You might recall how, some years ago, the public's imagination was momentarily captured by a television campaign in which a drumstick-wielding gorilla was seen to bash out the percussion fill to a certain Phil Collins tune. It didn't have a lot that was conceivably to do with the product being shilled (a bar of chocolate), but it certainly garnered attention. The gorilla in question was alright enough, although if you ask me a little too cute and clean-cut. My TV ad-suffused nightmares are haunted by a very different gorilla - a nocturnal, city-dwelling ape who terrorised the appearance-conscious for a brief spell back in the late 1990s. A gorilla who was weird, wild and had an undisputedly sinister side. This was the gorilla who really deserved to go down in the advertising hall of the fame; the one who came to you when your defences were down and for whom Wella brand gel was required to literally keep out of your hair.
This campaign opened by purporting to answer that most immortal of questions - why does your hair look so bad in the morning? The real answer is that you probably shouldn't be showering right before you go to bed, but that is obviously significantly less fun that what the ad comes up with - specifically, a gorilla who scrambles through your bedroom window every sundown and takes you on one positively mind-bending long night's journey into day. How mind-bending might have depended on which version of the ad you were watching; the basic formula has the gorilla taking hold of the sleeping protagonist, tossing him around his apartment like a rag doll and taking him out for a crazy joyride (for all we know, not even in the protagonist's own car), but the full, uncut version from Germany went a lot more hardcore with the gorilla's hedonistic outbursts. In this version, he goes so far as to extend his middle finger to a couple of innocent bystanders...which sounds, on paper, as though it should make him the funnier depiction, yet the ad counterpoises by centring in on the more menacing implications of having a gorilla invade your personal space while you're at your most unresponsive. This ape is a looming, snorting beast who takes you from your comfy resting place and out into a harsh nocturnal soundscape of blaring horns and sirens. He crawls along your bedsheets like something from a low-rent slasher. All of which gives him the air of a most unsavoury prowler, in the hair-raising business, one assumes, because he's a thug who just gets off on the chaos. Not so with the gorilla from the chopped down version, who starts by resting his face adoringly on the sleeper's shoulder. As he tosses the man around, he lets out a hearty chuckle. This gorilla is doing it because he loves. He loves...yes, he loves messing up your hair, that much is evident. But what he really loves is spending his twilight hours with you, and this bizarre ritual is just his offbeat way of showing it. From his perspective, the two of you had a beautiful thing going, and then you went and allowed that tub of greasy cosmetics to come between you.
The diverging ads are a fine example of just how drastically you can alter the tone of
a campaign with a bit of editing and a change of soundtrack - both make witty use of the fever dream absurdity of the scenario, but at notably different pitches. In the shorter
version that I was always accustomed to seeing at the time, the gleefully buoyant choice of music not only has the gorilla coming off as more of a mischievous scamp, but pretty much everything in how the ad is put together imbues him with a greater sense of affection for the man whom he ruthlessly pummels every evening. That moment where he fondles his hair one last time before calling it a night is a particularly lovely touch. There's a whole lot of tenderness in this edit. Compare that to his uncut counterpart, who curtly shoves his companion aside during the driving sequence, when the motion of the vehicle momentarily causes his head to rest against his fuzzy gorilla hide. The two apes likewise get their own individual reactions to the appearance of the fatal Wella hair gel, as befits their respective characterisations - the uncut gorilla beats his chest in indignation, presumably intending to get even with his human quarry on another night, while the cut gorilla howls in desperation, horrified that his token of affection has been so thoughtlessly nullified.
The creepiest aspect of the scenario (incorporated into both versions of the ad) is the epilogue implying that the gorilla is constantly monitoring his unwitting plaything, even during the daylight hours. If Wella is proposing that this is why we ALL tend to have bad hair in the morning, then is the implication that we ALL have our own personal gorillas popping in every nightfall to play? It surely can't just be one urban gorilla doing it to everybody with a head of hair all over the glove, or how on earth would he find the time? Or is he supposed to be like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, and can apparently handle calling in on innumerable households in a single night? (Now that I think about it, The Bad Hair Day Gorilla does have a nice ring to it.) The simpler explanation would be that this gorilla is actually a cunning metaphor, for the bestial qualities that lurk within us all. He is the wilder part of yourself that you might not always want to let hang out, the part of you that entices you to do, if not bad, then socially unacceptable things (like strutting around with unkempt hair), here envisioned as a dark shape that creeps into being and manipulates your body while your higher reasoning turns a blind eye (if you're wondering how this guy manages to sleep through the experience of being tossed around by a hulking gorilla, then there's your answer - it's entirely willful on his part). The practicalities of Wella Shockwaves, the ad proposes, are in avoiding making such qualities evident in your diurnal, or public self. Although if the implication is that there was no gorilla and that the damages to our protagonist's hair were all entirely self-inflicted, then I'm not sure it bodes so well for him at the end of the uncut ad, given that I think I hear a police helicopter in hot pursuit. The shorter version is just sweeter all-round, even if that precious playful gorilla does end up getting spurned.
"Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim (otherwise known as Norman Cook) is a curious artefact of the big beat era. The track, which pivots on a string sample from "Ashes, the Rain & I" by James Gang and a micro-snippet of dialogue spoken by Angela Bassett (she was on everyone's social media radar earlier this month for some reason, but life moves on fast) in the 1995 film Strange Days, is arguably Fatboy Slim's most iconic. It captures the urgency and euphoria of merely being alive in the present,
with a combative energy that accounts for its enduring popularity as a sports anthem. Mixmag, who proclaimed it the 10th best dance track of all-time in a 2013 article, described it as "a universal anthem of strident empowerment". Here's the thing, though...it is kind of a haunted track, is it not? It's about the omnipresent threat of the apocalypse and our persistent failure to take corrective action. Really, it is.
"Right Here, Right Now" was released as a single in 1999, and I'd like to think it's not such a coincidence that Strange Days itself takes place in a hypothetical version of 1999, specifically in the last two days before the new millennium. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and taken from a script by James Cameron, the cyberpunk thriller presented a more technologically alluring vision of the then-near future than the 1999 we shortly wound up with, but one that nevertheless sought to cater to contemporary anxieties as we approached the Y2K - the sense that, whether it stemmed from concerns about the Millennium Bug, religious prophecies or anything else, it signified the end of a particular era in human history, and the dawning of a new age of uncertainty. In Strange Days, our dependence on technology is depicted not as facilitating our salvation, but as symptomatic of our civilisation being in decline. Lenny, the characteristically shady noir protagonist played by Ralph Fiennes, deals in a form escapism that is designed to disconnect participants from the present moment at every conceivable sensory angle; he is a peddler of SQUID (otherwise known as the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), an illegal contraption that records human memories and all of their associated physical sensations onto Minidiscs and enables third parties to experience them first-hand, via "playback", as if they were their own. Lenny affirms that these vicarious thrills are not to be mistaken for "TV-only-better...it's a piece of somebody's life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex" - although it does encompass much the same function as television, in enabling viewers to get tantalisingly close to the kinds of salacious shit they presumably wouldn't touch in real life. As with television, there's the question as to whether the viewer's spectatorship makes them complicit. Friction between reality and fantasy is at the heart of the picture, and becomes particularly explicit during a scene in which Bassett's character, Mason, stresses to Lenny that: "This is your life! Right here, right now! It's real time, you hear me? Real time! Time to get real, not playback!" For context, Mason is telling Lenny to get over his ex, Faith (Juliette Lewis), hence her subsequent insistence that, "Memories were meant to fade. They're designed that way for a reason." Faith gets to weigh in with her own wry observations on the matter when she tells Lenny why the cinematic experience will forever have the edge on playback: "The music comes up, there’s credits, and you always know when it’s over." With or without the aid of playback, Lenny's attachment to Faith keeps him stranded in an inferior non-reality, but there is a more dangerous element to this desire to disconnect from the present, if it means indifference to its social ills. Mason's statement "Right here, right now!" is itself an echo of the rallying cries of another character, Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer), a rapper whose outspoken criticisms of the LAPD inevitably make him a victim of police corruption. Before his untimely demise, Jeriko proclaims that the day of reckoning is coming, bringing the people the opportunity to tear down the corrupted present and reclaim it as their own. "History begins and ends again right here, right now!" All of this is set against the backdrop of one heck of a gargantuan party taking place upon the streets of Los Angeles, as flocks of people gather in an attempt to seize that specific moment in which The End and The Beginning seem to intertwine. (Was December 31st 1999 really anything like that epic for anybody who lived through it? It certainly wasn't for me. I watched the movie Tron on TV and then went out with my parents to a nearby party, of which I have precisely one surviving memory - an older guest questioning if Wilson Pickett's "In The Midnight Hour" was appropriate background music to have on when there were kids around. That's all!)
The counterpoint to the high emotions surrounding the Y2K, and everything it threatens or promises, is the suggestion forwarded by private investigator Max (Tom Sizemore) that The End of Things, when it comes, will arise not from some apocalyptic bang, but from the whimper of stagnation: "Everything's been done, every kind of music's been tried, every government's been tried, you know? Every fucking hairstyle, fucking bubble gum flavours, you know, breakfast cereal, every type of fucking. What are we gonna do? How we gonna make it another thousand years, for Christ's sake?" In Max's words, civilisation is doomed because it's already expended all of its avenues and has no further space in which to adapt and move forward.
