Duffless (aka Kiss My Red Asphalt)

 

It's fair to say that Season 4 was a relatively bright and breezy time in The Simpsons' life. Compared to Season 3, which had an entire trilogy based around scenarios where certain Springfieldians were either at risk or at perceived risk of being done away with by their compatriots, whatever anxieties had been plaguing showrunners Al Jeans and Mike Reiss seemed to be mostly out of their system by their tenure's second half. Season 4 is where they allowed their cartoonier tendencies to rule the roost, and (for better or for worse), the show's world got a whole lot more dynamic and larger than life. Serious and grounded stories were a little less high on the agenda, but that's not to say that the odd dose of genuine discomfort couldn't still work its way into the mix. So which episodes stand out as the darker entries of Season 4 (besides the Halloween show, which is always a given)? Obviously there's "Kamp Krusty" - any installment in which the children of Springfield find themselves far from home and at a summer camp that's actually a sweatshop dedicated to the manufacturing of cheap wallets for sale in Hong Kong was bound to be a harrowing experience. That was a Season 3 holdover, however, so it only half-counts. The implications of "Marge vs The Monorail" are frankly horrendous (how many people in North Haverbrook died?), but played at such an overblown level that they don't necessarily register. The situation in "Marge In Chains" has some distressing overtones, but the script isn't focussed enough to fully realise them. Where Season 4 gets most convincingly uncomfortable, I'd say, is with a pair of episodes where the consequences of Homer's lifestyle choices are at the forefront, namely "Homer's Triple Bypass" and "Duffless". "Bypass", in which Homer comes down with heart disease and requires a major operation, has him once again reckoning with the possibility that his time on Earth might be coming to an imminent halt (as he did in "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" of Season 2), while serving as a commentary on the American healthcare system, with his quest for surgery that won't break bank. "Duffless' (9F13) is less overtly dramatic - here, Homer is never in a situation where his life is immediately endangered (well, except where an eight-legged freak is involved) - but is in some respects the more emotionally haunting of the two. It works as a quieter, more nuanced character study, in a fairly similar vein to "Selma's Choice" (by astonishing coincidence, both episodes feature trips to dubious Duff-themed attractions), where the lead character is put under pressure and must come to a decision about what it is that will ultimately bring them fulfilment in life.

Debuting on February 18th 1993, this one sees Homer being arrested and convicted of a drink driving offence, resulting in the loss of his licence and prompting Marge to challenge him to give up beer cold turkey for a month. The resulting conflict is a fairly barebones one - once Homer has agreed to Marge's request, there's not a lot for him to do other than to stick it out as his entire world closes in on him and the allurement of the bottle mounts - but there is an honesty in its observations that keeps it at all times compelling. We see Homer being pushed to a really low point, with a good deal of emphasis on the intense loneliness that accompanies his addiction (even while attending an Alch-Anon meeting, he finds no solidarity) and the claustrophobia (a nightmarish sequence where the Duff brand is omnipresent). It's not the easiest going of episodes, but it finds the light at the end of the tunnel, offering up one of the most sweetly redemptive closing sequences of all the series. So sweetly redemptive, in fact, that there's the temptation to accuse it of being disingenuous, since we know that the status quo won't actually be yielding no matter how feel-good the sentiments, but that's a discussion we'll get to in due course.

One of the smartest things about David M. Stern's script is in how it implicitly challenges the underlying assumptions reinforced by what was then one of the series' longest-standings dynamics - namely, how hard it was to feel overly stressed about Homer's drinking habits when Barney Gumble is right there and so perpetually intoxicated that he's barely able to keep himself upright. If you want disingenuous, then maybe take a look at what that's all about. Since as far back as Season 1 (most notably, in "Homer's Night Out"), Barney has been on hand to make Homer look better by providing a sobering example of how Homer's life might have been if he'd really ballsed things up. Compared to Barney, Homer leads a relatively normal existence, with a steady job and a loving family, and for as frequently as he's seen occupying his bar stool at Moe's, he isn't shown to habitually drink to the same excess as Barney. But there is a certain fallacy in all of this, given that that Barney is merely a caricature of an alcoholic, played to such a grotesque extreme that he ceases to be an accurate representation of what addiction necessarily looks like. The implication (particularly prominent in "Homer's Night Out") is that drinking has been allowed to dominate his life because he doesn't have the responsibilities that Homer does to give him the incentive to do better, but then we know that it would be awfully naive to suppose that people with responsibilities like jobs and parenthood can't also be addicts, or that they wouldn't do a better job of disguising it than Barney. Alcohol dependency often exists within the cracks of normalcy, not outside of it. In that regard the opening act of "Duffless" does something fairly deceptive. Homer sneaks out of work early to accompany Barney on a tour of the Duff brewery, where they enjoy a selection of free samples (Barney with far more reckless abandon than Homer). As they're leaving the tour, Homer ostensibly does the responsible thing by confiscating Barney's keys and preventing him from driving them home, only to get pulled over by the cops when he then gets behind the wheel. Homer appears perfectly lucid, but when he's made to take a breathalyser test it's revealed that he is in fact over the limit, resulting in his arrest. Some viewers consider this turn of events to be most unfair, given that Homer had made the effort to be sensible with Barney and was blatantly nowhere near as intoxicated as his companion, but I would argue that that is precisely the point. Homer might have been right to have interfered with Barney, but he ultimately wasn't in a fit state to drive either. (Only a little bit over? You bloody idiot.) It is a common misconception that you need to be drunk to qualify as a drink driver, and while I'm not expecting or desiring for The Simpsons to function as a PSA on that point, it's also a valid observation in terms of what it says about Homer's characterisation. He might be doing okay compared to Barney, but does that actually mean that he's doing okay? I agree that there is an egregious injustice in Barney spitefully giving Homer away and then being encouraged to drive home by Wiggum, but that's Springfield's police department for you. Besides, by the nature of the episode's ending, it wouldn't be accurate to say that Barney gets off scot-free. For what he has to go through, Homer is given fleeting insight into how self-improvement is at least possible, whereas Barney stays deep in the pit of stagnation. 

With Homer having returned home from his legal ordeal, stripped of his licence and faced with the gruelling prospect of attending traffic school and two months' worth of Alch-Anon meetings, Marge quizzes him on his drinking practices using a checklist from a pamphlet, and it becomes sadly evident just how heavily Homer uses alcohol as a crutch for getting through the day. There's a delectable humor in Homer's responses ("Do you ever drink alone?" "Does the Lord count as a person?" "No." "Then yes."), but a genuine undercurrent of pathos too - not least in a moment where Marge asks him if he drinks to escape reality, and we see him take a swig of beer before checking himself out in the bathroom mirror and indulging in the fantasy that he has an ultra-buff body. It's hilarious, but it also illustrates what kind of existential despair is plaguing Homer underneath. For him, drinking offers relief from the weariness of existence, and from the eternal dissatisfaction of being who he is. Agreeing to give it up for a month means having to live with himself, and with the rest of Springfield, in a way that he's really not keen on doing.

With the major theme being how Homer navigates the grim vapidity of his day to day life without falling back on alcohol to ease the monotony, it shouldn't surprise us that "Duffless" emerges as one of the more grounded episodes in a season with a tendency to go off the rails. Conversely, it also offers up a formidable contender for its single biggest "WHAT THE FUCK?!" moment, when Homer attempts to exit the plant through a disused corridor and comes face to face with a spider the size of a Clydesdale horse. People don't talk enough about how reality-breaking that spider is - it is one heck of a fanciful thing to be implementing outside of a Halloween show, even with the unspoken assumption that the spider got really big through exposure to nuclear radiation (a fish with three eyes is one thing, but a spider that's like something out of a 1950s B-movie might be pushing it somewhat). The spider can supposedly be subdued with the recitation of Biblical verses, but if you're like Homer and don't know any of those, chucking a rock at its head will work just as effectively. That spider's not so tough. (It's also purple, which makes it marginally less horrifying than it would be if it were a more conventional spider colour.)

As much as it is, I'll admit that I'm cool with the spider. I rather enjoy the random nonsense of it all. Intellectually, its presence should be treated as a far bigger deal, but it's also the kind of detail you can only get away with if you push past it as quickly and as cheekily as the narrative does. The spider is, in the scheme of things, quite harmless. For me, the thing that prevents "Duffless" from attaining true greatness is the B-story, which sees Bart destroying Lisa's project for an upcoming science fair and Lisa seeking vengeance through a back-up experiment involving a hamster, a supply of cupcakes and an electrical current. It's nothing really terrible, but it's far from my favourite Simpsons subplot, and I promise you it's not because of the scene where the hamster receives a mild electrical shock. I know I've a tendency to grumble whenever the show does jokes about abused hamsters, but on this occasion that's honestly the least of my problems. I'm of the opinion that the two older Simpsons siblings work best when they're a team, and any episode that pits them against each other is automatically on shaky ground. It's not that it can't be pulled off, but I don't think that Stern ever lands the right balance. Here, their rivalry is nowhere near as mean-spirited and one-sided as in "My Sister, My Sitter" of Season 8, but it still leaves rather a sour note, which is ironic for a subplot that was presumably implemented to give balancing levity to an A-story that touches on heavy topics. Bart destroys a futuristic tomato that Lisa had been growing using steroids - not out of malice toward Lisa, but because Skinner presented him with an opportunity for mayhem that he couldn't pass up - leaving her naturally distraught (she'd also had aspirations of the tomato being used to combat world hunger, so...nice going there, Bart). With the science fair looming, she devises an alternative project that involves running a series of tests to determine if her brother is a slower learner than a hamster, with the intention of humiliating him in front of the school.

