Grade School Confidential (aka Where Does The Time Go?)

 

I'm continuing in my mission to get more of Season 8 covered before 2023 is through - and for now, no, I won't be focussing on any of the really obvious heavy-hitters. I promise you, I'll get round to "You Only Move Twice" and "Homer's Enemy" eventually, but Season 8 being such an underrated season in general, I think it's only appropriate that I rivet my efforts upon making the case for the more underrated episodes. Hence this look at "Grade School Confidential" (episode 4F09), which debuted on April 6th 1997, Springfield's classic tale of love and licentiousness from inside the school janitor's closet. This is yet another episode that I think is all too often overlooked, in terms of its narrative richness and character building; at the same time, there is something about the resolution that frankly bugs me and that I think warrants discussion with regard to the assumptions behind it, so there's your heads-up.

"Grade School Confidential" is in some respects a very characteristic specimen of the Oakley-Weinstein era, while in others it feels like a total outlier. It continues the showrunners' interest, initiated in the previous season's "Homer The Smithers", in wanting to create stories that focused more on the private lives of peripheral characters - as with that episode, a member of the Simpsons family is caught up in the middle of the proceedings, yet his stakes are not where the narrative interest lies. It was during this period that the series seemed to have really acquired the confidence to take advantage of its diverse supporting cast, and the assorted narrative possibilities they suggested ("22 Short Films About Springfield" was structured on the premise, however facetious, that any one of the townspeople could have been the star, in their own alternate reality sitcom), with Season 8 devoting multiple episodes to exploring hitherto unknown regions of our tertiary line-up, delving into who they were and what made them tick outside of what they represented to the title clan. Not all of these were entirely successful (the backstory ascribed to Ned Flanders in "Hurricane Neddy" remains, at best, a divisive one), but others definitely left the Simpsons universe feeling like a richer, better-rounded place. We had glimpses into Kirk and Luann's troubled home life, into an especially prickly branch of Sideshow Bob's family tree, and a deluge of development for Moe following years in which he'd only had one real focal episode. And this wonderful installment, in which Skinner and Edna, two long-term card-carrying members of Springfield's Lonely Hearts Club, discover that the solution to their mutual predicament might have been right there under their noses this entire time. Here's the sense in which "Grade School Confidential" seems to break from the general mood of Season 8 - it is fundamentally an optimistic episode that celebrates the possibility of a new beginning, a quality that makes it the philosophical opposite of both "A Milhouse Divided" (which acknowledges the necessity for change, but through the breakdown of a relationship) and "Brother From Another Series" (which teases the possibility that Bob might actually escape his vicious cycle of release and relapse, only to cruelly snatch it away from him at the end). Season 8 was an intelligent and adventurous series that knew how to play around with its own formula, but a word that I don't think many would use to describe it, on the whole, is "sincere". This was a time when the series had gotten a whole lot more snarky and cynical about its own ongoing existence, and a great chunk of the episodes seemed to have been spawned from places of unrelenting sardonicism, or at least have quotation marks around them. At its most extreme, this resulted in some of the series' most notoriously dark developments ("Frank Grimes, or Grimey as he liked to be called..."), while even some of the more unassuming premises, which feel like they could have fit comfortably into earlier seasons, such as "My Sister, My Sitter", venture into considerably meaner-spirited territory than one could picture from the show's younger days. I've made it known that Season 8 is my personal favourite, but I do have to admit that it doesn't always make for great comfort viewing.