This ability to keep moving forward was imperative to the accompanying music video for "Right Here, Right Now", which was created by Hammer & Tongs (the pseudonym of director/producer duo of Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith) and depicts the world in a constant state of upheaval, its occupants always having to stay mobile in order to get to what's next down the line. Like Strange Days, it's concerned with a countdown, but one spanning 350 billion years, a concept that seems to slyly echo the title of the track's album of origin, You've Come A Long Way Baby (itself taken from an advertising slogan for Virginia Slims cigarettes, which speaks ironically to humankind's appetite for self-destruction over self-preservation). Taking its cue from the opening sequence to the 1978 French animated series, Il était une fois... l'homme, it follows the course of human evolution in less than four minutes, its rapid visual momentum giving the illusion of a single entity continuously morphing and adapting over time, pressing ever onward as if driven by the urge that there's always somewhere else it has to be.
The critical moment of the sequence occurs at 1:03, when our protagonist, in fish form, exits the ocean and becomes stationary for just a moment, as if the viability of its selected evolutionary trajectory is in doubt. At first, the fish can only squirm helplessly on its new terrain. To its left, off in the distance, stands the silhouette of a mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex. To its right, just out of reach, is a small mantis, which gives the fish the incentive it needs to keep going. The camera pans to the back-end of the fish as its fins morph into legs, while just above the outline of that T-Rex looms marginally closer; it's here that our attentions are momentarily split between two parallel narratives, although one of them is already at a dead-end. The sun is setting on the time of the dinosaurs - we all know how things ultimately went down for them - and it is our intrepid piscine who shoulders the future. This all coincides, incidentally, with the first occurrence of Angela Bassett's sample, which kicks in just as the fish leaves the water, throwing itself into a situation where its only options are either to adapt or perish. Now perfectly suited to terrestrial life, it keeps moving in the same direction, devouring the mantis and leaving behind the immobile T-Rex in the midst of volcanic eruption. The fish then becomes a crocodilian, scales ever further up the evolutionary ladder and emerges in the form of a mammal, specifically a primate. From here it's on the fast track to learning to walk upright, shedding the bulk of its body hair and gaining sapience - the appearance of an "End School Zone" sign acts as our segue into this bold new world of knowledge and civilisation, but conversely suggests that things are only going to get more precarious from this point on. Something well-covered by Il était une fois... l'homme (and also the Simpsons couch gag that paid homage to it) that the "Right Here, Right Now" video seems almost humorously indifferent toward is the course of human history, with our homo sapien strolling pretty much directly into a contemporary city. The process of evolution becomes a shaggy dog story, to which human civilisation acts as an almost gleefully frivolous punchline - the video ends by poking fun at Fatboy Slim's own iconography, as the homo sapien dons a shirt that reads, "I'm #1 So Why Try Harder", the very slogan brandished by the (still unidentified) figure on the You've Come A Long Way Baby album cover, who then shows up to finish off the video. This positing of Cook (or a shorthand thereof) as the pinnacle of human evolution is a gloriously tongue-in-cheek gag, but one that feels cut from the same sardonic cloth as Max's warning in Strange Days that humankind has already reached its zenith. If our moment as #1 has been and gone, how confident can we feel about where we're going from here?
What makes "Right Here, Right Now" such a haunting track is that, while the titular sample might be rooted in the apocalyptic anxieties of a bygone age, speaking to a moment that has long since passed (Strange Days was, after all, a picture that superficially dated itself almost instantly by choosing such an imminent date for its setting), the apocalyptic anxieties themselves haven't gone away. If anything, Strange Days was to prove distressingly prescient in terms of the challenges society would face going forth into the 21st century. The technology itself wasn't so far off - it might not might not have reached the lurid heights of SQUID, yet the availability of camera technology and rise of YouTube has made the kinds of point-of-view films depicted therein accessible at the touch of a button, while the growth of social media offers its own immersion in a technological world as an alternative to flesh-and-blood interaction. Meanwhile, the murder of Jeriko One and the central theme of police brutality were themselves timely explorations of tensions surrounding the beating of Rodney King, the aquittal of the four police officers charged with using excessive force, which was captured on video tape, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but that's a tension that has merely persisted and remains as relevant as ever with the murder of George Floyd and the resulting fall-out in 2020. The contemporary problems of climate change, pandemic, political extremism and the ever-persistent nuclear threat are indicative of an impending boiling point - the sense that, more than ever, our society is on the escalating collision course for disaster. Ostensibly an ode to the present moment, there's a level on which Bassett's resounding battle cries speak specifically to a lost moment, a time for action that was already squandered, an apocalyptic warning that we did not heed. They serve as chilling reminders that we are basically fish who made our way up onto dry land and then didn't budge an inch. The time for action (both collective and individual) is still upon us, just as it was almost a quarter-century ago when we entered the new millennium, just as it was 28 years ago when Strange Days debuted. The "Right Here, Right Now" is a celebration of a specific moment, but it is a prospective moment that humankind has yet to seize and capitalise on. Mason was imploring Lenny to wake up to what was happening in the present and, thanks to the enduring popularity of Fatboy Slim's sound collage, she's had the opportunity to keep belting it out at all of us for 24 years. By now that mantis will have certainly scarpered, but if we get our fish fins into gear there's a chance we can still avoid going down with that dinosaur.
Today is the Ides of March, and what better way to honor the occasion than by paying tribute to the two most endearing backstabbers that I know?
On the DVD commentary for "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", Ken Keeler introduces the core concept of a spin-off as being to "take a successful show and make an unsuccessful one out of it". That gets a hearty laugh out of Yeardley Smith and provides the basis of the episode's entire irony-drenched philosophy. There are, however, two very obvious counterpoints to Keeler's definition. Firstly, The Simpsons itself is a spin-off, of the crudely drawn filler material on The Tracy Ullman Show. Secondly, the series had, that very season, already paid tribute to one of the most acclaimed spin-offs in television history (the tribute in question was, ironically, penned by Keeler himself), the one that has, ever since, served as a model example of how to do a sitcom spin-off correctly. And for good reason - Frasier kicked Cheers' butt. I recognise that Cheers itself is still an iconic and fondly-remembered show, but then my assertion is not an at all uncommon one - shit got interesting when Frasier ditched his Boston barstool and took his place alongside his fastidious younger brother in their Seattle opera box. "Brother From Another Series" (episode 4F14), which first aired on February 23rd 1997, is another shining example of why I hold Season 8 in such high regard - it's the kind of experimental episode I could only really see them pulling off at this point in the series' lifespan, one that, in lesser hands, might have smacked of hollow gimmickry. The previous season's "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" had already explored (very successfully, I might add) how far you could take a Bob encounter in terms of pure, gut-wrenching peril, and while "Brother From Another Series" features a similarly action-orientated climax with Springfield once again at risk of complete annihilation, it's less interested in topping its predecessor in that regard than in examining Bob's predicament from a predominantly fresh perspective. It brings in a sparkling new addition to Bob's line-up of thorny relationships, one that cuts closer to home than usual for the clown-cum-criminal and sheds compelling light on the man he is, and the man he could potentially be if his circumstances were slightly altered. The result is a very different kind of Sideshow Bob episode, in which Bob finally gets to pay homage to the role for which his voice actor Kelsey Grammer is best renowned, whilst building on his in-universe characterisation in a way that is functional, meaningful and exceedingly gratifying. You can keep your Cape Feares, seriously. For me, THIS is the Bob narrative to rule them all.
True Simpsons geeks might have noted that "Brother From Another Series" was only the second episode named in honor of John Sayles' criminally underrated 1984 science fiction indie The Brother From Another Planet - and, unlike Season 4's slackly-titled "Brother From The Same Planet", the reference actually works, alluding to the imported nature of pivotal kinship, and to the fact that anybody hip to the television sitcom landscape of the 1990s would have certainly seen it play out before somewhere, in some parallel reality. In this episode, Bob gets an unexpected new beginning when his kid
brother Cecil (voice of David Hyde Pierce) re-enters his life after a
decade of estrangement, and manages to secure his release from prison,
on the condition that Bob stays with him and joins his hydrodynamical workforce. Naturally,
this isn't doing wonders for Bart's sleeping habits - Bob insists that
he's over his vindictiveness and wants only to lead a normal life, but
the shamus in short pants isn't nearly so willing to let their
relationship go, and makes a point of stalking Bob in the hopes of
proving that the leopard's spots remain unchanged. The obvious precursor
to this scenario is "Black Widower" of Season 3, with Bart once again
being the only character inclined to entertain the possibility that an
ostensibly rehabilitated Bob might be harbouring dangerous intentions. But on this occasion the culpability is inverted, so that (oh delicious
twist) Bart has the wrong perspective and Bob is effectively the good guy, a novel arrangement that gives Bob the privilege of, not unreasonably, getting to declare Bart psychotic.
"Brother From Another Series" is an episode that I've held off talking about for a while. I've held off talking about it because I want to do it all the justice that I possibly can, since it is quite a bit special to me. By that, I mean that it is my all-time favourite Simpsons episode - it has been ever since its UK debut late in the spring of 97. At the time, I was still a virgin to all things Frasier, so the central conceit was lost on me, although I did pick up that there was something a little...peculiar
about Cecil as a character. There was, very blatantly, an in-joke that I wasn't getting; the title alone was a dead giveaway
in that regard. I still had so much more of a journey to undertake
regarding "Brother From Another Series" and that other series it was so lovingly
homaging, but that didn't prevent me from immediately falling in love with the dynamic between Bob and Cecil - after years of Bob being such an odd man out in his highbrow graces, it was heartening and refreshing having him contend with a character who could operate on the same wavelength. I also give "Brother" credit for being the first Bob episode to really attempt to explore any of the specifics of Bob's backstory - eight seasons in, and we still knew next to nothing about his personal history. The only window we'd previously gotten was in
"Sideshow Bob Roberts", where it was revealed that Bob attended Yale
University, and as such feels automatic antipathy for the alumni of Princeton (a gag that actually receives additional payoff here - guess what university Cecil attended?). The question of Bob's family was something I had long wondered about (disregarding Neil, his nephew from one issue of the Simpsons Comics, who can get his non-canonical ass out of here) - it didn't look like any of them attended his wedding in "Black Widower", but I figured that he had to have one. Finally, "Brother" stands out for being the Bob episode that I can most get behind philosophically speaking, as a card-carrying Sideshow Bob sympathiser - it is an unusually favourable episode toward Bob, which has less to do with him getting to be the hero on this occasion than it does "Brother" appearing particularly mindful of the plight Bob faces as an ex-con. Rather than upholding his criminal history as evidence that he can never be a functional member of society and should be fundamentally regarded as an object of fear, this episode flips the process on its head, in having Bob really, really wanting to go straight, but finding that his past will ultimately always be wielded against him. You might say that it is the anti-"Black Widower", an antecedent of which Keeler's intelligent script does seem to be looking to make us specifically conscious - the events of "Widower" are evoked, outside of Bob's usual rap sheet recital, during his dinner with Edna K, when he notes that their evening together constitutes his first date in six years (I assume he's talking about Selma, although his math is a little off, given that that episode aired in 1992). As far as I'm concerned, setting out to be the anti-"Black Widower" is an extraordinarily auspicious place for any Sideshow Bob episode to start.