Quick question to Mr Stern - are we supposed to sympathise with Bart in this situation, or Lisa? Because neither party is coming off particularly well. There is, in theory, nothing wrong with attempting to explore Lisa's pettier, more childish side - in fact, it's what fuels some of the subplot's best laughs ("That'll learn 'im to bust my tomater!" is an absolute banger of a one-liner, and I love how Lisa's degraded grammar all but affirms her personal debasement). There's amusement to be had from her ruthless antics, but it's hard to get past the fact that she is being extremely vindictive. At the same time, I've no real sympathy for Bart. It's not as though he even attempts to atone or take responsibility for wrecking her tomato, nor are we given any evidence of Homer, Marge or even Skinner reading him the riot act for it. So I don't like the fact that he wins at the end (with victory handed to him by Skinner, no less, although it does allow him to give a shout-out to the very scientist who inspired his name). There is something about this whole outcome that feels terribly unsatisfying. Honestly, I'd have much preferred it if Bart and Lisa had both lost and the ribbon had gone to that overzealous father who'd commandeered his son's volcano project and worked too long and hard on it to let the poor confused kid share any of the glory. Also, this might be a tad nitpicky, but another reason I don't much care for the subplot lies in how it fudges the timeline of the A-story. Lisa explicitly states that the science fair is happening in three days, meaning that the actual length of time spanned by the bulk of the onscreen action is very short, and Homer's prolonged period of abstinence is left to be largely rushed through within the last few minutes. This might have felt a tad less hurried if there'd been a little more ambiguity as to how much time had already elapsed when we get to the science fair, and an aching Homer is seen drooling over Ralph's alcohol-fuelled car.

Where the subplot best succeeds is in its darker, more unsettling moments, like Lisa imagining a hamster with Bart's head getting stuck in a maze and crying out "Help me! Help me!" in the manner of the human-fly hybrid from the 1958 version of The Fly (consistently one of the most disturbing pop culture items you can possibly reference - just look at The Emperor's New Groove). Then there's the allusion to A Clockwork Orange (1971), where a highly-conditioned Bart attempts to grab hold of a pair of cupcakes (just like Alex reaching for the topless woman's breasts) before collapsing in a quivering heap. I'm likewise always unnerved by the high-pitched whining Bart makes during his first encounter with the electrified cupcake (which the subtitles on Disney+ helpfully indicate that is a Three Stooges reference - ah well, I've already admitted I'm not massively well-versed in their lore). Incidentally, on the DVD commentary Reiss talks about how difficult it was implementing the moment where the hamster gets shocked (this, coupled with Lisa's white saviour fantasy, admittedly feels like an out of character thing for her to do now, even if the hamster isn't seriously harmed). They were aware that the audience's sympathy would lie with the hamster and looked to make it as quick and easy as possible...which begs the question as to why they were so callously indifferent to that poor expired hammy we saw in "Dog of Death"? Given the frequency with which hamsters seem to end up dead or imperilled on The Simpsons, I had gotten the impression that the show's crew regard them as acceptable punching bags, although Reiss insists that this isn't the case. (Jean does, however, go on to immediately confirm my suspicions about them being a bunch of cat haters, when shares his theory that onscreen kitty carnage is all well and passable in television, but once you've killed a dog, you've automatically lost your audience. I don't know if I buy that as a universal principle. Wouldn't it depend on whether your audience was comprised predominantly of dog lovers or cat lovers?)

 

As brutal as those kids are, the most disturbing portion of the episode, bar none, would be the video Homer is forced to watch in traffic school detailing the potentially grave consequences of drink driving, which is presented by an incongruously buoyant Troy McClure, star of such esteemed driver's ed titles as Alice's Adventures Through The Windshield Glass and The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot. I've never gotten official confirmation on this, but I strongly suspect that this film was modelled on the Red Asphalt series, an infamous collection of films produced by the California Highway Patrol between 1960 and 2006 that urged responsible driving using tactics straight out of the Mondo playbook (shocking images of crumpled vehicles and mangled bodies abound). Specifically, I believe that Troy's film was based on the 1989 entry, Red Asphalt III, which opens with a similar mise-en-scene and has the presenter saying "What a _____ waste!" multiple times. If you're tempted to look up Red Asphalt III, know that it isn't for the faint of heart (among other stomach-churning vignettes, we're shown footage of a driver whose head has taken a massive battering, and I think you see parts of his brain spilling out into the wreckage). Appalling stuff, and yet I'll admit to having a certain sympathy for Homer's reaction as he sits there giggling at the lurid onslaught. He's portrayed as an anomaly among an audience of fellow offenders who are all at serious risk of losing their lunches, but he nails a fundamental aspect of the experience of having to soak in a production of this nature (either because you were forced to do so in traffic school or because you're a masochistic sicko like myself and your morbid curiosity got the best of you). So often, it is insanely difficult not to laugh, particularly with a specimen like Red Asphalt III that insists on being as overbearing as possible with its grisliness. I would argue that it's not even schadenfreude. Sometimes the brain just goes, "You know what would be the most inappropriate reaction right now? Laughter!", and before you know it you've lost control. Truth is, laughter can be a natural response to stimuli so terrible and overwhelming that it defies being processed in any other way. Homer's exact assertion is, "It's funny because I don't know 'em!", suggesting that it's is a privilege of the distance between ourselves and the subject, and that's valid enough - often, the stimuli is so extreme that it doesn't fully register as someone else's lived horror. The issue doesn't just lie with Homer either; the irreverently upbeat music and cheesy puns that accompany the presentation are concessions that, no matter how high-minded the professed intentions, there is something dreadfully exploitative about exhibiting real-life death and suffering in this manner. All I know is that allowing myself the occasional ignoble snicker is what made it possible for me to get through Red Asphalt III. It is a confounding film. Unlike Troy, the presenter in the initial sequence does a decent and respectful job of reminding us of what's really at stake in these situations: "Remember that each [body bag] carried away contains a destroyed human life. Not a dummy or a cleverly made-up actor, but a real body. A lifeless person. Next time it may be a friend, a brother, your child, or you." But then we go into the studio with our main presenter, and he isn't quite so delicate in his approach. He gestures, with a more theatrical anger, to a pile of videotapes that he tells us were created by highway patrol officers depicting real accidents - "This one is simply labelled: 17-year-old DUI, six dead!" It's all a little much to take in. There are times when awkward tittering is the only coping mechanism we're left with.

It's also the only mirth that Homer derives from what's otherwise a soul-crushing experience. As he gets deeper into his dry month, he finds himself a pariah in every social situation, at once the sole sane individual who can see the rampant futility of the world with his metaphorical beer googles off and a man going slowly to pieces as he's pushed to the very limits of his endurance. Being a rare sole sober spectator at a baseball game opens his eyes to what a tedious, chaotic mess the entire affair is, while having to sit through the supperware demonstration that Patty and Selma are hosting in the Simpsons' home (I'm guessing that he's usually down at Moe's when this sort of thing is going on?) has his thoughts turning quietly murderous. Empathy and community are bitterly denied him, even by those who claim to be peddlers in it. He gets exiled from the local Alch-Anon group when he confesses that his cravings for anything remotely close to a beer had him crawling beneath the bleachers of a football stadium ingesting dirt, and the judgemental pricks therein won't even pretend to understand that desolation (not even Hans Moleman, who here reveals himself to be a 31-year-old who ruined his life through excessive drinking). The greatest menace, though, comes from the Duff advertising that's slapped in every direction he looks, and serves as a constant reminder that it's never less than him against the world. Earlier in the season, "Lisa The Beauty Queen" had tackled the topic of cigarette promotions and their odious efforts to create a generation of young smokers, and it was explicitly noted in that episode's commentary that such an outspoken attack was only possible because cigarette companies couldn't advertise on television and the networks didn't have to worry about stepping on their toes. With alcohol it's a much thornier issue, although "Duffless" still gets surprisingly audacious in critiquing how a product so potentially harmful can be pushed on consumers who can't handle it. The promos Homer has to contend with in the present might not be as bare-faced as the 1950s television ad glimpsed at the Duff brewery, where viewers were urged by a cartoon medic to fill up their undernourished Q-zones with "pure beer goodness", but their sheer omnipresence proves just as diabolical. It illustrates how difficult it is for someone fighting addiction when the pressure to drink is so deeply ingrained within every aspect of the cultural scenery. It gets to the point where even a passing train bearing the Duff logo on every carriage appears to taunt him by repeatedly commanding him to "Chug".

Even with the odds so heavily stacked against him, Homer makes it through the month with his promise to Marge intact, at which point he's eager to head straight to Moe's and get his Q-zone overflowing once more. Marge is disappointed that this would be his first inclination, since the entire purpose of this exercise was to prove to him that he had the willpower to survive without alcohol, not give him an excuse to go on the mother of all binges. Still, when Homer arrives at his sorely-missed watering hole, he finds that he can't go back to the way things were. He looks around himself, takes note of the palpable dolour that hangs over the bar's patrons, and becomes conscious of how much his own perspective has shifted within those 30 days of non-boozing. He tells Moe to put his beer back in the fridge and leaves, having decided that he'd sooner spend the evening sober, and in the company of Marge. It's here that the episode runs into its greatest challenge - we all like happy endings, and after the anguish Homer has endured in this particular go-around, it feels as though he's earned one, but how does it balance itself against our awareness that this newfound harmony is probably not going to last? Homer's weakness for Duff is too prominent a character trait to be going anywhere, and will prove his expressed Achilles' heel just two episodes along, in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", so does the ending become any less sincere with that in mind? There is a flip side to this problem, which is that alcohol addiction isn't an issue likely to be resolved by just one month's worth of abstinence. Realistically it would be something that Homer should expect to struggle with for a while. So perhaps the ending risked looking disingenuous either way. Instead, it exits on a glorious middle ground, with Homer gaining a moment of clarity on what it is that really makes his life worth living, and the sincerity of that realisation certainly not being in doubt (he was willing to give up the beer in the first place for her). Meanwhile, Moe speaks on behalf of the slighted status quo, asserting that Homer will be back in his usual spot before long, and working in an odd bit of pseudo-fourth wall breaking when he gestures toward the viewer and indicates that they, too, will return. It's then revealed that he is in fact pointing his finger at Barney, who's very much wedded to his personal Hell (to the extent that if Moe's bar didn't close, he wouldn't set foot outside its walls), but for a brief second, the viewer is implicated in this culture of sorry dependency. We know that nothing's going to change substantially for Homer, and we wouldn't miss it for the world. It's as if our need to return to our television sets night after night and while away the hours chuckling at the kinds of sad saps who populate sitcoms is indicative of some existential hole within our own lives. We're all creatures of our own dubious habits, after all.