Stemming that tide is "Grade School Confidential", which has an earnestness that quite sneaks up on you. Rachel Puldio's script is sharp, but sensitive. It seems genuinely interested in exploring the essences of adult loneliness and getting us genuinely invested in how Skinner and Edna each answer a need in the other that they had all but given up hope of being fulfilled. In that sense it feels like a throwback to the earlier, more grounded seasons that tended to favour understated melancholy amid the chuckles, and to the specific episodes that established the pair as respectively lost and abandoned in their yearning for a little intimate human company - namely, Season 2's "Principal Charming" and Season 3's "Bart The Lover". And yet it opens with a distinct air of world-weariness, of the kind that hung heavily over the latter half of Oakley and Weinstein's era. The jadedness and disappointment that forms the basis of Skinner and Krabby's early rapport springs from a somewhat gentler-tempered version of the same anxieties that birthed such acts of all-out desperation as Poochie the dog and The Love-Matic Grampa. These are characters who've been stuck in the same set roles and routine for so long (and back in 1997, eight years felt like an eternity in cartoon sitcom time) that the prospect of having to keep going indefinitely seems unbearable. The beginning of "Grade School Confidential" establishes time as our preliminary antagonist, as indicated in Martin's announcement that he'll be holding a lavish birthday party this coming weekend, a reminder of both the relentless march of time and of the emptiness and inertia that seems to characterise all of his associates' lives, regardless of their age (we suspect that most of the party attendants are there not because they care about ushering in yet another trip around the sun with Martin, but because none of them have anything better to do on a Saturday). Martin has only a minor role in this episode, but it's interesting nevertheless to go back and compare it to his input in "Bart Gets an F", where he seemed to represent the one golden cause for optimism amid Edna's waning enthusiasm for her educational career. Remember how thoroughly she dug his presentation on Ernest Hemingway? Come Season 8, and Edna's allegiances seem to have shifted. Her status as an authority figure might put her at odds with Bart, but we sense that she feels more sympathy for his position than she'd perhaps let on. She's just as fed up with the system, and with the feeling that she isn't moving anywhere in life, and each day within school grounds represents another form of personal entrapment for her, Martin included. Her response to this stagnation, up until now, has been to try getting as close to her unfulfilled dreams as humanly possible, through a hobby that involves writing to glamorous night clubs and asking them nicely to send her promotional match-books. So it's a tremendous irony that her liberation should arrive not from the glitzy club lifestyle she'd aspired to be a part of, however vicariously, but from the very inertia she'd been trying to transcend. Up until Martin's party, Skinner himself was just a part of the stagnation, his intercom interjections regarding how the bake sale to raise money for the car wash had been cancelled due to confusion virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the background drone.

Season 8 in general felt like the work of a creative team who'd been at this game for enough years to wonder if there were any genuine surprises still lurking on the horizon. Expended time is a theme that resonates all throughout "Grade School Confidential", most explicitly advertised in Edna's line, "Where does the time go?", but here it comes not so much from a place of arch sardonicism than a place of naked, authentically poignant regret. It plays upon a powerful sense sense of lost time, and the pained acknowledgement that things didn't work out as perhaps they should have done. This suggests a very different, more wistful side to this season's ongoing fixation on the show's mortality - that, far from scraping the barrel for fresh ideas, there was actually a whole lot more the team wished they could have accomplished with the series, but they were at the point now where things seemed to have already run their course and the window would soon be closing. What's heartening about the episode is that it actually yields a positive solution, and what feels like a genuinely sincere message about how it's never too late, no matter how far along you are in life, to embark on something new and life-changing. Skinner and Edna find love and companionship in sources that already seemed so tediously familiar they had scarcely even registered until now. Part of the episode's emphasis on lost time is rooted in the recognition that these characters spent eight whole seasons in a close proximity to one another, so why on earth didn't they attempt to make a deeper connection sooner? Was the answer to their problems really that glaringly obvious all along? Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood imply as much in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, when they credit the episode with "bring[ing] to fruition one of the series' longest running gags: Edna and Seymour's mutual attraction." I was inclined to question Martyn and Wood there (as often I do), because I'm not convinced this actually was one of the series' longest running gags. So far as I can tell, the only prior reference to their possibly becoming an item was in "Bart The Lover", where Bart cites Skinner as a potential suitor for Edna, only for her to shoot down the suggestion with the bitter postulation that, "Let's just say his mommy won't let him out to play!" But maybe Martyn and Wood did pick up on something legitimately there - according to the DVD commentary for "Grade School Confidential", it was an idea the series had been noodling around with since the days when Al Jean and Mike Reiss were showrunners. "Gaping unexplored plot avenue" might be a more accurate way of phrasing it. And I suspect the reason why a prospective Seymour/Edna romance never got off the ground during Jean and Reiss's run is because it was also around this time that the writers settled upon the characterisation of Skinner as a stifled mommy's boy, and this ended up taking precedent over giving the guy a love life (although Agnes was established as a character all the way back in Season 1, in "The Crepes of Wrath", she wasn't immediately cemented as having such a domineering hold on Skinner's life; in fact, she was completely absent from "Principal Charming" and Skinner's ill-fated pursuit of Patty). So Edna wasn't making excuses - it was indeed his mother who was keeping them apart.

More's the pity, because Skinner and Edna do make such a natural couple; their dynamic clicks straight off the bat, in a way that feels so honest and genuine. It's not hard to comprehend why these characters would be drawn to one another. There's a great deal they have in common; they're both intelligent, vulnerable people who've grown bored with their careers in education, and with the hands life has dealt them in general, and both of them hunger for a little human connection. They're also polar opposites right where it counts - Skinner is an innocent (how much of an innocent we will not learn until the episode's end), yet to truly discover all that he's capable of, while Edna has been around the block a few times and thinks she's seen it all. Each has a lot to bring in terms of refreshing and broadening the other's perspective. One of the episode's most heartfelt moments is when Skinner pays Edna the highest compliment he possibly can, in assuring her that she's nothing like the mother whose toxic influence he'd never imagined he could ever transcend: "I always thought I'd fall for a woman just like Mother, even though I didn't want to. And now that I haven't, I've discovered what true happiness can be."