I've professed to being less fond of "Widower" than I am the other Bob episodes of the "classic" era, in part because Bob's motives for wanting to kill Selma are so disappointingly arbitrary (compared to "Krusty Gets Busted", in which he was given a very clear and compelling reason for his backstabbing). Truth is, I find it such a bleak and depressing installment in general; it's the episode that affirms Bob's commitment to the path of sociopathy (making his flimsy motivation all the more frustrating), but it comes at it from a position of unrelenting sardonicism. "Widower" is obviously attuned to the crippling flaws of the criminal justice system; it's aware that, rather than enabling Bob to become an upstanding citizen, his experiences within this system have pushed him even further along that slippery slope. The ludicrousness of Bob being expected to rebuild his life is highlighted in the disclosure that he left prison with only ten dollars to his name and no visible means of supporting himself besides leeching off of his new fiancée. The episode does, superficially, purport to transmit sympathy in Bob's corner, only to throw it back by the end with the twist that he was Evil All Along, and there's just no helping him, other than to put him back under lock and key. And, let's face it - Bart's distrust of Bob was rooted overwhelmingly in the fact that Bob had specifically wronged Krusty, a character to whom he feels a disproportionate sense of loyalty. The revelation that Selma's beau was an ex-con did not, in itself, perturb him ("Cool, he can teach us how to kill a guy with a lunch tray!"). I appreciate that it must have been intensely awkward for Bart to have this man hanging around his family's kitchen after the part he'd played in implicating him, but he had no real evidence on which to base his initial suspicions that Bob was up to no good, outside of the fact that he just didn't like him. Marge's observation that Bart never lost his mistrust might serve as a "cute" callback to the ending of "Krusty Gets Busted", but it does highlight the central problem that Bart has been rewarded for what were fundamentally always prejudices on his part - at least by "Brother From Another Series", Bob has proven himself to be a repeat offender, and Bart arguably does have some justification for his paranoia. Naturally, he is a bit shaken by their previous encounters, but he's also genre savvy; he's been playing this game with Bob for long enough to know what to expect. "Brother" goes entirely the opposite route to "Widower", in demonstrating that Bart's expectations actually have him blinkered - his gaze is so fixed on Bob that it never occurs to him to watch out for Cecil. As Keeler notes on the commentary: "You don't like Bart, by the end of the episode. He hasn't been right in his suspicions. Everyone in this episode is wrong EXCEPT Sideshow Bob."
Even so, the conclusion "Brother" reaches is actually no less bleak than that of "Widower". It doesn't exactly work out any better for Bob, in spite of his being 100% in the clear this time. And yeah, that ending always was something of a bitter pill for me to swallow, being as grotesquely unfair as it is to our hero. To a point, this outcome was dictated by that evil little thing called the status quo, and the imperative to get everything back to square one once our twenty-two minutes are up. But I can accept it as carrying a deeper significance than a simple reset, and it's a significance I greatly appreciate. The ending is as intensely cynical as that of "Widower", the key difference being that this cynicism is not directed at Bob himself, and at the idea per se that he could have outgrown his allotted role as town homicidal maniac and turned things around, but rather at the idea that the town - and by extension, the series dynamics - would ever have allowed that to happen. In this instance, Bob did not fail society so much as society failed him. Besides, there is an upside to the arrangement, in that Bob and Cecil get to stay together. And that's a happy ending, right? Don't those two bruvs just have the most delectable chemistry?
Let's talk now about Cecil and his inspiration. First, a fun fact - his character design was conceived as
a synthesis of Sideshow Bob and his voice actor David Hyde Pierce. We've already explored what you'll get if you combine Sideshow Bob and Mick Jagger.
Sideshow Bob and David Hyde Pierce, on the other hand, will get
you...well, none other than Simply Red frontman, Mick Hucknall. When I heard Josh Weinstein point
that out on the DVD commentary, I could have kicked myself for not
having made that observation independently. For Cecil
does indeed bear more than a passing resemblance to Hucknall as he looked during the Picture Book era. I've never been able to watch the music videos to "Money's Too Tight To Mention" and "Holding Back The Years" in quite the same way again.
I spent an inordinate part of the summer of 97 rewatching my home recording of "Brother From Another Series" back-to-back; it struck me as an almost miraculously wonderful episode of The Simpsons. Mainly, I craved the repartee between Bob and Cecil, and could have taken an entire series' worth of it. I did a little background reading on the episode and discovered that, lucky me, I could have exactly that, Bob and Cecil's brotherly rapport being a somewhat darker variation on that shared by Grammer and Pierce's characters in contemporary sitcom Frasier. I tuned into Channel 4, where Frasier was playing, more out of curiosity than anything else, at the thought of seeing those familiar voices come out of actual human beings. I freaking loved it, and all of a sudden I had a whole new series to devour. My appreciation for "Brother From Another Series" only deepened from there; I could attest that the chemistry between Frasier and Niles Crane had been beautifully replicated in Bob and Cecil, two brothers who compliment each other's refined tastes and who intermittently feel the need to go at one another like a couple of rutting stags. And while I grew to love Frasier and Niles as their own independent characters, to me they will always be the live action counterparts to Bob and Cecil first and foremost. It's how I was introduced to them.
If you've never seen an episode of Frasier, there are a couple of gags in "Brother From Another Series" that might confuse you - the appearance of that "Frasier is a Hit Show On NBC" title card before the second act (a nod to the characteristically Frasier convention of giving each individual episode act its own title), and Cecil's reference to a mysterious "Maris", this being the name of Niles' wife, the focus of a long-running gag in which she is frequently discussed but always stays firmly off of screen. Otherwise, you don't need to be particularly well-versed in Frasier to enjoy the "Brother" on its own terms, although there is still a lot you'll miss out on - not least, the irony of Frasier and Niles both being psychiatrists and Bob and Cecil both being characters who could clearly use psychiatrists in their lives. Nevertheless, you might appreciate that one of the smartest and subtlest underlying gags of the first act is in the set-up seeming particularly suggestive of the beginnings of a TV sitcom, which perhaps comes off as even more salient with "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase" being so close around the corner. The whole plot point of Cecil arranging for Bob to move into his apartment is reminiscent of the premise of Frasier, in which Frasier played reluctant host to his father Martin (John Mahoney, who would later guest star as the Terwilliger patriarch in "Funeral For A Fiend"), whose mobility issues were making it increasingly difficult for him to live alone. Their relationship wasn't exactly estranged, but Frasier was blatantly never as close to Martin as he was to his late mother Hester, and there had been a notable drift in their contact during his time living in Boston, so a lot of the tension in earlier seasons came from them re-establishing their bond and learning how to put up with one another. Bob and Cecil come together from a similar point of disconnection, with the prospect of catching up after years of not speaking - and all the time in the world in which to get reacquainted is exactly what they end up with, but alas, not in the confines of Cecil's chic apartment.
More than a love letter to Frasier, I see "Brother From Another Series" as playing into that broader sense of "what if?" that characterises a number of episodes from Oakley and Weinstein's tenure, most notably "Spin-off Showcase" and its own predecessor, "22 Short Films About Springfield". Like those episodes, the premise (and the title) feels evocative of the kind of parallel sitcom narratives that might be unfolding constantly all over Springfield, and which we could potentially even be watching if the Simpson family didn't insist upon hogging the limelight. But the question of "what if?" carries its own harsher significance for the Terwilliger brothers, as we delve deeper into the nature of their fraternal bond and uncover the reason why they stopped talking. The Crane brothers' dynamic is so skilfully intersected with the specifics of Bob's narrative, intermittently creating something of a culture clash - for example, there's a great moment where Cecil, an ardent wine enthusiast much like
Niles, offers his new charge a glass of Bordeaux using typically ornate
Crane bro-esque jargon, to which a pruno-surfeited Bob retorts that
he'll happily accept anything that doesn't taste like orange juice
fermented under a radiator (at least he was tasteful enough to keep it to the radiator). The greatest stroke of genius, though, is in the reveal that Cecil, like Niles, harbours a deep resentment of his brother's celebrity - even if, in Cecil's case, all that celebrity really amounts to is the sad trajectory from a TV clown's sidekick to a pitifully unsuccessful criminal. Hey, Bob got notoriety from the deal, which is more than being a humble civil servant will get you. This echoes Niles' envy of Frasier's status as a local radio psychiatrist, a frequent source of tension between the Crane brothers and something he was particularly explicit on in the Season 1 episode "Author Author", where Niles specifies that becoming a psychiatrist, like Hester, was something he had aspired to since childhood, only for Frasier to nab his thunder by way of seniority. "Brother" offers up its own direct equivalent, through the disclosure that, a decade prior, Cecil had tried out for the much-coveted role of Krusty's sidekick, only for Bob to inadvertently upstage him and take the spoils.