In the meantime, Homer and Marge are allowed ride off into the sunset singing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", in a homage to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969). There's a cute visual gag in that Homer still doesn't have his licence back and is having to ride about on Lisa's little pink bicycle to get anywhere. With Marge perched on the handle bars it should be additionally awkward, but they're managing. It also doubles as a touching metaphor, with the bike, once a symbol of Homer's failure and humiliation, becoming his final means of mobility, a chance to glide free from the burdens of his past, now that his recent upheaval has directed him to an alternate path. It's a path that seems to only ever open on a temporary basis in the world of The Simpsons, but it's a reassurance to know that it's there. 

 

BBC2 edit alert!:  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31st August 1997 had an inescapable impact on the zeitgeist in the UK. I remember tuning into Sky 1 to watch The Simpsons that very day and having to sit through numerous links showing footage of Diana and her family set to mournful music, creating such a deluge of misery that they had me feeling dirty for merely desiring a bit of fun and levity with a cartoon family in between. You'd have thought that "Duffless", which contains an explicit shout-out to Diana Spencer, would have been an obvious target for Sky 1's censoring scissors when it next appeared. Yet I remember being surprised when they aired "Duffless" in what was still the close aftermath and the entire Princess Di sequence was left completely intact. It's not that there's anything overtly problematic or offensive about the sequence in itself (the joke is just Barney being a drunken wally, in mistaking something as ridiculous as a pile of rags for the Princess of Wales, and Homer being comically hurt in the process), but given the atmosphere at the time I wouldn't necessarily have faulted Sky if they'd opted to play it safe and not have Diana joked about in any capacity (particularly given the episode's broader subject matter, and its subsequent talk of fatal road accidents). But no, they either overlooked it or decided it was okay. And then when BBC2 got round to airing the episode (some time later, once things had settled down a notch), they did implement all the anticipated edits, so that Barney simply drives forward without explanation, causing Homer to miss the mattress on the roof of the car and hit the ground, and the sequence immediately ends. While I've no doubt that the Beeb made these cuts in the interests of not ruffling anybody's feathers, it's quite possible that they thought it would be confusing to have Diana referenced as though she were still among the living - as I recall, they also cut the moment in "Treehouse of Horror IV" where Richard Nixon, having been summoned to the Jury of the Damned, protests that he's not dead yet, on the grounds that Nixon was dead by the time the BBC aired it and the joke would have made no sense. To which I say, they should have given a bit of credit to the viewer's ability to decipher the original context - not least because the actual punchline of that exchange was Devil Flanders' "Listen, I did a favour for you!", which will never not be hilarious. Also, the man never drank a Duff in his life.

This was not, however, the most bewildering edit to be made to The Simpsons on account of Princess Diana. Believe me, I've a much juicier anecdote to share when I get round to covering "Rosebud". Spoiler: that one was Sky 1's doing.

Homer The Vigilante (aka Would You Say It's Time For Everyone To Panic?)

 

It goes without saying that The Simpsons is one of those shows that only gets better as you get older. So much of its wizardry lies within its finer details, and in the subtle humor, cultural references and character nuances that are largely unattainable to a child, but will hit you with a spanking new resonance when adulthood sets in. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for watching the series through the eyes of an unworldly nipper and having no choice but to go along with the flow, to wherever it might lead you. In those days, when you had no real frame of reference for a good percentage of what was going on, the world of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie always seemed so much more random and mysterious. Remember, for instance, what it was like to be 10 years old and experiencing "Homer The Vigilante" (1F09) for the very first time, never having heard of Stanley Kramer's 1963 marathon-lengthed farce It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and having no idea how you were even expected to process the direction in which the narrative eventually heads? In those final two and a half minutes, we witness the populace of Springfield losing its collective mind over an elusive fortune reported to be concealed in the outskirts of town beneath a "Big T", an audaciously dizzying swing with which to see out a story that had already seemed to have reached its quota for over the topness. It was almost as though the episode had tumbled down some wild and wonderful rabbit hole - which, for all intents and purposes, it basically had. 

Being in on the joke is great, but not being in on the joke can be a tremendously thrilling experience too. As a child, I became fascinated with that entire ending sequence, and with what I was potentially missing. It felt like the ultimate Simpsons enigma, a great unknown lingering just outside of my understanding, waiting to be discovered and unpicked. I'd quickly deduced that was most likely an elaborate reference to a movie I hadn't seen, for there were two major giveaways. The soundtrack was doing something interesting and unconventional, a tip-off that it was borrowing from an outside source (in this case, Ernest Gold's Academy Award-nominated score), and a bunch of new and distinct faces who were not part of the recurring Springfield mob had gotten in on the money-hungry frenzy, the most prominent of which was a semi-coherent man in glasses and a fedora who had apparently been tricked by Bart into driving into a river. He is of course a parody of Phil Silvers' character from It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and the scene with him being hoodwinked by a wily child into an ill-advised aquatic diversion is transplanted pretty much wholesale from the film. And then at the Big T itself (an unusually-shaped palm tree, just like the film's own Big W, which can also be glimpsed in the mise en scene) there are figures modelled on Buddy Hackett and Milton Berle. 1997 saw the publication of a couple of Simpsons reference guides, the official A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family and the unofficial one by Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, both of which pointed me to Kramer's film, and thus began a whole new phase in my cultural education, in which the media I consumed was predominantly dictated by my need to comprehend certain jokes on The Simpsons (I also watched 2001: A Space Odyssey purely to understand the closing sequence of "Deep Space Homer", but it frankly left even more baffled than when I'd come in). Back then, if I wanted to see an older movie it typically meant having to wait for it to show up on television, which could be a slow and frustrating process, but in 1999 my patience paid off. The film left a strong enough impression that, some years later, I unsuccessfully campaigned to get it screened at my university's student cinema (I was thwarted less by a lack of interest than by the impracticalities of getting hold of a 35mm copy), but the most important thing is that I was finally up to speed on the secrets of "Homer The Vigilante". Still the overarching enigma of that closing sequence refused to fade, even with the necessary research now behind me. The individual choices all made perfect sense, but as a whole it remained such a confounding way of signing off a Simpsons story. There is something about that it seems downright hallucinatory, even within context. 

"Homer The Vigilante" debuted on January 6th 1994 as part of the show's fifth season, and I don't think it's acknowledged enough what a uniquely strange time in the series' life that quinary year was. While nowhere near as darkly cynical or openly portentous as Season 8, the overall tone feels weirdly unsettled. There's a sense that the very fabric of the Simpsons universe is perpetually on the verge of unravelling, whether that's a result of the basic rules and underpinnings being challenged within an episode's conflict (see "The Last Temptation of Homer" and "Homer Loves Flanders"), or just a random tangent it goes off on at the end (see "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood"). It was also an era when the writers seemed to be getting particularly dependent on doing elaborate parodies of popular movies, occasionally to the point that it formed the basis of the entire plot. Some of these parodies were relatively unintrusive, serving more as platforms on which to examine existing character dynamics -  we all know that "Marge on The Lam" is one big homage to Thelma & Louise, but it ties in logically enough with Marge's characterisation that it's a functional story on its own merits, one that fits in comfortably with the internal grounding of the series. With other parodies, you get the impression that the show's entire universe is bending in order to accommodate the demands of what it's spoofing, with the It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World homage in "Vigilante" belonging in that second camp. The story gets so intensely frenetic in those final moments, with so much going on and so many outside elements at play (the soundtrack, the appearance from Phil Silvers), that it has the effect of suggesting a heightened reality, one that's strayed drastically far from the show's regular wheelhouse. By the end, the characters aren't in Kansas (or indeed Springfield) any more, but have gone to some whole other plane of existence in which the worlds of The Simpsons and Stanley Kramer have mysteriously converged (in a way that's not altogether different from the moment in "Selma's Choice" where Marge's memories become fused with images from The Prince of Tides). The entire set-up, and not just Malloy's promise of hidden loot, becomes an extravagant mirage. There's that off-kilter moment where Silvers' grinning mug is inserted among a shot of Springfieldians looking downward, as if he were just one of the regular line-up. The angelic choir music that plays as the assorted treasure hunters pull out their shovels and tunnel deep into the earth beneath the Big T might have been pilfered wholesale from the movie, but the ethereal aura it creates causes the sequence to feel particularly illusory. It is both a false promise of salvation, foreshadowing the eventual reveal that there is no buried fortune, and a tip-off that things in general have gone very deeply haywire for Homer and co.