I give additional credit to "Grade School Confidential" for being a rare episode to extend its middle finger to the status quo and have its developments stick, in spite of going through all the motions of pretending to reach for the reset button near the end. Edna and Skinner play a trick on Bart, and by extension the viewer, in the final minute when they tell him they've decided to break off their relationship. Once Bart has left the building, they return to their favourite make out spot, inside the janitor's closet, and laugh about the child's gullibility. This wasn't the first time a Season 8 episode would pull one of these fake-out "We're going to restore the status quo - PSYCH, actually, we're not!" endings - see also "A Milhouse Divided", which looks momentarily as if it might rescind Kirk and Luann's divorce, only to brusquely double down on it right before the credits. Here, though, there's an unmitigated sense of triumph in the sleight of hand. Releasing Bart from his privilege/obligation as the couple's confidante is indicative of Skinner and Edna's desire to move on from the missteps made throughout this episode, but their commitment to one another is not one of them; they come out renewed in their mutual affections. Although the viewer is initially tricked alongside Bart, they are then made complicit in the revelation that Skinner and Edna's relationship will persevere; it serves as a confirmation that Skinner and Edna have successfully taken back their privacy, but also a little knowing wink to the viewer that there is something beautifully, radically subversive in the acknowledgement that these characters make a good couple and yes, they should be allowed to keep what they've gained for the foreseeable future. And so they did. It all ended on an absolute bummer, with Edna ditching Seymour and marrying Ned Flanders, shortly before Marcia Wallace's death in 2013 necessitated her character's sudden removal from the series, off-screen. The whole Nedna thread reached a dead end before it had even started, accomplishing little more than the unfortunate feat of making Ned a widower twice over (and if Edna hadn't married Ned, then would they have gone so far as to kill her off in-universe? Could they have gotten away with having her quietly fade out of the picture, as they did with Phil Hartman's characters?). But for now, let's just focus on the relationship's hopeful beginnings. Unambiguously happy endings were seriously something of a rarity in Season 8, so we should enjoy the moment instead of dwelling excessively on what's ahead.

At first, Skinner and Edna feel bound by the obligation to keep their relationship a secret. Despite being previously cited as the single biggest obstacle to a relationship with Skinner, Agnes is actually less of a factor in this than you might expect. She interferes with Skinner's early attempts to strike up a conversation with Edna, and Skinner later has Bart distract her as he goes on a date with Edna, but she has no role at all to play in the third act conflict - whether Skinner would be able to stand up to his mother specifically for Edna is not tested. The bigger issue is Skinner and Edna's fear that the outside world would judge their workplace-based romance as a conflict of interest (the complication being that Skinner is technically Edna's superior). The first hurdle they encounter is in the discovery that Bart witnessed them kissing at Martin's party, and is only too gleeful to have dirt on two of his regular adversaries; they convince him to keep his mouth shut in exchange for switching his permanent record with Milhouse's, and use him as a go-between in facilitating their assorted liaisons. As the romance between our two love birds blossoms, they become so wrapped up in themselves that they begin to take advantage of Bart's complicity, eventually prompting him to expose their secret to the entire school. From there, things spiral into the territory of the uncontrollable scandal; several children return home with stories implying the teacher and principal were outright fucking in the janitor's closet, resulting in such furore that Chalmers moves to fire them both. Bart, regretting his part in this outcome, reaffirms himself as an ally to Skinner and Edna, convincing them to barricade themselves inside the school in protest of both the loss of their jobs and the town's negative reaction to their relationship. Other than cooking up sufficient media interest in the matter, Bart doesn't prove massively essential in how the resolution plays out, but it's nice that he stands beside Skinner and Edna throughout their protest, in a show of solidarity. Mostly, though, it's the solidarity Skinner has found in Edna that gives him the backbone to rebel against the judgement of Springfield at large. This does not come naturally to Skinner, something he highlights early on when he comments that if there's one lesson life has taught him repeatedly, it's to know when he's beaten. The problem, as Bart explicitly points out, is that Skinner has grown accustomed to the idea that he's only capable of following orders, be it from his mother, the army or Chalmers. His devotion to Edna is what unlocks his greatest untapped potential of all, in revealing to him that he does have it in him to be defiant. It builds to an ending that is both tender and heartfelt and also a little questionable. And by "a little questionable", I of course mean that it might be considered aphobic AF.