There is, naturally, a thread of unspoken humor in the inexplicability
that becoming a clown's sidekick should have been a matter of such imperative for someone as highly educated as Cecil (according to Bob,
Cecil wanted to be Krusty's sidekick since he was five years old...which
does make me question how old Krusty has to be, since I'm not pegging
Cecil as any younger than his mid-late 30s - Bob's in his 40s, right, and I doubt the age gap between the two of them is all that great). What's also not verbalised by
either brother but hangs heavily over their contention is the blatancy
that accepting the position as Krusty's sidekick was the decision that
caused Bob's life to crash and burn, costing him not only his
relationship with Cecil, but his dignity, integrity and eventually his
liberty. Which is where the whole matter of "what if?" comes in. What if
things had gone differently on the day in question, and Bob had never
caught Krusty's eye? What if he had been able to resist Krusty's offer,
out of solidarity with Cecil? He might have avoided ten wasted years of
needless division with his brother for a start. Moreover, he might
actually have been able to channel his personal energies into something
positive and constructive, instead of getting hung up on futile,
self-destructive things like obsession and revenge. Bob's an intelligent,
courageous and resourceful person, and he has clearly always had the
capacity to do tremendous good in him, something that "Brother From
Another Series" enables him to finally act upon. The climax of the
episode provides us with a heartening and honestly quite harrowing
glimpse into the benevolent Bob he could still have been, and
with which Springfield would have been lucky to have been blessed, but
which it turned down because it just wasn't ready to accommodate.
Innocent Bob may be in "Brother", but angel he ain't. For all of his good intentions this time around, there is still one area in which he gets things spectacularly wrong - as much as I love him, Bob is kind of a dick to Cecil, and this maybe doesn't reflect so well on him, given how deeply he owes it to Cecil for getting him out of jail. It is telling how much more barbed their interactions become in Cecil's apartment, away from the watchful surveillance of the prison visiting room, giving us insight into the ritualised sparring that has presumably characterised their relationship for some time. Cecil might kick off their dinner table pissing contest with his loftiness in being appointed Chief Hydrological and Hydrodynamical Engineer, but all of the fabulously rude rejoinders are coming out of Bob's mouth; Cecil is completely outmatched in that regard. And true, Cecil is planning to betray Bob, but Bob has no idea at this stage, and he's probably not doing a whole lot to convince Cecil to reconsider his impending perfidy. The specific exchange where Bob dismisses Cecil's suggestion that any civilisation in history has ever considered Chief Hydrological and Hydrodynamical Engineer a "calling", only for Cecil to cough pointedly and Bob to concede that, "Yes, the Cappadocians, fine" - well, it may be my favourite exchange in the entire history of the series. It's hilarious and brilliantly esoteric, and that's exactly what I dig in a Simpsons gag. But you know, it does look an awful lot to me like Cecil was attempting to defuse the tension, and Bob couldn't resist the temptation to keep on being disparaging. I suspect this is intended to feed into the narrative misdirection - our suspicions are meant to be zeroed in on Bob throughout, so his astringent treatment of Cecil might have us questioning if his prior amiability was all part of some act to get through that prison door (I remain wholly unconvinced that his supposed religious awakening was anything but). But no, it turns out that Bob's happiness at being reconciled with his brother is entirely sincere - he just moves past it very quickly, and back into his implied old habit of locking antlers with him. This, ultimately, is the mistake he makes - he underestimates his brother and all that he's capable of, because he's so used to always having the upper hand with him.
What is obviously wrong-headed about Cecil's scheme to destroy the Springfield dam and have Bob take the fall is that he's already gotten to watch from a distance just how badly becoming Krusty's sidekick worked out for Bob, and the healthiest possible takeaway would've been that Bob had suffered for his actions while he had dodged a bullet. But then healthy life perspectives clearly don't flow in the Terwilliger genes (something we might connect back to Bart's observation on how "inside every hardened criminal beats the heart of a 10-year-old boy", foreshadowing as it does the intrinsic immaturity of Bob and Cecil's respective grudges). It's possible that Cecil wouldn't have fared any better than Bob if he'd gotten the gig, but this is of no odds to the younger Terwilliger; even if he'd wound up with Bob's pitiful life trajectory, it was still his trajectory, and Bob took it from him. What Cecil really wants to do is to prove that he can do better than the brother who's always bested him, if not as Krusty's sidekick then as a master criminal; like Bob, he aspires to subvert the status quo by hitting back at the individuals who've most held him down. Hence, Cecil punishes Bob by making him a victim of the crimes he's thus far only ever been used to dispensing - he sets out to frame Bob, as Bob did to Krusty, and to destroy him, as Bob has previously attempted with multiple characters. (Note: it's not clear if Cecil always set out to blow Bob up along with the dam or if he was just taking advantage of the opportunity - he couldn't have predicted that Bart and Lisa would get involved, and had no premeditated plans for Bart specifically, but it's entirely feasible that he always intended to ambush Bob at the dam and hold him at gunpoint.) To demonstrate that he is a Terwilliger to the core, Cecil admits to Bob upfront that he cares significantly less about the $15 million he's embezzling from the deal so much as getting even with his brother - the money is, as Niles Crane once said of marrying into Maris's family fortune, a delightful bonus. Delightful enough for him to shriek in frustration when Bart causes him to accidentally throw all of the ill-gotten bank notes over the side of the dam (according to a deleted scene, it ended up with Hans Moleman, but I think it's more fitting for the cash to just disappear into oblivion - almost like the briefcase in Fargo - illustrating how unimportant it really is to the situation at hand), but he latches onto an immediate consolation prize via the opportunity to do the single thing that was perpetually beyond Bob, and dispose of one particularly pesky 10-year-old child. To give Cecil his due, he isn't taken in by Bart's flattery as Bob would have been. He could just make a first-rate homicidal maniac yet.
The most ironic thing about the climax of "Brother" is that Bob does still technically
get to make an attempt on Bart's life, just under circumstances that
make it more admissible than usual. When Cecil hurls Bart off the top of the dam, Bob
pulls off the death-defying stunt of swinging and catching him by hanging
onto the detonating cord - he saves Bart, but it does leave them both
directly at the mercy of Cecil, who has the detonator at the opposite
end. Bob proposes that they cut the cord, preventing Cecil from blowing
up the dam and saving the town, even if it means that the two of them would inevitably plummet to their deaths. Bart seems reluctant, but Bob's the one with the pliers and he makes the call. I'm put in mind of the climax of "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", where Bob dragged Bart into his last-ditch suicidal gambit to crash the Wright brothers' plane on top of Krusty; in both cases, Bob approaches the prospect of his own destruction with a thoroughgoing fearlessness that is either highly admirable or pant-wettingly terrifying, depending on its context. It just goes to show how easily his talents could have been used in service of good instead of ruination. Bob and Bart both survive, thanks to a conveniently placed water pipe that breaks their fall but leaves Bob temporarily immobilised; Bart does the honorable thing and repays Bob's earlier act of heroism by pulling him to safety when he could have let him quietly slip. Does this hint at a potential understanding between the two long-running enemies? As with everything else, "Brother" illustrates that there is always the possibility of a better way, only have it go tragically down in flames. Despite their two-way show of magnanimity, I suspect it would be extremely difficult, under any circumstances, for Bob and Bart to ever truly to be friends - a problem that may be rooted more in Bart's small-minded grievances than Bob's, as the episode ending bears out.
In the aftermath, Bob still insists on being a dick to Cecil (jeez Bob, you've been in Cecil's shoes, you could cut him just a little slack); Cecil, by contrast, seems to convey a grudging respect for Bob, conceding that they are now levelled in their mutual inability to pull off their criminal ambitions: "All this time I thought you were a bungler, but destroying a city is far tougher than I thought." Sadly, Cecil's concession is all the graciousness Bob is going to get from this resolution; Chief Wiggum shows up and insists on arresting Bob along with Cecil, despite a gaping lack of evidence for his involvement. Wiggum has clear preconceived expectations about how this scenario must have played out and is as blinkered as Bart was earlier. This turn of events was, for a time, enough to make me thoroughly loathe Wiggum, but I've moved past that, having figured that Bob is a victim of so much more than Wiggum's incompetence. You know what I consider to be the really unsettling thing about this outcome? The total silence from our shamus in short pants. Lisa, to her credit, makes a perfunctory effort to stand up for Bob; Bart keeps his mouth shut and lets it happen. According to the current Wikipedia summary, "Wiggum arrests Bob, despite Bart and Lisa's protests that he is reformed", but it simply isn't true that Bart offers any kind of protest at all. Clearly, he was quite happy to see his old nemesis go back behind bars. Bart might have had the decency to save Bob's life when it fell to him to do so, and he might even have climbed down from his opening assessment that Bob is "pure evil"...but that doesn't necessarily mean he could forgive Bob for all the years of bad blood they will unfortunately always have behind them. Bob may yearn for a change of direction, but Bart is less inclined to let it go. Could we say that Bart is the real villain of "Brother", then? "Irredeemable" as Grammer observes on the episode commentary? It wouldn't be inaccurate, but I'm disposed to go a step further and see his shameful silence as being indicative of Springfield's ultimate indifference toward Bob's plight as a whole. The cruelty of the ending is actually two-fold - not only does Bob get dragged back to jail after his display of incredible heroism, it turns out to have all been for naught. The ill-constructed dam disintegrates by itself and unleashes a deluge upon the town, but it doesn't look like anybody is seriously hurt (I do like the joke that it's apparently only just occurred to Homer to look for Bart and Lisa now, goodness knows how many hours after they snuck out). The harsh reality is that Springfield just wasn't worth Bob's efforts to defend it; he pays the price for sticking up for a town that he knew in his heart of hearts to be cursed. The single victory Bob is afforded in the final scene is in getting to reassert his status as the dominant Terwilliger, by beating Cecil to the top bunk in their cell. Business carries on as usual for our two rutting stags, in whichever neck of the woods they might find themselves.