Or it might just be that the entirety of "Vigilante" is an illusion. It opens in the early hours, with the family all sleeping, and I'm half-tempted to propose a fan theory that the ensuing events are nothing more than a colourful dream that one of the household is having (presumably Homer or Lisa, given that they're most at the forefront). Even before we get to that overblown ending, "Vigilante" is a peculiar little beast. Penned by John Swartzwelder, this might just be the most surreal non-Halloween entry of the season - impressive, when you consider that it arrived hot on the heels of "$pringfield (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)", an episode with a particularly baffling structure and execution that evoked a collection of miniature fever dreams sewn together. As a story, "Vigilante" flows much more fluidly and coherently than "$pringfield" (helped along by the fact that there are no subplots it has to juggle), but it somehow feels even more unreal. It's not that the events of "Vigilante" are especially far-fetched - this was the same season where Homer went into space and Bart was keeping a full-grown African elephant in the backyard, and the premise of an artful burglar who's capable of swiping anything in Springfield that isn't nailed down feels positively modest and down to earth by comparison. It's more that this burglar goes about his swiping to a leitmotif modelled on Henry Mancini's theme for The Pink Panther (a reference that was never lost on me, even as a child), which puts his thieving antics in conspicuous quotation marks. Again, it's the movie allusions that take the story to a whole other realm, where everything is all very knowing and caricatured. The Cat Burglar is a cartoon creation by even The Simpsons' standards, at once too farcical to be taken overly seriously as a threat and a way more formidable foe than anyone in Springfield can conceivably handle. (He certainly isn't challenged by the town's approach to security. One of my favourite gags occurs right at the start, when we see the burglar's infiltration of the Simpsons' household from his perspective. He gets his tools out, ready to break open the lock on their front door, and does a double take when he finds Homer's keys dangling there, ready for him to turn.)

The outlandish streak continues during a later scene where Homer looks to up his game against the burglar by shopping for weapons at Herman's military antiques store, and is taken out back for a glimpse at the hottest, most clandestine merchandise on offer - a miniature version of the A-bomb, which Homer fantasies about dropping on a gathering of unsuspecting beat poets. This sequence is clearly framed as an idle daydream in context (so a dream within a dream?), but it's still such a weird digression, in that it's basically an excuse to recreate that iconic shot from Dr Strangelove (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb) where Slim Pickens goes out on the ultimate adrenalin rush, by riding the titular bomb to the doomed Earth below. But then the real punchline occurs when Homer is forced to return to reality, where we see that he's gotten as far as actually mounting the bomb. Herman indignantly gestures to a sign right next to it explicitly forbidding such behaviour. Apparently it's the standard reaction of everybody who sees the bomb to get high on a Pickens-inspired power trip, to the point that would necessitate the installation of a sign. Which really sums up the spirit of the entire episode. It's a cautionary tale about the dumb stuff that happens when people inevitably get drunk on their own bravado.

It's fair to say that "Vigilante" is not a particularly character-driven episode. Or rather, it's not particularly driven by the characters as individuals. The participant who gets the most heartfelt treatment is naturally Lisa, whose beloved saxophone is stolen by the Cat Burglar, depriving her of her principal means of self-expression and grounding this otherwise entirely silly story with a firm enough undercurrent of pathos. Despite the amount of screentime he's given, and the personal stakes afforded through the theft of Lisa's saxophone, it is only nominally about Homer. "Vigilante" is best understood as a study of the psychology of Springfield as a collective, and just how badly it can react when faced with a crisis, and in that regard Homer becomes more of a representative of the wrong-headedness of the town. This is the recurring theme we've seen since pretty much the beginning, with community spirit forever giving way mob mentality, and the masses being swayed in whatever arbitrary direction is suggested to them. Neither the media or the law enforcement prove in any way reassuring in their responses to the Cat Burglar - Kent Brockman insists on reporting through the most disastrous lens possible ("When cat burglaries start, can mass murders be far behind?"), and while the police get as far as uncovering a clue in the form of a handkerchief dropped at one of the crime scenes, compromising the evidence comes only too naturally and too moronically to Wiggum. When it falls upon the townspeople to pull together and come up with a solution of their own, Ned has a sensible idea in proposing that they start a Neighbourhood Watch, in which everybody looks out for everybody else. The town seems eager to embrace this initiative, until Ned turns the tide against himself with an ill-judged display of modesty, enabling Homer to rise to the top in his stead - not because he consciously understands how to work the crowd, but because he so perfectly embodies the mindlessness of its ethos ("We don't need a thinker, we need a doer - someone who'll act without considering the consequences!"). Homer, whose personality and antics had already seen a marked broadening throughout the course of Season 5, is as loud and obnoxious as he'd ever been in "Vigilante", although in this context it is justified with the perspective that he's representing something much bigger than himself. It also accounts for how he can be so brazenly dismissive of not only his father, but of the entire older generation, when Abe offers to help with the crusade against the Cat Burglar, but is refused on the grounds that he's an old man, and "old people are useless". Despite the significance of this particular plot point to the eventual resolution, Homer's curt position comes from basically nowhere; there are no establishing moments where he's shown having any kind of personal difficulty with Abe, and "Vigilante" certainly isn't about his relationship with his father. Rather, he's best understood as speaking for a broader societal attitude - the idea that senior citizens are to be cast aside and ignored. He also makes himself ripe for a humbling, for it is this very assumption that fatally wrongfoots his mission, causing him to underestimate not only what Abe could potentially bring to the table, but who he might be up against.

Homer goes about assembling a ragtag team of non-seniors to patrol the streets of Springfield, looking for any opportunity to hurl their weight around. Again, the particulars of the group's dynamic don't really matter. Moe and Barney are a given, Apu was slowly being cemented as part of Homer's social circle, and we were slap dab in the middle of the era where there was a concerted effort to make Skinner one of the guys (something more or less abandoned with Season 6; the contrast was often hilarious, but it was too insurmountable a stretch that he and Homer would actually choose to hang out together), but none of them get much of a chance to act as individuals. Under Homer's guidance they swiftly devolve into faceless followers with less interest in protecting their community than in fuelling their own thuggish sensation of being at the top of the pile. It's not just the perspective of the elderly that gets discarded amid this alpha-driven arrangement, but that of the younger generation too. The thread with Lisa's saxophone provides a valuable counterpoint to the vulgar tendencies of the group, in that it gives Homer something genuinely righteous to be fighting for, if he could just keep his sights on it. The saxophone is the only stolen item that actually matters (aside from the cubic zirconia that proves crucial in the latter half), because it is the one area in which the Cat Burglar's practices are shown to have caused genuine harm. None of the other thefts merit anywhere near as much gravity - Marge's pearl necklace was also stolen, but she has an entire drawer full of them, and while Bart wakes up to find his stamp collection gone, in his case it's all a great joke that he would out himself as partaking in a hobby that nerdy (Lisa's observation that "Bart's pain is funny, but mine isn't" might seem a little mean by her standards, but she is only vocalising the stance being taken by the plot). Lisa has been robbed of her emotional mobility, which Homer promises to restore, only for her voice to become all the more buried beneath his chaotic agenda of harassing buskers, flipping vehicles with people's mouthy grandmas inside upside down, and world domination. Lisa represents the vulnerable youngsters on whose behalf this war is supposedly being waged, so that they might grow up in a safer, more nurturing environment, but who inevitably get pushed aside, or worse still, corrupted by its hopelessly subverted values. There are multiple instances where we see Homer's toxic influence being spread among Springfield's impressionable young minds. Bart is apparently permitted to participate in a chaotic session involving shotguns. The mob happens upon Jimbo (who's possibly been watching too much Dead Poets Society of late) spraying "Carpe Diem" onto the side of a building, and not only lets him off the hook when his rationale accords with their own ("It makes me feel like a big man!"), they agree to recruit him into their ranks (on the condition that he supplies his own weapon, in the form of a sack filled with doorknobs^[1]). Later, Homer is lured away from his post by the sight of underage kids drinking beer without a permit, only to get in on the beer binge himself and become the very model for belching frat boy behaviour.

As society disintegrates ever further under Homer's oversight, the mystery of the Cat Burglar ends up not being much of a mystery at all, although the episode deftly avoids overselling that point. You get no prizes if you figured out long before any of the characters did that the burglar is his fellow retiree Malloy, for who else could it have been? The answer is right under the community's noses the entire time, but nor is it made entirely explicit up until Abe's epiphany. If you were particularly attentive, you might have been able to match the burglar's silhouette in the opening sequence to Malloy's outline when he appears at Abe's bedroom to borrow his ointment. Perhaps you recognised his voice when he calls in during Homer's televised interview with Brockman to publicly announce his plans for pilfering the cubic zirconia from the Springfield Museum (prompting Homer to take his rage out on an innocent stagehand). Odds are that you picked up on how he sticks out like a sore thumb among everyone else in the story - a one-off character who's a blatant outsider to the ethos of community, and clearly being set up for plot significance. By the time he shows up at the threatened museum dressed in black the jig is pretty well up. Malloy is voiced by the late actor Sam Neill, who gives one of the most sublimely underrated guest performances of the series. His cool, collected and impeccably well-mannered affability makes him the very antithesis of a town that spends the entirety of the episode (and most of the series) racing around like headless chickens, and that, more so than his Henry Mancini-inspired leitmotif, is what makes him such a formidable nemesis. Not even the viewer is immune to his offences, for we too end up liking him and wanting him to get away with his crimes. The man is a gentleman through and through (his prior failure to clean off the applicator on Abe's ointment notwithstanding), but there is still a discernable element of amused disdain in how he handles the Springfieldians. At the start, when he prizes a portable television from the sleeping Bart's arms and leaves him with a book entitled Coping With Loss, I can't decide if that's his politeness showing or just his penchant for taunting his victims. It's evident that Malloy is in the burglary game because he enjoys the thrill of infiltration, and of toying with all of these foolish souls, and in a way, good for him - he represents an undervalued class fighting back against a system that's written him off as worthless and expects him to spend his remaining years withering away in a rundown retirement home. He was always above suspicion because nobody imagined that somebody so low down in the social food chain could be such a worthy adversary. In the end he's done in by Abe, who notices that Malloy has the stolen zirconia on his coffee table and finally puts two and two together. Maybe Malloy got a little too cocky, or maybe he expected a little more solidarity from Abe, who is part of that same undervalued class. But then how could Abe resist the opportunity to get back at Homer's earlier slighting by turning up at his door and announcing that he's cracked the mystery? Actually, this is a pretty generous move on Abe's part, demonstrating how much he fundamentally loves his son. If he'd really wanted to show Homer up, he could have gone to the police directly and wallowed in all of the credit, but instead he allows Homer to take the lead and obtain redemption at a time when the entire town was baying for his blood for failing to keep tabs on the zirconia.