I'm referring to the fact that Skinner is ultimately able to dispel the angry mob by publicly revealing himself to be a virgin in his mid-40s; the townspeople find this so shockingly embarrassing that they agree Skinner wouldn't own up to it falsely and beat an awkward retreat. In narrative terms, it's an elegant way of resolving our conflict and setting Skinner and Edna free from the glare of public salacity. Outside of universe, the implications of this ending do leave us with a lot to unpack - the main point of contention being that it rests on an assumption that's honestly degrading to asexuals; this idea that if you haven't taken an active interest in sex by a certain age, then there's something wrong with you (I am not suggesting that asexuals are invariably virgins, mind, just that the ending positions sex as something that adults should be invariably into). I think Erik Adams does a wonderfully succinct job, in his review on The AV Club, of encapsulating both what's lovely and what's potentially problematic about the ending when he observes that, "It quells the furor of the Helen Lovejoys in the crowd, but it also displays Seymour’s devotion to Edna. He cares so much about her, he’s willing to sacrifice whatever remains of his dignity." My question here is why, exactly, is Skinner's dignity being sacrificed? Is it because he was forced to go public with information about his personal life that was frankly never the townspeople's business, and that would naturally be degrading to anyone's privacy? Or are we expected to agree with Chalmers' assessment that virginity is not a quality any self-respecting adult would consider acceptable or aspirational? (I mean, Chalmers is obviously wrong - even putting aside asexuality, there are also people for whom sexual abstinence would be a requirement for religious/vocational reasons.) On the one hand, the revelation that Skinner is a virgin doesn't feel like a cheat, nor a betrayal of his character (which, you know, is more than we can say for a certain other Skinny revelation that wasn't far on the horizon). It fits in perfectly with the observation made by Edna at the start of the episode, when she notes that there's an innocence about the man that's rather charming. At his heart, Skinner is fundamentally a child; his adult life has been so dominated by his mother that he's never had the opportunity for physical intimacy with another individual. It is, nevertheless, perhaps a little disappointing that Pulido's script, for all of its intelligence and sensitivity, would boil down to an assumption as narrow-minded as that of the middle-aged virgin as a figure immediately inviting judgement and derision, as opposed to someone who might just never have been interested in sex in the first place. The obvious counterpoint is that Skinner's sexual preferences are not intended to be representative of asexuality, that he clearly does feel sexual attraction to Edna and that "Grade School Confidential" is all about his journey in slowly being able to open up and discover a part of himself that, up until now, he hasn't had the space or confidence to explore. That, on its own terms, is a beautiful bit of character progression for Skinner. But arguably, it also reinforces another common prejudice against asexuals - that they are repressed individuals who could be brought around to sexual attraction if they simply met the "right" person. Whichever way you slice it, sex is upheld as the ultimate end-goal of adult development - we are given reason to believe that Skinner will lose his virginity that very night (the sound of the champagne bottle popping is about as subtle a metaphor as the tunnel-bound train at the end of North By Northwest), and while that's great in terms of his relationship with Edna, it also eradicates his laudable non-conformity in being an adult virgin, and willing to admit to it.

Don't get me wrong, though. "Grade School Confidential" is still one of my favourite episodes of Season 8, and I want to be very clear that my talk of the possible aphobic assumptions therein do not represent any efforts on my part to get the episode cancelled or whatnot. I should also emphasise that I don't believe The Simpsons to be any worse than most other media when it comes to a lack of acknowledgement or validation given to asexuality. It's simply a discussion I've been wanting to have for a while now, particularly since I think there is a broader debate to be had specifically regarding the Simpsons' relationship with the issue. There is at least one other Simpsons episode that could be seen as harboring aphobic undertones, albeit mostly retroactively in its case, and that would be "Principal Charming", the episode that first explored Skinner's non-existent love life. Here, it isn't Skinner's sexual leanings that are the point of interest, but Patty Bouvier's - this episode revolves around her considering a possible long-term relationship with Skinner, but ultimately rejecting him out of loyalty to her twin sister. Patty would later come out as a lesbian, in Season 16's "There's Something About Marrying", and fans often credit "Principal Charming" with being the first episode to properly hint at this, by establishing her lack of sexual interest in men. The thing is, "Principal Charming" doesn't actually indicate that Patty has any sexual interest in women, either - in Homer's words, she "doesn't like to be...touched", which on its own terms would strike me as more suggestive of asexuality - and this is where the retroactive aphobia enters in. The absence of interest in the opposite sex is automatically taken to be indicative of interest in the same sex, as opposed to the possibility of a lack of sexual interest, period. And since this outlook was verified in subsequent episodes, it reinforces the prejudice that asexuality should be seen as a sign of repression, as opposed to being a valid sexual preference and identity in itself. There were certainly a number of positives in Patty's lesbianism becoming canon, not least that lesbians gained additional representation through the character (of course, the specific episode in which she explicitly outs herself does have its own particular problem with transphobia, but I won't be getting into that today). But there is also a negative side, in that asexuals lost out on some potential representation, particularly given that asexuality is still so poorly represented in media in general. If you asked me to name a fictional character who was unequivocally asexual, I would honestly struggle - I had the titular character from the 1984 film Birdy pegged as a possible asexual, but it took some headcannoning on my part (and besides, I'm not sure you could describe him as as such, based on some of the things he gets up to in William Wharton's novel). Otherwise, I don't have much else I can offer.