Here's the thing about Frasier and Niles, though - in spite of their intense sibling rivalry, they were the best of friends really,
and very dependent on one another's companionship as their mutual emotional
safety net. It's your classic love-hate relationship, and deep down I could see
the exact same being true for Bob and Cecil; for as much as they annoy
one another, they are also the only individuals who truly "get" one
another, and there is a certain degree of reassurance to be had from that. Bob could do a whole lot worse than being locked up with Cecil at the
end. Although I am going to admit that the punchline of the episode confuses me a little. "When do they bring us the menus?" sounds like the kind of typically naive thing that Niles would say, but Cecil says it with a knowing smirk, suggesting that he is in on the joke, whatever it might be.
And that's "Brother From Another Series", the episode that both lifted my heart and broke it in one fell swoop and left an indelible impression on my pre-adolescent psyche. I got the sympathetic Sideshow Bob episode I always wanted - which is just as well, because Bob would be taking a hiatus for the next four years, so I had to look on this episode as his going away present of sorts. By the time he eventually returned, in Season 12, the world had become a very different place and so had The Simpsons, and "Day of The Jackanapes" was a crushing disappointment to me (come back "Black Widower", all is forgiven). But you can't take "Brother From Another Series" away from me, and that's what really counts. And while it is a shame that Cecil wasn't able to become a fixture of Bob's installments going forward, because he is such a great character in his own right, I still got to enjoy the Terwilliger brothers' ongoing rivalry second-hand, by way of their parallel universe incarnations in Frasier. We'll always have Maris.
I'm a staunch proponent of the notion that TV ads are at their most delectable when you can perceive them as miniature horrors in their own right. Bite-sized chunks of bizarre imagery, disconcerting hyperbole and fragmentary storytelling, attacking in groups every quarter hour...I knew growing up that there was a wealth of nightmare fodder to be mined from the cracks in between your favourite shows, and this ad for the Toyota MR2 Roadster has long struck me as a particularly underrated example. I remember catching it a lot during late night blocks in the germinal days
of the Y2K, and it was very effective, knowing that soon the darkness
would be upon me, and I would be at the mercy of whatever fantasies were about to flitter across my own brain. It's a strange and beguiling beast, rife with muted, atmospheric dread, and helped along by Toyota's willingness to cast their own product as the villain of the scenario.
The ad concerns a lone character, a young ascetic who has ditched civilisation and carved out an existence of solitary mindfulness far removed from the materialistic fixations of human society. The opening shots show him roaming the mountain wilderness in all its splendour, as he monologues on the spiritual bliss he has procured in the company of nature. There is, however, a fly lurking in his ointment, one that completely belies his claims to have attained liberation from earthly desire. His emotional purity lasts for only as long as the sun is up - he admits that he lives in fear of the night, which he spends writhing about in a fit of sweaty terror, grappling with nocturnal visions of a sports car known as the MR2 Roadster. For all his good intentions and diurnal discipline, night is when his wordly id creeps back into view and exercises its rapacious influence, reminding the protagonist that even he can't resist the allure of a flash Toyota, albeit vicariously, via a dreamed image. That the Toyota should be the source of such rampant night terrors is, fundamentally, all a joke, and the ad happily lets the mask drop in having the protagonist's monologue become a lot more frenzied (and unambiguously sexual - he uses the expression "the prick of earthly pleasure", for Pete's sake) as the car hurtles into view, in contrast to the collected stoicism of his earlier words. But this doesn't preclude the fact that the ad does manage to be genuinely unsettling in its build-up, like the opening to a horror narrative about a person trying to find themselves out in the wilderness and instead happening upon a much more disturbing reality. There is an underlying menace in those opening shots, a sense of an eeriness perpetually lurking beneath the beauty - in part, it might be that the vast silence, or the softened ambience of his surroundings, seems almost unbearably vacant to ears accustomed to the hustle and bustle of city living. But moreover, straight off the bat the ad puts heavy emphasis on the intense isolation of its protagonist, conveying his vulnerability through various wide shots in which he is dwarfed by the scope of his surroundings. The only other living creature we see with him out there is an owl, and it serves less as a companion than as a herald to that impending darkness he dreads so much. Already there's an empathy for his fear of the transition into nightfall - if you're this on your own, then of course you're liable to feel shifty in the dark.
His isolation is, I feel, key to the eeriness of the ad - and even when the Roadster, the lingering imprint of the world he has left behind, enters the picture and the narrative takes a more overtly comical turn, that isolation does not dissipate. His vision of the Roadster is at odds with the world he currently inhabits, its angry, abrasive whirring (matched with the sound of the protagonist's heartbeat) a startling contrast to the mountain ambience, as it as it thunders along a metropolis of high-rise buildings. These environs seem washed-out and lifeless, stacked up against the magnificence of his digs out in the wilderness, giving them a convincing sense of unreality, in spite of their mundaneness. One thing that these duelling panoramas do have in common, however, is a near-total lack of human presence - aside from the vague outline of the driver of the Roadster (assumed to be a projection of the protagonist) the streets seem eerily devoid of residents. This proves even more unsettling than those establishing shots of our protagonist alone in the wilderness, creating as it does a sense of a post-apocalyptic landscape from which man has disappeared and machine now sits at the top of the pile (a dynamic reinforced in the implication that, although the protagonist sinfully fancies himself as the driver of the vehicle, the allure of the Roadster is blatantly driving him). The narrative I was always tempted to apply to this scenario, however fanciful, was one in which our hero might potentially be the last man on Earth, having witnessed the violent reckoning that resulted in machines laying claim to the streets and any human survivors being driven to the far reaches of the wilderness. Naturally, he fears sundown because that's when he's haunted by his memories of the mechanical objects that have displaced humanity, and which he fears may still be hunting him, with an acute awareness that humankind's attachment to such technological luxuries is what facilitated its downfall.
Despite the overt absurdity of the reveal, the ad ends with a return to daylight, and into that original uneasy silence, as we see the protagonist atoning for his material indulgence with an act of self-flagellation. The character is stuck in an unending cycle of peace (although not really) and despair; the final look on his face conveys a distinct bitterness, with the knowledge that his human desires, and by extension the materialism that thrives on them, will forever get the better of him. The final shot of the ad shows the Roadster of his nightmares - despite its cold inexpressiveness, the car is clearly having the last laugh here.
I should confess that my interpretation of the film was always based on the 40-second version of the ad making the TV rounds of new millennium, and which I long assumed to be the only version in existence. Only very recently (by which I mean last month) did I have the pleasure of discovering that there is, in fact, a version that clocks in at a whole minute long, and which had been sneakily squirrelled away from me this entire time. I can't confirm it was a recipient of theatrical screenings, but I'm guessing it's the one you would have likely seen included in cinema trailer reels. The 60-second version isn't radically different to the shorter cut - the establishing shots of the protagonist's peaceful diurnal existence run on for a little longer, with extended pauses, and the monologue incorporates a few snippets of additional dialogue. Below is a complete transcript, with bolding indicating what was exclusive to the 60-second cut:
"I have found peace, liberated* from the daily pursuit of gain. Mind: pure. Body: cleansed. I am free. I fear nothing, but the night. For the night brings - sports cars! A true sports car! A Roadster! The painful prick of earthly pleasure! The Yin of performance! The Yang of design! Yeah! Go baby, go! Oh, mama!"
*He says "free" in the 40-second version.
The most striking difference between the two is the inclusion of an additional visual punchline before the hero's act of self-flagellation, in which he opens up a crate, revealing a snazzy suit and tie he has illicitly stashed away, and which he proceeds to rub against in a sensual manner. This overt expression of pleasure creates a much more salient contrast when we leap to the succeeding close-up shot of him grimacing whilst flogging himself - we see the polarity between the ascetic Jekyll and the indulgent Hyde, each occupying opposing ends of the day/night cycle, and each persisting in their alternating leverage of the protagonist's urges. The entire situation puts me in mind of of that equally unsettling Imperial Leather ad with the two minimalists concealing their carnal bathing habits from one another, only with the additional complication that he's having to negotiate the arrangement with two conflicting facets of himself. What does the suit and tie have to do with the Roadster? My best guess would be that it's a vestige of the life he left behind, a glimpse of the person he may once have been before he ditched civilisation (or before the machines brought it crashing down, take your pick). We can see the suit as the skin he has attempted to shed but never fully been able to sever his connection to, with the car being the insidious little toxin that momentarily teases that buried identity out of hiding. It adds an additional layer of irony to the outcome - in the daylight, the ascetic reasserts control, but in a way that implies a reversal of the dynamic expressed through the monologue, with peace coming at night through his embracing of that luxurious suit, and anguish with the sun as attempts to beat his material yearnings into submission. His intentions may be laudable, but his wordly human nature dictates that his life might be less complicated if he just submitted to those infernal desires and rejoined the rest of us consumers. Like the soap ad with the minimalists, it is fundamentally an ad designed to make us similarly crave the product on offer, not sell us on the virtues of his chosen lifestyle. From where he is, though, I'd say he still has the infinitely better view of things. His woodland abode might be lonely and a tad unnerving, but it feels real and vibrant; those imagined Toyota night drives, by contrast, are bombastic, but also kind of wan.