Unlike Homer, Malloy clearly does understand how to work the masses. When cornered, he comes very close to wheedling his way out of trouble on the basis of his charisma alone, agreeing to return all of the stolen items (including Lisa's saxophone) and stroking at the townspeople's egos by telling them how much he likes them. Again, just beneath Neill's charming performance you can practically hear him snickering internally at just how easy they are to hoodwink. It is, surprisingly, Wiggum who puts his foot down and reminds everyone that they can't just ignore the fact that Malloy is a highly prolific criminal. But Malloy isn't beaten yet. He still has one further ace up his sleeve, which is what gets us into our It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World pastiche. Malloy makes his ultimate play, laying out a scenario that this malleable town couldn't possibly resist. He claims to have amassed millions of stolen dollars over the years, which he's concealed somewhere in Springfield at a site marked by a Big T. He's so obliging that, rather than send them out on a totally haphazard treasure hunt, he's even willing to supply the precise location - the money is buried at 4723 Maple Valley Road ("You take Highway 201 south for 15 minutes. You take a left - a left!..."). It is of course a grand diversion, designed to take eyes off himself for long enough for him to sneak away. The town feasts on the bait and races off with their shovels in hand, while Malloy escapes and presumably legs it to a new life somewhere in South America.

The It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World parody works as brilliantly as it does because, far from being an arbitrary movie homage, it is but the logical culmination of the episode-long obsession with the townspeople's collective mindlessness. This whole thing started with Malloy, an apparent interloper from another reality, waltzing in and turning Springfield upside down, and it ends with the town disappearing up its own delirium into territory that is hitherto unknown, leaving them ultimately stranded and with no clue how they're going to get back to their normal state of affairs (to the extent that, according to a nondescript professor consulted by Brockman, society is on the brink of collapsing into a state where bludgeoning and cannibalism will become the new order). Its surrealness is by design, to illustrate how the characters are touching such drastic new heights in their susceptibility as to have become completely detached from reality. The frenetic pacing and epic scale of Kramer's picture has been lovingly recreated, somehow managing to condense the plot of the movie (160 minutes long in its standard release) into less than 3 minutes and run through many of the highlights (like Phil Silvers cursing a child for convincing him to drive his car into a river). It helps that the two properties are such a great match tonally, not simply in being ambitiously larger than life comedies, but in sharing the same unrelenting cynicism about human nature, and reaching toward much the same conclusion. People on the whole are a greedy, grubby and pathetic little bunch, but you've got to laugh, haven't you?

It's an ending that lays bare the fundamental lack of community spirit that's been fuelling the mob's actions throughout. We all know that it was never about any desire to protect their neighbourhoods and uphold values, or (despite Marge's musings to the contrary) any shared love for the glittering novelties housed at their local museum. For Springfield, moving with the mob is a simple matter of self-preservation, in that it's always preferable to be a faceless shadow in a crowd than to be singled out as outside of it (as Homer learns the hard way when the zirconia is stolen on his watch and he becomes a highly acceptable target on which to vent their malaise). With that final suggestion of hidden riches, things degenerate into a matter of everyone for themselves, with the single interest in filling up their pockets with ill-gotten loot - that the alleged fortune was explicitly made up of stolen money is of no odds to any of them, not even to Wiggum and his underlings. Lisa, who's been the episode's moral centre and is satisfied just having her saxophone back, gets to maintain her dignity and sit the sequence out, but the rest of the town is swept up in the frenzied scramble to be the first at the Big T. Even when they've seemingly united in a team effort to dig up the money, Homer is all poised to snatch whatever they unearth for himself - which unfortunately turns out to be a briefcase containing only a missive from Malloy. He apologises for sending them on such a wild goose chase, admitting that there is no hidden money and that he was merely buying himself time in which to escape. It is hilarious when you contemplate that Malloy would have to have gone to the lengths of planting that briefcase with the note inside in advance, as his contingency plan in the event that he was caught, which speaks volumes to the meticulousness of his scheming, and his dual need to be extremely polite to his prey and to taunt them in the same breath. 

Malloy's success represents the triumph of the rational individual over the mindless herd, and I think we the audience are entirely satisfied with that outcome. The Cat Burglar played his hand astutely and earned his getaway. It's a meaning that is, unsurprisingly, lost on the Springfieldians, who persist in digging ever deeper, believing that if they keep going, they'll eventually uncover something. Having tasted such an exhilarating high, they still refuse to be brought back to Earth, and insist instead on going in the opposite direction, by burrowing down ludicrously deep into a tunnel of denial and self-delusion. When, some hours later, it dawns on them that they probably won't be locating any millions and, what's more, they've gone so far down that getting back up to the surface could be a problem (an ironic contrast to Malloy's situation), the solution is once again to keep on digging and see what comes of it. It's not just the moral to which they're left oblivious, but the metaphor too.

BBC2 edit alert!: I don't remember Sky 1 touching anything about this episode when it was part of their rotation, but later when the Beeb got a hold of it, I recall that they nixed the precise moment where Bart was revealed to be in on the vigilante group's shotgun party. 

[1] This was a line I misunderstood as a child. Back then I'd assumed that "swing a sack of doorknobs" was some idiom I hadn't previously come across, but I would figure out as I got older, with, with the joke being that the vigilante group were taking it all-too literally. Nowadays I'm pretty confident that no such idiom exists and this is all just a morsel of self-contained nonsense. Oh, and when a disillusioned Jimbo later tells Homer that he's going to law school, I originally misheard that as "Laura's school", thinking it was a continuity nod to "New Kid on The Block".

West Country Tales '82: The Breakdown (aka Said The Spider To The Fly)

"The Breakdown" is often singled out as one of the oddities of West Country Tales, largely on account of its lack of any supernatural content. Written by Josephine Poole and based on a contribution by Janet Holt, it is a brooding little drama about the perils of getting caught in remote places with the wrong sort of company, with a gleefully macabre closing twist that wouldn't have seemed at all out of place in an episode of Tales of The Unexpected. That being said, you're not actually going to mistake it for Tales of The Unexpected, for it does that very West Country Tales thing of having a voice-over narrator do most of the talking, shouldering the burden of dropping all of the cumbersome exposition while the characters make more minor chitchat in the backdrop. It is the voice-over narration that I suspect tends to get stuck in some people's craws about West Country Tales, keeping it from becoming a classic in the league of Tales of The Unexpected.  But it's also the use of the voice-over narration in "The Breakdown" that makes it such an unsettling entry to the West Country archive.

I noted in my coverage of "The Beast" that the seeming purpose of the voice-over narration was to impose a degree of distance between the viewer and the action on screen, something that might initially frustrate us but that recreates the experience of hearing a story second-hand and only being able to get so close to the truth (an important aspect of the series' texture, given that these tales were supposedly based on real-life testimonies). "The Beast" was told in the first-person, from the perspective of a character who was grappling with the inexplicable and whose objectivity as a storyteller we would certainly question were he to share his account with us in the real world, however much we enjoyed hearing it. We don't get quite the same effect with "The Breakdown", where the voice-over takes on a very different form to that of "The Beast". For one, it is supplied by a third-person narrator (Keith Barron), with the story being rather short on internal characters who could have convincingly fulfilled this duty (the eventual outcome would make it extremely difficult for either of the principal players to be relating it first-hand, and while a third character does show up eventually, he's in the dark on a lot of the details). Likewise, no attempt is made to give Barron's narration any kind of context in terms of local lore - he isn't recounting this as something that happened to a friend of a friend, or as a legend attached to a nearby building (one wonders what Holt's own connection was to the story she submitted). He is simply an all-knowing (if not all-sharing) observer who seems eerily fascinated by the pivotal encounter. There are times where he comments on the characters' actions with a cool matter-of-factness, as if they were subjects in a nature documentary, and other times where he comments for them, his words providing a sinister inner monologue that contrasts with the mundaneness of their own muted dialogue. "The Breakdown" is a cautionary tale about the banality of evil, where Barron's narration articulates a taster of the less-than-savoury impulses lurking below a surface of overwhelming quietude. It is a slow-brewing story, with little in the way of overt drama until the very end, but the commentary ensures that we are always aware of that omnipresent menace, the silences and the relative ordinariness of the characters' interactions exuding an incongruity that becomes all the more chilling. Meanwhile, the action is punctuated by a succession of abrupt fade-outs, indicating the slightest passage of time, but also the blank, obscured spaces in which the viewer can never quite be certain what is transpiring.

The episode centres on an anonymous woman (Anita Harris) whose car, a green Ford Escort, comes to a sudden standstill in an isolated part of Devon, about an hour's trek from the village of Ipplepen, where the only other human in sight is Bill Foster (John Abineri), a devoted gardener who's lived a solitary existence ever since his wife Aileen died under circumstances that were deemed suspicious, but ultimately not suspicious enough to have Bill tried for her murder. The lingering uncertainty has rendered Bill a pariah amongst the local community, who nevertheless regard his story with a lurid fascination - Barron notes that if Bill were to open his garden to the public, he would have no shortage of gawkers stopping by, but not for how beautiful his flowerbeds look in the summertime. (Unfortunate characters named Bill seem to be something of a running theme in West Country Tales, for it was also the name of the husband from "The Beast" who bore the full brunt of the titular creature's fury). None of this means anything to his unexpected visitor, who is simply seeking help with restarting her car and, failing that, access to a telephone, and who is too good an opportunity to pass up for the companionship-starved Bill. He goes to inspect her car and sneakily dishes out further damage so that she'll be forced to stay put. He then invites her into his house while he pretends to call the garage in Ipplepen on her behalf, claiming at first that he cannot get through before deliberately waiting until past the garage's opening hours to try again and leave a message. When she politely requests that he ring her a taxi, he informs her that the only taxi service in the area is run by the garage, and offers to put her up until morning, which she accepts. All the while, Barron's narrator frames Bill's regard for his guest in distinctly predatory terms that are designed to get our alarm bells ringing. We hear a startling metaphor about a spider and a fly, and repeated emphasis on how much this woman's form and aura reminds him of Aileen, not least in her comparably attractive legs.