But I digress. On balance, I come away with the feeling that "Grade School Confidential" is actually the less aphobic of the two, despite being the episode in which aphobic sentiments play an explicit role in the story's resolution. It comes down to the fact that, fundamentally, the story is on Skinner's side. Although Skinner is initially hesitant to admit to his virginity, when he does, he does so with total confidence, and with no visible shame on his part. He's aware that the townspeople are going to form their own judgements, but he's decided he can rise above it. Afterwards (Nelson's reaction notwithstanding), the embarrassment is entirely with the townspeople, who are basically getting their own salacious hypocrisies directed back at them. Their moral outcry against the scandal is, plainly, rooted in fascination - the discovery that there was never, in fact, any salacious detail to be had exposes their outrage for the voyeuristic lechery that it was. "That was more than I wanted to know" grumbles Lenny as he walks away - the implication that he finds Skinner's profession of virginity to be more distasteful than those allegations of "making babies" really speaks more of his licentious mindset, and all of Springfield's, than it does any actual indignity in Skinner being a virgin. The townspeople are the ones at fault, and they are left to stew in their own discomfort while Skinner and Edna are left in peace, and with the freedom to truly be themselves. We do still need to weigh this up against the fact that Skinner is implied to lose his virginity at the end, thus upholding the assumption that it is inherently something an adult should aspire to leave behind eventually. But the one thing Skinner does retain is his dignity - he simply forces the mob to confront its own messed-up thinking, and banishes them from the school grounds.

As a side-note, it's a bit odd that Homer and Marge just walk away with the crowd at the end. You'd think they would have hung around to get their son back. Instead, they leave Bart to find his own way home, the deadbeats.

Sky 1 edit alert!: Another victim of Sky 1's editing practices in the 90s was the moment where the townspeople hysterically pile on their accusations before Edna and Skinner (Dr Hibbert: "My child told me you two were having sex in the school janitor's closet!" Chief Wiggum: "You know, making babies?" Mr Prince: "Yes, illicit sex!" Helen Lovejoy: "Doing IT! IT! IT!" Sideshow Mel: "Sordid public sexual congress!"). Santa's Little Helper is also seen making off with Skinner's hot dog bomb, in what I presume is intended to be yet another highly conspicuous sexual metaphor. To be totally fair to Sky, this moment wasn't strictly necessary from a narrative standpoint - Maude Flanders' accusation about S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N, which was retained (presumably because it was a little less blunt than the others), is all that's needed to coherently establish, to Skinner and Edna, what the town presumes to have been going on. But from a thematic standpoint, it is a bit of a loss, since it drives home the point about the townspeople being the truly salacious and sex-obsessed ones, and their outcry being so mindless and hollow. I am somewhat sorry that the 12-year-old me missed out on Mel's sexual congress tirade, but mainly just relieved that Krusty's "Sex Cauldron" bit survived the cut. Krusty and Maude make such a fabulous comedic dyad, who knew?

Oh, and here seems as good a place as any for a disclaimer about a piece I wrote nearly six years ago (where does the time go?), regarding a throwaway gag from this very episode. Remember this one, when I was trying to figure out if there was any deeper meaning to Chalmers' query about whether they actually filmed that movie in Atlanta? A while ago, in 2020, Bill Oakley told me on Twitter that the movie in question "definitely wasn't The Big Chill" - I wasn't inclined to save the tweet at the time, and besides I think that Oakley got his Twitter account nuked anyway amid some of the recent insanity (I'm finding it kind of hard to keep a pace of what's going on over there), but I thought it only right and proper that I acknowledge that he did indeed say that. That piece can continue to stand, however, as a testament to the absolute rabbit holes I can send myself down sometimes.