As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series goes, the 1992 offering "Eyes" is a particularly unlovely one to have to look at, although it starts out, deceptively, by emphasising the apparent beauty of its subject. The young woman at the centre of the film looks perfectly pretty in her opening close-up, as though she could be staring off dreamily into the distance. Straight off the bat, however, are clues that we haven't walked in on an innocuous scenario, if we should happen to notice that one of her pupils is dilated, or the strange objects protruding from her mouth. The film pivots on a simple technique - a gradual pull-back from the face of the woman, shortly revealed to be the victim of a road accident, as paramedics attempt, to no avail, to revive her. We continue to move away, but her expression remains unnervingly static. Interspersed with the paramedic's procedural commentary is the voice of the driver, who stays off-screen for the duration. What we have is a juxtaposition of two parallel narratives, in the woman's unresponsive form and the driver's disembodied voice, with each conveying their own individual despair. The driver's account is an entirely familiar one - almost word-for-word identical, in fact, to the circumstances that reportedly convinced Mark he was okay to drive on that fateful Christmas night.
D&DWL was never an especially gory series, preferring to seek out horror from the emotional debris of each featured calamity, although "Eyes" might be considered a slight outlier in that regard. It offers only minimal blood, yet it still ranks as the most disturbingly graphic of the D&DWL canon, being the entry that's most fixated on the blunt physicality of death, and in the sheer discomfort of watching a body slip past that queasy barrier between being and corpse as its last waning flickers of function are slowly extinguished. Technically, the protagonist is never actually dead for the span of the
film - at the end the paramedic pronounces her asystolic, which isn't
exactly the same as death but does mean that her chances ought probably
to be considered non-existent. In practice, it makes very little difference - with her pallid skin and stationary gaze, it's an exercise in horror as worthy as any video nasty. The technique used in "Eyes" is something of a variation on an earlier D&DWL film, "Kathy", which also had a character affected by a drink driving incident stare directly into the camera while a disembodied voice filled in the narrative gaps and impressed the moral weight of the scenario. In both cases the fourth wall breaking is implicitly accusatory - the subject, while powerless to change their situation, is utterly merciless in challenging the viewer to return their gaze and to confront the consequences of their own prospective actions (something explicitly evoked in the film's print counterpart, which instructed spectators to "Look her in the eye. Then say a quick drink never hurt anyone"). In the case of "Eyes", the subject's expression is entirely vacant, conveying absolutely nothing, and yet so much at the same time. There is a certain ironic tension between the subject's physical inertia and the stony relentlessness of her stare, her seeming refusal to back down from presenting us with the impacts of drink driving in their harshest, ugliest detail. Who this woman is and the repercussions of her demise go unexplored, which here only adds to the impact; we do not venture outside of this very specific moment in which she is reduced to only a stagnant image, as all prospects of progressing beyond this are tragically shut off to her.
"Eyes" was, along with "Kathy" and "Arrest", part of a sequence of D&DWL entries that bucked the trends of the opening wave of PIFs by shifting the focus more toward the offender's side of the equation, and of the ramifications (both legal and emotional) for them. Noteworthy is that the driver was still denied corporeality in any of those three films, allowing the outcomes of their poor choices to continue to define them visually, although "Eyes" is unusual in actually giving them a voice. The driver is humanised, but through distinctively debasing means, with his final insistence that he "didn't mean it" emphasising his fundamental limpness; we do not doubt the truthfulness of that statement, but it seems a distressingly futile response to such a dire situation - a point underlined by whichever of the first responders (I'm not sure if it's the police officer or the paramedic) is heard to scoff after the fade-out. There is, again, an ironic tension between the evident patheticness of the driver and the harrowing destructiveness of his actions.
What might take the sting off a little, if you find yourself losing sleep over the imagery in "Eyes", is the realisation that the subject in question is actually a teenaged Denise van Outen, who later rose to prominence as a presenter on The Big Breakfast at the latter end of the decade. Her familiarity comes as a reassuring reminder that, for as horrifying as this PIF's contents are, they were only feigned and she did, in reality, progress beyond the gruesome stasis encapsulated here. I fear that stasis may be forever etched into my skull, however.
"Eyes" is, as far as I'm aware, the only D&DWL film to have been made commercially available for home viewing - you can find it on the BFI release The COI Collection Volume Four: Stop! Look! Listen!, along with "Lonely Water". (EDIT: Correction. "Dave" was also released on the sixth volume, Worth The Risk?)
There are few music videos I'd rate as quite so silently haunting as that of "In Demand", a hit for Scottish pop rockers Texas, released in late 2000 to plug their new compilation album, The Greatest Hits. The video was directed by Vaughan Arnell, noted at the time for his collaborations with Robbie Williams (the psychological scar-fest that accompanied "Rock DJ", where Williams is seen to rip out hunks of his own flesh and muscle and throw them to his screaming cannibal fangirls? That was Arnell's), and depicts an overnight drive from London to Brighton being undertaken by band frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri. Spiteri rides in style, in a chauffeur-driven Bentley Azure, and with actor Alan Rickman (just a year before his tenure as Severus Snape began) as a fellow passenger who intermittently caresses her (no seat belts on either of them, though? Tut tut...). Things reach a tantalising climax when they stop to refuel at a Shell garage and engage in a spontaneous tango out there in the forecourt, before resuming their journey and arriving at Brighton in dawn's early light. At this point, the nocturnal travellers go their separate ways, with the suited Rickman (somewhat incongruously) retrieving a backpack from the boot of the vehicle and heading for a decrepit apartment block, leaving a doleful Spiteri to continue on to her unknown destination with only her chauffeur for company.
This Smooth Radio article sheds some light on how Rickman came to be involved in the project, although there isn't really a whole lot to the story as author Georgina Ramazzotti describes it. Rickman liked the band's output and was willing to be in the video, is the gist of it. There is a heartening epilogue to the alliance, in the acknowledgement that Spiteri and Rickman remained friends in the aftermath, up until the latter's death in 2016, and that the "In Demand" video was not Rickman's only contribution to the Texas catalogue; he also provided vocals for the band's 2015 recording, "Start A Family". The most inflammatory aspect of the article would be Ramazzotti's assertion that the video is currently "forgotten", which...well, it would be to my chagrin if so. Arnell's video is simple but effective - visually captivating, and with the presence of an equivocally contemplative Rickman giving it a persistent air of beguiling uncertainty. Perhaps it's an easy video to take for granted because Texas in general seem somewhat taken for granted these days; despite their various chart successes in the 1990s and into the new millennium, they were an offbeat band to factor into the contemporary music climate, for reasons summarised in Stephen Thomas Erlewine's review of The Greatest Hits: "They may have been able to gain momentum from Britpop, but they didn't
really belong, since their sensibility was far too soulful and classy,
borrowing equally from the smooth soul of the '70s, Americana
fascinations, and, in a roundabout way, the sophisti-pop of the '80s."
The song itself is fairly upfront about its own meaning, with the lyrics detailing the aftermath of a bitter breakup; the protagonist indicates that the relationship did not endure because her ex was not inclined to take it seriously, although now that she has moved on and found a new, more stable partner, they seem to be having second thoughts on the matter. The protagonist chews on the implication that it took their jealousy of a third party (the fact that she is "in demand") for her ex to realise what a catch she truly was, while making it plain that she isn't looking backwards. Muddying the waters slightly is her admission that "when I fall asleep, I see that winning smile", suggesting that she does, on some level, harbor her own wistful fantasy vision of how things might have worked out under different circumstances - although she counters this with the assertion that, "When my dreams just move along, you've lost the race by miles", maintaining that it is, fundamentally, only a fantasy. Nevertheless, the pining, melancholic nature of the tune means that the song is not quite the triumphant kiss-off suggested by the lyrics, with tinges of underlying regret tempering the protagonist's affirmations of having emerged as the winner of the scenario. The first mystery, in terms of how this bolsters our understanding of what's going on in the video, is which participant in this tetchy love triangle Rickman is intended to represent - are we to see him as the third party or the ex? The aforementioned Smooth Radio article seems pretty confident that he's the latter, but I will admit that - in spite of how the video ends - my gut reading was always that Rickman is the doting new partner, and the unseen pilot of the helicopter apparently pursuing them in the second verse represents the voyeuristic intrusions of her jealous old flame..as to an extent does our own inquisitive spectatorship. I guess I'm basing that largely on Spiteri's tendency to nuzzle Rickman and gaze elatedly into the camera whenever she sings about being "in demand", implying that her current position, in the backseat of that Bentley with Rickman, represents the peak of her emotional prosperity, and implicating any onlookers (the viewers, the camera, the helicopter searchlight) as outsiders who can gape upon their one-to-one nirvana but can't get in. I'd also note that Spiteri is seen whispering in Rickman's ear during the song's taunting remark, "There's a side you'll never know", while the helicopter watches from above, aggressively probing but firmly excluded from their private exchange.