There's no question that Bill is a creep, but ample ambiguity as to just what level of creep we're dealing with. It could be that he was wrongly judged as a killer by the villagers and that he was in fact the victim of one of life's great tragedies through the loss of Aileen. Forced into solitude and pining for his wife, he's become sad and desperate enough to want to cling onto whatever scrap of warm human company might come his way. Alternatively, he could be sizing up another potential murder victim, the qualities that make her similar to Aileen being the very things that  might make her susceptible to his machinations. So many of Bill's behaviours are left open to interpretation - for example, when he first becomes aware of the woman's presence outside of his grounds, his immediate response is to study her through a pair of binoculars, an action that could be seen as voyeuristic but also, so the narrator informs us, represents his go-to means of maintaining any semblance of connection with other people. Even the act of gardening seems double-edged, with the observation that Bill is locked in a struggle to prevent his grounds "from reverting to the jungle it seems to determined to be". Does it point to an inner struggle, to keep his own feral tendencies in check, or does it evoke those same themes seen in "The Beast", where the wilderness becomes a symbol for the social isolation that threatens to consume those who cannot find their affinity with solitude? The narrator's description of the garden brims with violent imagery that appears, ostensibly, to paint the surrounding nature as a victim of Bill's attacks - a peacock wandering the grounds "screams like a woman", while the gardening tools are "honed to a razor edge" - but more likely reveals the extent to which he remains cornered and forever pushing back against a past that persists in haunting him. The screaming peacock effectively mocks him, and no matter how hard he hacks away at the undesirable shrubbery, it will simply return to its overgrown form.

The woman, for her part, seems all-too willing to accept the hospitality of this man in the middle of nowhere whom she doesn't know, something that might on the surface read as total naivety. She is an outsider of another kind, a tourist roaming the countryside and going wherever the road takes her, with no apparent purpose other than to enjoy herself, a sure-fire indicator of an innocent who doesn't anticipate what a dangerous place the world can be or what she might in fact be getting into. Or is she more canny than she lets on? The narrator articulates her inner thoughts a lot less than those of Bill, but does make it known that she is also a loner, her husband having left her for another woman. It is another titbit of information that seems to set her up as an easy victim, the kind of individual so desperate for company that she's less inclined to reject the advances of a stranger, but it could just as easily suggest that she has an axe to grind of her own. An additional, particularly curious revelation is made during a sequence where she attempts to prepare a sandwich in Bill's kitchen and accidentally cuts her finger, prompting the narrator to divulge that while she's unfazed by the sight of other people's blood, she can't stomach the sight of her own. Foreshadowing for the the further blood-spilling she's sure to endure if she continues to hang around with Bill? Or perhaps it's letting us in on something else entirely?

Indeed, "The Breakdown" amounts to a rather puckish exercise in confounded expectations and deceptive appearances, culminating a grisly visual punchline when the mechanic who runs the garage in Ipplepen (Brian Jennings) receives Bill's message the following morning and goes out to retrieve, repair and finally return the car. Piecing together the evidence that Bill has had a female visitor and being all-too aware of the man's reputation, he sneaks into the house to have a nose around, hoping to gain insight into what goes on behind the local pariah's closed doors. His salacious curiosity is rewarded with the shock of discovering Bill's corpse, brutally skewered, with the woman nowhere in sight. He escapes the scene in the newly-repaired car, and as he does so, we hear a radio broadcast advising that police are looking for a woman last seen at the wheel of a green Ford Escort. The nature of why they are looking for her is never disclosed (might it have anything to do with her husband and his lover?), but the public are cautioned not to approach her because she's dangerous. Poole's script has carefully engendered one set of expectations, only to have thing go in the opposite direction entirely. Bill's grasping desperation, the characteristic that appeared to make him so menacing, was in fact what made him vulnerable. As he conspired to keep the woman stranded at his abode, he was unwittingly laying out his own trap all along, beckoning in and isolating himself with a total stranger who turned out to be a psychopathic killer. Of all the rotten luck.

Still, what complicates our final assessment of "The Breakdown" is that it never definitively answers the question of whether or not Bill was guilty of Aileen's murder. We might assume that because he winds up the victim of this scenario then he was a misjudged innocent all along, but his meeting his match in a more insidious party doesn't automatically preclude the possibility that he might have been a killer himself. Both things could be true, and we leave the story not knowing what to make of Bill - was he a tragic figure or a villain who got outplayed? Ultimately, his backstory proves to be something of an elaborate red herring, Poole being less interested in delving into the psychology of these characters than in setting the audience up to have the rug pulled out from under them. But the shadow of the deceased Aileen nevertheless looms too large over the proceedings for her to be dismissed as a irrelevant misdirection. As noted, "The Breakdown" contains no supernatural elements, other than in a figurative sense - the narrator wonders if the woman, as she enters the garden, will "catch the ghost screams of Aileen losing her balance, and her life, on the garden path?" Aileen later appears as a static photograph, in ghostly black and white, once the woman gains entry to Bill's living room (his oddly upfront description of her as his "dead wife" is another little detail designed to keep us firmly on edge). As night sets in and the fateful seduction gets underway, the narrator assures us that Aileen's image stands forever vigilant. IF Bill was indeed her killer, then a tempting interpretation would be that she and the woman are somehow in cahoots - that the appearance of the mysterious woman represents a homecoming for Aileen, a reckoning carried out on her behalf by a figure who uncannily evokes her memory. That the woman specifically drives a green Ford likewise seems to align her with the unruly garden that Bill is constantly battling and unable to keep in check for long; she becomes an extension of that same wilderness, which for all we know represents the inexorableness of Bill's guilt and which, in spite of his resistance, was always fated to get the best of him. If Bill is in fact innocent, then Aileen's memory becomes a symbol for him at his most vulnerable; his seduction of the woman is framed as an act of allegorical infidelity in which the sacredness of his wife is affronted through his willingness to let the wilderness in, opening himself up to his inevitable misfortune. The woman is a final, deadly manifestation of the outside world that he worked so tirelessly to keep at bay and which had already driven him to the periphery of civilisation. Her cold-blooded murder of Bill becomes a shorthand for the means by which society has callously condemned him.

On that note, what are we to make of the episode's final sequence, in which the mechanic flees the scene of the crime using the same vehicle that had, only the day before, provided mobility for a homicidal fugitive on the run? If the woman no longer has her wheels, it might be more challenging for her to get about, but it might also be more difficult for anyone who's heard the police warning to identify her, if this is the key information they have to go on. The implication is that she's made a clean break and disappeared into the West Country, absorbed by the same treacherous wilderness from which she mysteriously materialised, and who knows where she'll end up next and strike again? In the meantime, there is something comically incriminating in having the mechanic drive away in the very car we hear described in the police alert, suggesting a degree of complicity on his part. Although he professes (or rather, the narrator professes on his behalf) not to believe the stories about Bill, it doesn't take him long to start entertaining the possibility that he might have been up to his alleged old tricks with this brand new blood. He goes snooping around in search of the lurid evidence, but gets a rather different shock to the one he had anticipated. He is a representative of the local community, with its gossips and gawkers who distrust Bill but also treat his miserable story as a curiosity to be savoured. More crucially still, his perspective aligns with that of the viewer, in being in the dark about what exactly has gone on the night before but having strong pre-conceived notions as to how the scenario is likely to have played out. We head back into the building expecting a properly nasty conclusion, edging ever closer toward it with the same morbid fascination. Our mutual craving is technically satisfied, but comes with the additionally disturbing reminder that danger could be lurking in just about any guise. And now, like the mechanic, we've no choice but to take our ride in that treacherous Ford Escort. The wilderness has gotten the best of us all. 

There's No Disgrace Like Home (aka I Thought We Were Making Real Progress)

"There's No Disgrace Like Home" (7G04) is a Simpsons episode of multiple paradoxes - not least, that it provides such an honest and illuminating glimpse into the central family's dynamics while presenting a version of the family that might have come from a parallel universe, in which a number of the key roles associated with each member have been rearranged. Writer Mike Reiss sums it up neatly on the DVD commentary: "Virtually everything in this episode is wrong in the perspective of the show as it became. Lisa's a brat and Marge is a drunk and Homer's the most concerned family member." Watching the episode, only the fourth in the series' gargantuan run, it is certainly evident how loosely defined most of the characters still were following on from their origins in a collection of skits from The Tracey Ullman Show. The Ullman shorts had overwhelmingly tended to favour Bart's brash young perspective, with Lisa seldom receiving much development beyond her status as a middle child for Bart to bounce off of, while Marge's name was never spoken. Homer's personality was a bit better formed, but he was, in the beginning, defined largely by how Bart saw him, which was as a buffoonish would-be authority figure who endeavored to maintain order within the family but rarely succeeded. Coming out of The Tracey Ullman Show, the premise of Homer being willing to part ways with the household television in order to fund a family therapy session with a dubious-looking shrink really wasn't all that strange, although that's immaterial to a chunk of the fanbase. Like all of Season 1, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" is undervalued by modern viewers, but it attracts a particular flak, from fans who regard its more rudimentary interpretation of the characters as insurmountable. Even those who appreciate that character development isn't always a smooth process tend to dismiss it as a weird and redundant relic of another era, a view that I personally consider short-sighted. Having laid out its peculiarities at the start of the commentary, Reiss closes by concording with co-writer Al Jean and series creator Matt Groening that the episode itself still holds up well, and I agree. Even if "Disgrace" doesn't nail down everything about the Simpsons as we'd come to know them, it's earned its flowers as one of those quintessential episodes that took massive leaps in solidifying the series' heart and soul.

