would unfortunately require participants to enter the body through Homer's rectum ("We have had a little trouble finding volunteers...") Other sequences feel jarring even by this episode's piecemeal standards. Most arbitrary of all is an interjection from Mr Burns, who shows up very suddenly in an attempt to have Homer removed from life support, asserting that Homer has always been a burden to him and pointing to an incident from Season 3's "Dog of Death" to prove it. Not only does the conflict go nowhere beyond this brief flashback (when we return to the present action, we see that Burns has vacated the episode as abruptly as he stormed in), but it's another moment that seems almost custom-designed to test the patience of long-term viewers, given that it flies in the face of one of the series' longest-running gags, whereby Burns always has his memory conveniently wiped in between episodes and can never recall who Homer is. The very notion of Burns being able to contribute to an episode based around Springfield's personal memories with Homer is frankly as ludicrous and off-kilter as that aforementioned Rigellian abduction.
All in all I think it's Abe's remarks, and not Bart's, that best encapsulates the episode's agenda. It is not, as Bart suggests, an excuse to throw together an assortment of random clips without rhyme or reason; rather, Abe's words about reliving long lost summers put the entire ethos of the clip show into the framework of a nostalgic quest, the reminiscing less concerned with looking to the past for reassurance in weathering the present than with flat-out retreating into the past in order to avoid some unpalatable component of the present altogether. If the segues into each individual flashback ring entirely hollow, it's because the characters aren't practicing this escapism for their own benefit, but for that of the viewer. "Clip Show" invites us to seek refuge in the show's numerous past glories, taking comfort in our familiarity with the material and in the fact that we already know how these scenarios will work out. And yet "Clip Show" is not exactly a comforting watch. Abe tells us that the reminiscing process should be an entirely sweet affair, and yet in juxtaposing this with his description of a coma, creates a disturbance which calls attention to the disingenuousness of the set-up. All of this shameless and upfront emphasis on the days that are past suggests, troublingly, that there's something amiss within the current state of affairs, which our attentions are being diverted from. What, precisely, was The Simpsons so anxious about in the present?
When I think about it, "Clip Show" may actually have been the first Simpsons episode to openly advertise the show's anxieties regarding its own longevity, which had already far exceeded expectations at just seventy-seven episodes. That obviously seems ludicrous now, with The Simpsons still going strong after nearly thirty years and with more than 650 episodes under its belt, but back in 1993 that would have seemed unimaginable, and "Clip Show" served as the series' means of acknowledging how far it had come while admitting to just a smidgen of uncertainty as to where it could possibly be headed from here. Season 4, with its increasing emphasis on absurd scenarios and wackier, rapid-fire humour, already seemed worlds removed from the more grounded, character-driven dramas of Season 1. The very title of the episode conveys a mixture of resignation, bewilderment and apprehension, as if the show's staff, while superficially attempting to laugh off this resort to such a hoary sitcom standby as a minor blip in the road, genuinely feared that their act of desperation constituted the beginning of the end. The series would, of course, get far more openly self-referential and acerbic in contemplating its own prospective demise four more years down the line, and with hindsight "Clip Show" seems like a very mild and not-so-justified manifestation of the show's self-doubt, but it is nevertheless an early, disconcerting hint of the end times that did not come. The Simpsons, still somewhat overwhelmed by the extent of its own success, was waking up to its own mortality and wondering how much longer it could reasonably hope to keep this up.
As usual, there is a characteristically Simpsons twist to the proceedings. What makes "Clip Show" a profoundly unsettling experience, despite its emphasis on the warm security of yesteryear, is the fact that all of this fond reminiscing takes place against the backdrop of what is a truly appalling situation. The continued invitation to the viewer to slip back into the comforts of nostalgia is repeatedly disturbed by sharp reminders of Homer's own uncertain future. On the episode's DVD commentary, the production crew joke that the scenario was inspired by an episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz is badly injured, sparking a similar form of reminiscing among his friends, and how they as viewers struggled to get invested in Fonz's plight due to the whole thing being a very blatant set-up simply to compile a wad of clips. Likewise, I don't think that many viewers, at any point, were seriously worried for Homer's fate while watching this episode. Nevertheless, Homer does suffer terribly throughout, and his suffering is as sadly pathetic as it is grotesque. A candy machine falls on him and Homer, unable to defend himself, is almost suffocated by the succession of candy bars that drop into his mouth. There's one moment in which an unconscious Homer starts foaming at the mouth, confronting us with the grim, ugly realities of his condition, which seem almost incompatible with Abe's soothing description of what it's like to be in a coma. But that's all just peanuts compared to how the adventure ends.