What really intrigues me about the video is the interplay between the kind of sultry dream space suggested by Spiteri and Rickman's fairy tale backseat ride - the sumptuous effortlessness with which they glide from Point A to Point B - and the mundane realities that infringe on it. There is, presumably, an intentional irony to the climax, in which the couple experience their most intimate moment in a location as thoroughly banal as a Shell garage in the middle of nowhere (or in Bordon, Hampshire, to be precise). The garage itself makes for a curious ballroom stand-in, a garish onslaught of unlovely reds and yellows littered with signage promoting humdrum consumption, and yet the glare of the forecourt lights seem as hypnotic as any mirror ball. It calls attention to the fact that, a couple of hokey shots of the full moon notwithstanding, the blackness of the characters' world is punctuated mainly by artificial lighting from various sources (streetlights, car headlights, motorway signage), by turns magic and monotonous. Night becomes an open canvas in which the couple have the deserted road predominantly to themselves, with only the occasional freight vehicle travelling in the opposite direction to remind us of the lonely drudgery of nocturnal travel happening on the sidelines of their narrative. The appearance of the helicopter yields the only inkling of prospective antagonism en route, while a squad of motorcyclists travelling their way offer a moment of affinity - they are the only fellow travellers, other than Rickman, with whom Spiteri exchanges any kind of amicable interaction, and the manner in which they flock around the vehicle gives them the appearance of a protective brigade. As for the significance of the Shell garage, I am put in mind of Edward Hopper's Gas, with the garage providing a last refuge for our amorous night owls before they're forced to venture into a forbidding unknown - or in their case, the Brighton seafront in the bleak light of day. The darkness and the journey provide a dreamscape - perhaps the very fantasy space alluded to within the lyrics - the adventure of the open road sheathing the couple in an interval of of idyllic connection, with the emergence of dawn and their inevitable return to civilisation signalling the need to come back down to reality, and to contemplate the diverging roads ahead of them. Rickman, looking notably less kempt the instant he dons his rucksack, leaves the Bentley and Spiteri and disappears into a greyer reality; she rides on, mobilised by her emotional urges but visibly wounded by her companion's departure.
If we interpret the journey as signifying the forward momentum of Spiteri's life, and her time carpooling with Rickman as indicative of the duration of the characters' relationship, then the video can be read as an ode to the exhilaration but also the potential impermanence of such connections, however powerfully felt in the moment (in that regard, the concept is quite similar to the Cartoon Saloon short, Somewhere Down The Line). As with the lyrics of "In Demand", it is built on the recognition that the highs of any relationship may eventually culminate in the need to move on, emphasising the track's unspoken mournfulness of over its proclamations of survival. And if Rickman isn't the suitor Spiteri has spent the duration rebuffing, then I guess it speaks of the precariousness of whatever lies ahead for her, and the inherent but unavoidable risks of starting over.
As for the chauffeur, he's a total non-entity throughout. Neither
Spiteri or Rickman communicate with him at any point, and they even
obscure most of his face during the helicopter's offensive. He's window
dressing in their little joy ride and he knows it.
Something I'm definitely aiming to achieve more of in 2023 would be greater in-depth coverage of The Simpsons' Season 8. I've gone on record as saying that it is my favourite Simpsons season, and yet I'm deeply conscious of the fact that I've had less to say about it, thus far, than any of the seasons before it (except for Season 5, which I also hope to give a whisker more focus this year). And what with Mardi Gras upon us, now seems the perfect time to revisit "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" (4F20), and take look at the first of our trio of possible (though improbable) Simpsons sequels, "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", in which we follow Clancy Wiggum to New Orleans, and his futile attempts to reinvent himself as the star of a gutsy new action series. I covered the second segment, "The Love-Matic Grampa", a number of years ago in this piece, and while Moe and Abe's pseudo-sitcom still endures as my favourite of the three, there's a devoted place in my affections for this one too.
I think of Season 8 as a pretty underrated season on the whole (it has two really formidable fan favourites, "You Only Move Twice" and "Homer's Enemy", but in my experience most viewers tend to prefer Season 7), and "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" may well be the most underrated of them all. When it first aired, on May 4th 1997, a lot of viewers were uncertain what to make of it (like much of Season 8 in general!). A decade or so onward, and I'm not sure if that prevailing sentiment had really shifted - I can recall back when Wikipedia was a wee young thing, and their entry on "Jumping The Shark" cited this episode for lampooning the various ways in which a TV series can slip past its prime, before adding that, most ironically, "Spin-Off" was itself seen as a jump the shark episode by numerous fans "due to its poor quality". "Poor quality", as though it were fact. Nowadays, it's generally appreciated that the writers were up to something intensely meta with this installment, and that if you were taking each segment at face value then you were doing it wrong. And yet I still don't think it gets even half the credit that it deserves. An episode as balls to the wall odd and as doggedly outside of the box as this frankly belongs in more Top 10s than I'm accustomed to seeing it in.
"Spin-Off" was the third installment in what I'm henceforth going to refer to as "The Death Trilogy" (to pilfer a term from Gus Van Sant), following on the heels of "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" and "Homer's Enemy", episodes all built around showrunners Oakley and Weinstein's increasing preoccupation with the likelihood that they'd inherited the series in the evening of its life ("The Principal and The Pauper" can be seen as a close cousin of the Death
Trilogy, but I'm content to look at that one as an outlier that got
fortuitously packed off to become Season 9's problem). "Poochie" gives us Denial, Fear and Anger all wrapped up in one highly defensive package - it grapples with the paradox of how a long-running series can be as strong as it ever was, and yet not hit the mark because its audience is no longer impressed by such perfection. "Enemy" is an altogether stranger beast, a commentary on the series' increasing disconnection from reality and its degeneration into the territory of nonsensical cartoons - it represents the Searching/Bargaining stage of Season 8's journey, and is more introspective in nature than "Poochie", even if the answer it ultimately reaches is an indifferent shrug from a hardening heart. "Spin-Off" rounds off the trilogy with a lavish Acceptance party - notably, it feels like it has less of an axe to grind than either "Poochie" or "Enemy", having already vented the worst of its anxieties on Frank Grimes and Poochie the dog, and being more open to embracing the maelstrom of mediocrity it senses will shortly consume it. "Spin-Off" is about the general lousiness of television, but it's made with real love and affection for that lousiness. Some commentators, including Robert Sloane, author of the essay, "Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment In The Simpsons" (featured in the 2004 book Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture), identify a self-congratulatory underpinning to the entire enterprise, asserting that the main purpose of "Spin-Off" is to remind viewers what superior programming The Simpsons is compared to 99% of the dreck they could potentially be watching instead. And while "Spin-Off" is, indisputably, expounding a point about the creative bankruptcy that fuels a lot of the decision-making in the television industry, it avoids coming across as overly petty or spiteful in its observations (except perhaps in the base assumption that a spin-off is an inherently tacky concept, which would be steeped in all kinds of irony). For one thing, all three proposed spin-offs were parodies of archetypal programs from earlier eras in television - cop dramas of the 1980s, fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, and variety shows of the 1970s - as opposed to reflections of trends in contemporary entertainment. Part of the joke is that these hypothetical series were always going to seem hopelessly out of the place in the television climate of the 1990s. But there's also a level on which the writers appear to have had fun looking back on television's history and reimagining the shows of yesteryear to accommodate their own ingenious Simpsons twists; for an episode so concerned with what Sloane describes as "the general banality of television", it gave the crew leeway to flex some pleasingly inventive muscles.
"Spin-Off" pokes fun at television conventions of all stripes, but in the end (and this may be the single greatest factor differentiating it from the rest of the Death Trilogy), the butt of the joke turns out, in no small way, to be The Simpsons itself. Linking the three segments is a subtle but all-encompassing sense of existential despair, the nature of which doesn't completely reveal itself until the third spin-off, "The Simpsons' Smile-Time Variety Hour", which Kent Brockman introduces as coming from "the family that doesn't know the meaning of the word cancelled." The implication being that "Smile-Time" is to be viewed as a pre-emptive afterlife for The Simpsons following its impending (or so it seemed in 1997) cancellation. This is the most forthright the episode gets in communicating the uncomfortable subtext lurking beneath each hypothetical offshoot - the insinuation that the show is weighing up its options because The Simpsons cannot unreasonably hope to sustain itself for much longer. Troy reaffirms this sentiment in the closing sequence, when he offers a purported preview of Season 9 that includes magic powers, long-lost triplets, and Ozmodiar, a tiny green space alien that only Homer can see. One wonders, with hindsight, if Oakley and Weinstein had had a premonition of where Mike Scully would be taking the series after their departure. Ozmodiar wouldn't have been any more offensive than a lot of what we actually got.
Troy's presence, and his fourth wall-breaking wraparounds, obviously
recall the very similar device used in the previous season's "The
Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". But the true evolutionary ancestor
to "Spin-Off" would be "22 Short Films About Springfield", also of
Season 7, an episode heavily rumored to have itself been considered as the model for a potential Simpsons
spin-off about the lives of the supporting Springfieldians. It and
"Spin-Off" have the same interest in the kinds of parallel stories
suggested by the intricacies of the Simpsons universe, and what
we could be watching if narrative bias wasn't so heavily slanted toward
the titular family, with many of those individual sketches in "22"
playing like miniature pitches for their own self-contained series (some
with their own introductory credit sequences). The brief running time
of each individual spin-off and the "variety pack" nature of the episode
appears to mimic, as with the structure of "22", the impatient attention
span of a viewer with a finger pounding compulsively on the button of
their remote, anxious to know what might be unfolding concurrently on the next channel. What both episodes finally confirm is that all roads eventually lead back to the titular family, upheld as the inevitable nexus of their mutual universe - whereas "22" (perhaps unconsciously) undermines its suggested spin-off potential with its need to keep returning to the happenings in the Simpsons' kitchen, "Spin-Off" knowingly inserts the family into all three segments as a means of reenforcing the inescapability of each offshoot's roots. Not only do the Simpsons get the final spin-off to themselves, they make an awkwardly-implemented "guest" appearance in "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", and Homer drops in for a brief chin-wag in "The Love-Matic Grampa". Cross-overs with the parent series are a common device in spin-offs (recall those divisive appearances from the cast of Cheers throughout the run of Frasier), and are implemented here with a deliberate clunkiness that (in "Wiggum" in particular) echoes the kind of cross-promotional tactics previously used in service of The Critic in "A Star Is Burns". This continued reliance on the family is used as yet another shorthand for a creative dead-end, their familiarity and tried and tested star power apparently necessary to keep these flailing new enterprises propped up...even if (as "Smile-Time" seemingly confirms) the Simpsons were, at the time, finding it a struggle enough just keeping themselves afloat.