The paradoxical nature of "Disgrace" is further exemplified through its particular significance to the series' UK broadcast history, it being the first episode to air on BBC One, on 23rd November 1996. This ended a six-year period in which The Simpsons had been retained as an exclusive perk for Sky subscribers, and for mainstream UK audiences would have been their first real opportunity to get acquainted with the likes of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. It's fair to say that the Beeb's ordering of the series was, to begin with, aggressively scattershot. The enlarged gap between the show's satellite and terrestrial premieres meant that there was already an extensive backlog to get through, and rather than adhere to the original US order, or any kind of logical order at all, they were quite happy to jump about between the early seasons - the next few episodes to air across the remainder of 1996 were "Bart The Daredevil" (Season 2), "The Call of The Simpsons" (Season 1), "Lisa's Substitute" (Season 2), "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" (Season 1) and "A Streetcar Named Marge" (Season 4). It isn't hard to comprehend why they'd wanted to defer the Christmas episode, which launched the show in the US, until later that December, but can we make sense of any of the other choices here? Were they just pulling episodes at random out of a hat, or was somebody making a conscious decision about which installments went out when? Looking at that line-up, I do wonder if there was perhaps a deliberate effort to get the series off to the strongest possible start by prioritising episodes that might be considered "fan favourites", hence the likes of "Bart The Daredevil" and "Lisa's Substitute" being bumped to the front of the queue. The former has that indelible ending sequence where Homer takes a tumble down a gorge, while the latter has a reputation as one of the show's most emotionally searing entries. "The Call of The Simpsons", meanwhile, sticks out as arguably the most purely farcical of the early episodes, while "A Streetcar Named Marge" boasted one of the series' biggest and most ambitious finales to date, in which the characters enact a musical rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire. It does feel like a carefully-curated portfolio of everything the show could do, ensuring that BBC viewers got a compact snapshot of how effectively it functioned as both an anarchic comedy and as a heart-rending drama. If true, then the implication would be that "Disgrace" was hand-picked as the ideal introduction to the series, the episode that best encapsulated who the Simpsons were and what their adventures had to offer - a bitterly ironic move, given how everyone who views this episode nowadays invariably complains about how unrepresentative it is of the characters we've since come to know and love? Or were the BBC in fact onto a good wicket?

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that "There's No Disgrace Like Home" really was the perfect episode with which to kick-start the series. "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" did the job just fine, but an obvious limitation that episode had as an introduction is that it is predominantly a Bart and Homer show, with the Simpson women having to sit around the living room for the bulk of the duration. By contrast, the producers' original choice for the premiere, "Some Enchanted Evening", feels like it was consciously designed to be an ensemble episode, with every member of the family (Maggie included) getting to do something to further the narrative, but as a hypothetical pilot always had two key factors working against it. It gets a bit uncharacteristically dark and threatening in its second half, once Ms Botz enters the scene, and as for the first half, I'd question of the wisdom of launching the series with such a close and uncomfortable look at the problems underpinning Homer and Marge's union.  It was also fundamentally a tale of the family divided, with the kids being left to fend for themselves against a dangerous home invader while Homer and Marge are off resolving a conflict of a different nature - whereas "Disgrace" has the honor of being the first Simpsons episode interested foremost in exploring what makes the family work as a unit. That is its major strength, and why ultimately it doesn't matter if the family, as individuals, aren't entirely in line with their subsequent characterisations. "Disgrace" is more concerned with what makes them collectively the Simpsons, the unified front weathering the judgements of the external world and undercutting its various hypocrisies. It exemplifies the anarchic spirit that differentiated the show from its contemporaries, for what could be more subversive than a climax where the family are seen administering electric shocks to one another with wild abandon? But it's also a redemption narrative, ending on a note of genuine if wryly unconventional triumph, emphasising why this endlessly imperfect clan should speak so sincerely to our innermost sensibilities.

"Disgrace" also stands out as the installment most conspicuously informed by one of the original Tracey Ullman shorts, in that it is a loose sort of remake of the "Family Therapy" short where Homer tricks his family into attending a session with a psychologist named B.F. Sherwood, seeking to remedy the fact that they don't laugh any more. In both adventures, the solution to the family's problem is to come together against a common adversary, exposing the weaknesses of the hapless authority tasked with guiding them to a better standard of behaviour and confirming that, actually, the rest of the world is every bit as screwed up and chaotic as them. "Family Therapy" emphasised this point by making Sherwood yet another doppelganger of Homer's (being a slimmer, more successful Homer makes him the precursor to Herb Powell, who, as we've discussed, was the precursor to Frank Grimes, in a perfect chain of increasingly bitter self-loathing). Wearing a suit and tie and occupying his own office didn't preclude the fact that there was a raging simian in him looking for an outlet, and he was able to call Homer out so bluntly on his bullying of his children because deep down inside he was no better than him. "Disgrace" refines the premise in a way that makes the Simpsons themselves less antagonistic - other than being whacked by Bart with a de-foamed rod, Dr Marvin Monroe isn't placed so directly on the receiving end of their vindictive anguish. Rather than be provoked into behaving in the same unruly manner as his patients, he's exposed as a huckster peddling a facile vision of bliss, and the family one-up him by discovering that there is plenty of joy and unity to be had in embracing their imperfect selves.

Truth be told, I think a lot of the charges about the family being out of character in this episode are superficial at best. The only one that stands out as particularly egregious is the plot point of Homer wanting to sell the television set for therapy money, a development the story at least manages to justify thematically. But is there anything else in here worth getting overly hung up upon? Sure, we get two or three instances of Lisa bickering childishly with Bart, something that would all but die out as her personality matured and their sibling relationship mellowed, but she isn't completely unrecognisable either. "Disgrace" sees her taking distinct steps toward becoming her own character, touching briefly on her college ambitions and her melancholic realisation that the odds were always stacked against her ("There go my young girl dreams of Vassar"^[1]). As for Marge getting drunk, let's be fair - that much is explicitly framed as being an out of character occurrence within context. Marge states that she generally isn't much of a drinker, and judging by the outcome here it's not hard to see why. She really can't take her fruit punch (much like how she can't keep her gambling impulses in check once she's crossed that most treacherous of lines). But even then, it's not like she does anything especially untoward while intoxicated, just lead the other women in a sing-song and clap too enthusiastically during a round of applause. It isn't on a par with, say, Homer's drunken behaviour at the party in "The War of The Simpsons", which overshadowed the whole occasion and made it an uncomfortable experience for everybody present. Here, the other families look a little perturbed during Marge's protracted clapping, but I guarantee they immediately forgot about it.

Where you most feel the roughness of the show in "Disgrace" is less in the characterisation of the main family than in the wider world-building, which within the more limited scope of the Ullman shorts was even vaguer and more undefined. "Homer's Odyssey" before it had done much in establishing the kind of place that Springfield was as a community, giving us a glimpse into its pollutant-belching power plant, its incompetent police department and its neighbourhoods of unconcerned bystanders, but we still had a way to go in cementing who was who within the town. Mr Burns is present (albeit still more of a Ronald Reagan caricature than he would later become), as is Smithers, but Lenny, Carl and Charlie weren't introduced until much later in the season, so for now we have to make do with a bunch of random nobodies at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant's company family picnic. The Flanders likewise didn't exist at this point - viewers had previously met Ned and Todd in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", but only because that episode was shown out of its intended order - necessitating the creation of a one-off "perfect" family who could put the Simpsons in the shade with their impeccable harmony (this family are never explicitly named, but according to the commentary they're the Gammills, after Reiss and Jean's friend Tom Gammill who later became a writer on the show). Even some of the familiar faces don't seem entirely on model, in particular Barney, who is here a surprisingly mean character (he's not usually one to look down his nose at Homer for his domestic failings, much less get physically violent with him). On the flip side, this episode marks the introduction of Lou and Eddie, Chief Wiggum's underlings, and while Lou is wrongly depicted as Caucasian, their personalities are nailed straight off the bat. Both are more preoccupied with downing beers than with their duties as police officers, and their German shepherd Bobo (who sadly didn't stick around) clearly has more brains than either of them.

From my perspective, the moment in "Disgrace" that aged the least elegantly would be our first ever reference to Mona Simpson, Homer's absent and (at the time) presumed deceased mother. Homer makes a comment that's meant to give us some insight into the kind of upbringing he had, and from the sounds of it, they were possibly envisioning her as more of a female Abe - apparently, she once told Homer that he was "a big disappointment". We don't know how old Reiss and Jean envisioned the disparaged young Homer as having been when they wrote that particular piece of dialogue, but "Mother Simpson" of Season 7 would later establish that Mona was out of Homer's life when he was still a small child, so...that's a harsh thing to have to contemplate retroactively. With hindsight, it would have been more in keeping with Abe's parenting approach for that assessment to have come from him, but it's also clear that Homer attaches a certain reverence to his mother's words that he wouldn't necessarily do with Abe.