On reflection, I realise that this is yet another episode that I sold short by not including in my round-up of strange and unsettling Simpsons endings. Because the final sequence here really is the stuff that horrors are made of (never mind Jason Voorhees). Homer, having finally pulled out of his coma, is discharged from intensive care and reunites with his family in the waiting room. He promises to celebrate his recovery by taking the family on vacation to Hawaii, then triumphantly declares April Fools, pointing out that, as per the clock on the waiting room wall, there are still two more minutes of April 1st left to go. On a more straightforward sitcom, this might have seemed like a fitting enough closing gag to an episode that uses April Fools Day to set events into motion. Except Bart and Lisa inform him that it's May 16th and that he was in that coma for seven weeks. Homer looks, nonplussed, to Marge, who nods, and then the family all burst out laughing in unison. This is an ending that confused the hell out of me as a child because I wasn't certain if Bart and Lisa were being serious or if this was their retaliatory attempt at a last-minute April Fools prank. As an adult, though, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. The final revelation is disturbing because it implies that the situation was actually far, far more dire than we'd ever imagined. What's more, there were some nasty long-term consequences, as it seems that Homer suffered permanent brain damage during his coma; Marge giggles that he lost 5% of his brain. The safety net of sweet nostalgia in which we've been encouraged to indulge for the past fifteen minutes is completely shattered. The episode closes with Homer asking why he's laughing, which registers less as a symptom of his faulty brain kicking into gear and screwing with his memory than a desperate howl of anguish at the horror of what he's being made to process. Endings in which the family all laugh at once were becoming reasonably common at this point (see also "Black Widower" and "Last Exit To Springfield"); ostensibly it's a glib means of ending on a note of happy unity, although there is usually a darker undercurrent and "Clip Show" may have the darkest of them all. The family laugh not because there's anything funny about their closing situation, but because their emotions have reached breaking point and are spiraling out of control in a dreadful, hysterical whirl. This is the laughter of the damned, or at the very least the damned inconvenienced.
"Clip Show" has its merits, then. But I think what ultimately mars my enjoyment of the episode - and I doubt that this much was intentional - is the heavy sense of déjà vu throughout, by which I refer not to the episode's insistence on retreading the series' history, but to the resemblance the wraparound plot bears to a full-blooded plot used earlier within the very same season, "Homer's Triple Bypass". There, Homer is similarly hospitalised and we get a number of scenes in which the family have to deal with the frightening possibility that he might not pull through, and in which various supporting characters gather at the ward to give Homer their well wishes. The two scenarios are so similar and hit so many near-identical beats that I frequently have to remind myself which of them has the Cuckoo's Nest parody, which has the appearance from Frink and which has Abe musing upon the potential upside to one of life's supposed tragedies. It's also not as if "Triple Bypass" aired well ahead of "Clip Show"; there was a mere seven episode gap between the two. To compare the two episodes is probably highly unfair, for whereas "Bypass" has a genuine interest in the whole set-up of Homer and those close to him having to grapple with life-or-death uncertainty, in "Clip Show" it's all undisguisedly a means to an end, an excuse to get a bunch of characters together and jetting off on a trip down memory lane. Nevertheless, I wonder how it must have looked, at the time, for the series to be repeating itself almost instantly. Again, it seems ludicrous to propose that The Simpsons was on the verge of running out of ideas in 1993, but there is a malaise about this episode that cuts slightly deeper than the mere embarrassment of having to offer its viewers a clip show. In some respects, "Clip Show" did mark the beginning of the end - the end of the series' tenure as a young and radical cartoon and and the beginning of its time as a cultural mainstay, a development which, as the series would continually have to confront, can be a curse as much as a blessing.
No comments:
Post a Comment