Regardless of who planted the initial seed, Homer's deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy are the driving force behind the drama of "Disgrace", as they were in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" and "Homer's Odyssey". In those episodes, it was his failure to be a first-rate breadwinner for his family that fuelled his desperation, whereas in "Disgrace" it's the family themselves who've become the impediment, holding him back from achieving his full potential as a breadwinner and upstanding member of society. He feels the weight of that judgement at the company picnic, where Burns alternately chooses to fire or promote his employees based how good impression their children make (again, a preoccupation that seems out of sync with his later characterisation, in which he's completely detached from the lives of the common people, but it works within the context of this particular conflict). After an afternoon of chasing two over-stimulated kids around Burns' estate and trying to keep his intoxicated wife from attracting too much attention, Homer is struck by the respect and devotion paid to Mr Gammill by his ultra-polite son. As they head toward their cars, Homer confides in Mr Gammill what a relief it is to be leaving the picnic so that they can get back to being themselves, and is met with only contempt and confusion in return; Gammill is offended by the insinuation that his family's spotless behaviour was nothing more than a performance to get into Burns' good graces. We know that Homer wasn't being malicious in proposing as such, but was rather reaching out for the reassurance that he isn't doing things so spectacularly wrong and that all families, no matter how well-scrubbed on the surface, are cursed with the same challenges as his own. Gammill offers him no such solidarity, and instead seems to confirm his worst fears - that the kind of brood he's raising is a reflection of his own merits as a patriarch, and that if his family aren't up to snuff in the eyes of society, he'll be condemned along with them. This anxiety is sublimely illustrated in a fantasy sequence where the Simpsons are transformed into cackling demons, beckoning Homer into their Hell-bound vehicle on the insistence that he is assuredly one of them, while the Gammills, ever the precursors to the Flanders (and so unbearably wholesome that they sing "B-I-N-G-O" as they drive away, a stark contrast to the Simpsons' Freaks-inspired chanting), acquire angelic wings and halos and ascend into a heavenly light. Homer is inspired to try and teach his family better manners, but ironically causes them to degenerate further. His solution is to take them out spying on other families in the neighbourhood, hoping to give them a first-hand glimpse into the natural bliss most other households are able to attain within their natural habitats, prompting the community to raise alerts about a gaggle of peeping toms in the vicinity. Their ill-fated tour of the neighbourhood ends with an inevitable return to where they started - they approach their own house, where Homer gets to express further self-loathing by joking about having trampled the residing sucker's flower bed before realising where he is. The reality that all roads lead back to the disorder exemplified by the Simpsons is entirely inescapable. 

Because here's the thing. Homer was right about the Gammills. Their presentation as the happiest, most perfect of families is a facade. This is confirmed in a subtle but extremely telling visual gag, when we later see them in the waiting room of Monroe's clinic, all wearing distinctly sour expressions on their faces and all refusing to look one another in the eye. We can only speculate as to what's really going on behind closed doors with this clan (perhaps, much like the Lovejoys, the pressure of having to maintain their public facade is precisely what's causing them to crack). As it turns out, Homer has spent the narrative in pursuit of a mythical vision of the family that never existed, bearing out Lisa's assertion that "The sad truth is all families are like us." The final arrangement with the Gammills is not something the script explicitly highlights, leaving the viewer to take note and to draw their own conclusions, but it encapsulates the core message of "Disgrace", in having us contemplate why our sympathies should be so firmly with those ragtag Simpsons, and why it brings us such smug satisfaction to see the Gammills brought down to Earth. It is, naturally, so easy to see ourselves in the Simpsons' fallibility - the chant of "One of us! One of us!" that dominates Homer's hellacious fantasy is directed not just at Homer, but the audience as well, and by the end we can see that it's no bad thing. Monroe cannot fix the Simpsons, even after subjecting them to the most unorthodox, B. F. Skinner-inspired aversion therapy techniques designed to teach them gentler behaviour through operant conditioning ("I'll have plenty of time to explain while I warm up the electric generator"). Finding them uniformly prepared to shock one another without inhibition, and with no sign of slowing down, he's eventually forced to (literally) pull the plug and ask them to leave. Unbeknownst to Monroe, his efforts have failed not because the Simpsons are the worst of the worst and beyond all help, but because they never needed fixing the first place - even if this was something Homer jeopardised by depriving them of their beloved TV.

The moral of "Disgrace" is that the Simpsons were always basically fine. They might not be perfect, but as the the outcome at Monroe's clinic demonstrates, accepting imperfection is often a healthier and more fulfilling option than endeavoring to keep it buried. It's the family's ability to accommodate imperfection that makes them feel so real, and the episode's grasp on that fundamental point that causes it to hold up as such a quintessential Simpsons installment, with the quibbles about the family's individual characterisations all being small potatoes by comparison. The laws of nature say that we should expect families to have their share of messiness mixed in with the tireless devotion (just look at those bald eaglets the Simpsons watch on their television, who are entirely dependent on their mother regurgitating the food their father has worked so hard to bring to them) and, whatever their failings, there is an innate warmth and honesty in how the Simpsons are depicted. While they might not express it as performatively as the Gammills, there is also clearly a love and understanding where it most counts. They certainly come off better than the odious mother at the punch bowl who openly brags about how she plays her two children off one another for her affections: "I don't know who to love more - my son Joshua, who's captain of the football team, or my daughter Amber, who got the lead in the school play. Usually I'd use their grades as a tiebreaker, but they both got straight As this term, so what's a mother to do?" Well, for starters you're supposed to love your children equally and unconditionally, and that's something that Homer and Marge absolutely do (the subsequent running gag where Homer will intermittently fail to acknowledge Maggie's existence notwithstanding). We never meet Joshua or Amber, but you can tell that those poor kids are being set up for a wad of therapy as they enter adulthood. Even the Simpsons doppelgangers seen emerging from a session with Monroe, supposedly cured of their domestic strife, don't seem entirely genuine, talking in a way that seems more informed by Monroe's jargon than any actual connection with each other.

Running parallel to the episode's observations on the expectations and realities of family living is a witty critique of modern culture's dependence on and worship of the television. We see signs of this at the company picnic, when Marge is persuaded to leave Maggie in the designated nursery with the other babies, and with a screen playing episodes of The Happy Little Elves in lieu of human supervision. Later on, Homer finds himself competing with the television for command of his family, twice interrupting their viewing for his fruitless attempts at modifying their behaviour, and eventually resolving to pawn the television so that they can attend Monroe's therapy, much against their impassioned protests. On one level, this makes sense, for Homer recognises that the television has effectively supplanted him as the household patriarch. It maintains the equilibrium in a way that he couldn't hope to, and not only would his children sooner listen to it than to him, Marge even proposes that they pawn her engagement ring in its place, symbolically suggesting that the television takes precedent over their relationship. Furthermore, there's the implication that the television has gone so far as to assume the place in day to day life that might once traditionally have been occupied by a deity, with the ritual of sitting devotedly before the television with a dinner tray in hand having replaced the bygone practice of eating at the table after saying grace. The slight paradox in Homer's crusade is that he is shown to partake in this same idolatry, being as dependent upon the television's teachings as everybody else around him. In one scene, he implores the omnivorous man upstairs for an answer to his personal crisis and is met with only silence. He sees a promotion for Monroe's clinic on the television at Moe's bar and enthusiastically declares that the answers to life's problems are invariably to be found on TV. When presenting his family with his decided course of action, he claims to have researched the matter thoroughly, and that he has confidence in Monroe because of all the therapist commercials he's perused, his was the best. By sacrificing the television, Homer believes that he is reasserting control over his wayward family, but he's also throwing away a vital lifeline, a move bound to end in trouble. Marge accuses him of driving a stake through the hearts of those who love him, and during Monroe's session the rest of the family are unanimous in identifying Homer as the disturber of their previously-balanced peace.

Homer's paradoxical reverence and disregard for the television is compounded by the implication that the answers it's providing might not necessarily be the most trustworthy. We can tell that Monroe is not, in all odds, the solution to the family's problems, and not just because of the company he keeps (Lisa is mortified that Homer would put any stock in a therapist who advertises on pro-wrestling, prompting Homer to counter with the correction that he actually advertises on boxing, which is a more upmarket sport) but because of the glibness of what he's selling. In his ad, there is an unconvincing tonal dissonance between the grim and only partially exaggerated depiction of the struggles of a family where the father is visibly suffering from clinical depression and Monroe's upbeat promises of easy bliss and hugs. But even as Monroe expectedly transpires to have been full of hot air, the television itself does indeed provide. Homer is able to step up and become the dependable patriarch his family requires by holding Monroe accountable to his ad's guarantee of family bliss or double their money back, thus leaving the doctor hoisted by his own glibness. As they exit the clinic, the family are delighted that their supposed dysfunctionality, the sword that has up until now been wielded against them, has paid off so handsomely. As Lisa puts it, "It's not so much the money as the feeling we earned it". Marge suggests that they head straight to the pawn shop to retrieve their television, but Homer has an even better idea - they can use the money to upgrade to a bigger and better television, one with a 21-inch screen, realistic flesh tones (ha ha, I see what you did there) and a little cart so that they can wheel it in to the dining room on holidays. He has evidently abandoned his stance that the family's dining and television-watching should be kept separate, with the television now being extended a formal position at the table (if only on holidays). Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are in total accord with the proposal. Homer has earned his family's respect, not by competing with the television, but by aligning with it, becoming the provider who improves his family's lived experiences by taking their TV-viewing to the next level. The final image of "Disgrace" shows the family walking off into the night in unison, their arms all stretched out around each other in a picture of perfect harmony. All it takes is a healthy consideration for every member's place within the household, the chattering cyclops included.

Finally, being such a germinal episode, from the point when The Simpsons was still transitioning from the original Ullman shorts and redefining itself as a stand-alone series, "There's No Disgrace Like Home" has ample of examples of those weird, wonderful and ever-rotating background pictures that used to adorn the walls of each interior shot. Until they settled on that rather nondescript boat painting you used to see so many oddities hanging over the Simpsons' couch. On this occasion it's a tropical island scene, similar to the one they later had up in "Moaning Lisa", although not exactly the same. These paintings are specifically singled out on the DVD commentary as one of those "tragic flaws" the producers were eager to be done with, but I personally like how much life and colour they lent the backgrounds in the early days. I miss the times when you could spot something as quirkily disconcerting as that painting in Monroe's waiting room of the lady sitting with the banjo and the cat, and it was all just part of the broader milieu.

[1] I've seen fans cite another later contradiction, in "The PTA Disbands" of Season 6, when Lisa had graduated to being a Vassar basher, but to that I say that she's allowed to change her mind.