Of the three hypothetical spin-offs, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." is the one that feels
the least divorced from the series proper, tonally speaking, and as such may be the most palatable to casual viewers more interested in an enjoyable Simpsons story than in anything too arch. The Simpsons was already well within its element spoofing ridiculous action-orientated dramas of this ilk, a practice it initially restricted mostly to footage from "McBain" movies, but which had, in recent years started to bleed over into the dynamics of the Simpsons' everyday existence. There isn't such a world of
difference between the climactic boat chase up to Big Daddy's mansion and the
kinds of overblown action sequences periodically favoured by Oakley and
Weinstein during their run (the part where Wiggum expels Daddy's henchman by blowing him away with the boat propeller in particular feels like a gag that could have happened in any contemporary episode). I've no end of praise for Oakley and Weinstein, for their
intelligence and their willingness to take risks, but this is the one
aspect of their tenure on which I'm a little more mixed. (Bob swinging off of a
dam by holding onto a detonating cord in "Brother From Another Series"
is fucking awesome and I will never tire of seeing it; by contrast, that
climactic showdown between Lovejoy and the baboons in "In Marge We
Trust" always struck me as kind of dumb. Less dumb than the baboon
showdown in Ad Astra, mind you.) There are also jokes about New Orleans culture that wouldn't have felt at all out of place in a regular episode entailing a trip to the Big Easy - notably, an appearance from chef Paul Prudhomme, espousing (somewhat inexplicably) the catchphrase of fellow purveyor of Cajun cookery Justin Wilson ("I Gar-Ron-Tee!"), to the irritation of Skinner. In other regards, "Chief Wiggum, P.I." marks itself out as a very specific pastiche of 1980s crime dramas, most obviously Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice. It's noteworthy that, while such shows might have been looking distinctly old hat in 1997, when "Spin-Off" was made, more recent years have seen the rise of the cultural movement known as synthwave, a niche genre of electronic music/art dedicated to evoking a characteristically 1980s flavour, and for which Miami Vice, with its sun-drenched palm trees, bright colours and weakness for showy vehicles and swanky attire, has proven a cornerstone aesthetic. The series has gained fresh relevance, in helping to construct a mythical vision of the 1980s, one that's instantly recognisable but might never have existed, except in media image. The opening sequence to "Wiggum" has most of the cliches down - the obligatory shot of Wiggum whizzing along in a shiny convertible with the wind in his hair, the opening theme tune conspicuously striving to recreate the sound Jan Hammer's discography, the clip montage offering individual introductions to the principal cast, each culminating in a comical freeze frame (though I'd associate that particular quirk more with The A Team than either Vice or Magnum). What's evident from the narrative itself is that the chimerical cool that Wiggum has gone in search of, and which once came so effortlessly to the likes of Magnum, Tubbs and Crockett, just seems to keep eluding our hero.
The premise of this faux pilot has Wiggum relocating to New Orleans
to pursue a new career as a private investigator; in a hilariously
graceless chunk of exposition, we learn that he was compelled to leave
his former stomping ground of Springfield after suffering disgrace for
his "massive corruption" as chief of police. That in itself is not such
an implausible outcome for old Clancy. His exodus does not go
unaccompanied - Wiggum's marriage to Sarah has also broken down, for
reasons that the script does not care to specify, and he has custody
of Ralph. The curveball of the arrangement is in the casting of Skinner
as Wiggum's sidekick, "Skinny Boy". Wiggum and Skinner seem an unlikely
pairing off the bat (in the series proper they had little connection,
outside of Skinner being principal of the school Wiggum's son attends),
but the real kicker is in the reference to Skinner's former life as a
hustler on the streets of New Orleans, from which his foray into a
career in education was apparently just a meagre distraction. Here, this
plays as a deliberately clunky means of transplanting him into the
action, the joke being that a character as categorically prim and
starchy as Skinner should be a woefully unconvincing fit for such a
backstory. But...the thing is that it's not altogether far removed from
what we were shortly expected to swallow as canon in "The Principal and
The Pauper" (there, he was an ex-street punk, as opposed to an
ex-hustler, but it's in a near enough ballpark). That the two episodes
landed so close together is eyebrow-raising enough in itself. For now, I
don't want to get into the specifics of "The Principal and The Pauper"
and the contentious matter of whether it does or doesn't succeed, but it
is interesting to note that the two episodes take what is effectively
the same joke and give it a radically different treatment. In "Wiggum",
it's never presented as anything other than knowingly ludicrous writing,
and while there's an element of that in "Principal", it also attempts
to use it as the basis of a serious character drama involving Skinner's
bifurcated sense of identity.
Complicating the gag in "Wiggum" is
that the episode seems to vacillate on just how viable Skinner is in
the role of streetwise sidekick, presenting the character as both
ridiculously out of his element in theory and yet absurdly proficient
when it comes to the crunch. In one scene, Wiggum asks for the word on
the street and Skinner admits that he hasn't lived in New Orleans for
forty-two years and much of his contemporary understanding of the city
comes from an article he read in "Parade" magazine. In "Grade School
Confidential", an episode in very recent memory, Skinner's age was given as forty-four, so...are we to believe
that he honed his tough street guy credentials when he was just two?
Then again, Skinner isn't exactly bluffing about those credentials
either - given that he manages to subdue an alligator with his bare
hands, albeit one with corks around its teeth (of course, he was also a
soldier in Vietnam, but that aspect of his backstory isn't raised here).
I'll credit Seymour with being the magic ingredient that makes the
whole parody tick; his hidden talent for gator-wrestling
notwithstanding, his fundamental Skinner-ishness remains perfectly
intact for the duration. The joke about him having only vague awareness
of that Mardi Gras function the city intermittently throws would feel
wonderfully in character even if he were a native New Orleanian - he's
such a thoroughgoing square as to be totally indifferent to such things,
even when they're happening right on his doorstep.
From the outset, Troy promises us a "gritty crime drama, starring Springfield's beloved Police Chief Wiggum," - a statement that, to anyone familiar with Wiggum and his staggering incompetence, rings as flagrantly oxymoronic (and what happens in "Spin-Off" certainly feels less gritty than Wiggum's disturbing encounter with Snake and Herman in "22 Short Films About Springfield"). Adjectives featured throughout the segment itself, in poorly-disguised snippets of self-promotion, include "exciting" and "sexy" - words first used by Lisa when she and the family conveniently show up during the Mardi Gras parade to give Wiggum's new ambitions their tacky-ass seal of approval. Despite being explicitly signposted by Troy before the segment begins, the Simpsons' entry into this world is jarring, not least because it brings what meagre plot "Wiggum" has going to an abrupt halt. Bart insists that the family are in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras celebrations, but the real purpose of their visit is made plain when Lisa interjects (in what turns out to be her only line of the episode) that she "can't wait to hear about the exciting, sexy adventures you're sure to have against this colourful backdrop." This statement would have felt odd coming from any of the family's mouths, but seems especially jarring for Lisa, a point made all the more salient later on, when we learn of her principled refusal to take part in the gruesomely tacky "Smile-Time Variety Hour". In his essay, Sloane notes that "the line is awkward and forced, particularly coming from the rather self-aware Lisa," (p.155), although he doesn't highlight the most skin-crawling element of Lisa's pitch, which is the questionable appropriateness of an eight-year-old child, albeit one characterised as having the mentality of an adult, selling something as "sexy". Wiggum later echoes these very words at the end of the episode, when he anticipates a long-running enmity with crime boss Big Daddy that will take "more sexy and exciting" forms with each passing week. What's important is that the characters spend more time taking about how alluring and adrenalin-packed their adventures will be than is actually evidenced onscreen throughout the adventure, which is a predominantly empty affair, despite occasional morsels of dramatic development. In that regard, it could be seen to vacillate as much as Skinner; there is an inkling of genuine peril when Ralph is abducted, and the story climaxes in a legitimate (albeit ridiculous) action sequence, yet the final confrontation with Big Daddy (who, despite possessing the suave Southern vocals of Gailard Sartain, appears to be every bit as incompetent in his allotted role as Wiggum) is a total anti-climax. Daddy exchanges a lot of nonsensical bluster with our heroes, before suddenly bailing, surrendering Ralph and making his (prolonged) escape, which Wiggum allows for the expressed purpose of securing a recurring nemesis for his upcoming (although not) series. The whole thing is implemented with the obvious intention of instilling a marketing hook in audiences, and the lack of closure, rather than opening up narrative possibilities, suggests an overall aimlessness to the enterprise - an indication that the real interests lie in longevity, and in keeping the Simpsons train running, than in accomplishing anything of genuine merit.
The most revealing aspects of "Wiggum" lie not in any pulse-racing action sequences, but in the parts of the segment that take place in the sparseness of Wiggum's new office, as he attempts to set up his detective business with meagre resources. Just as Moe's allegiance with the possessed love tester in "The Love-Matic Grampa" was entrenched in a pitiful desolation barely disguised by the machinations of the laugh track, so too does the heart of "Wiggum" secretly lurk in the overwhelming emptiness that pervades the segment. The doomed nature of the spin-off is depicted in the drab vacancy of the building interior, and in the (beautifully executed) sequence where Wiggum and Skinner open the windows to find the Mardi Gras celebrations happening right outside; there's always a party going on somewhere near Wiggum, but he just can't seem to find his way in. Like "Love-Matic", it ends up being a story of lonely individuals, of a couple of outcasts struggling to find their niche in a landscape that is both emotionally and creatively barren, and likely to discard their bid for the spotlight with total indifference. The joy of the segment lies in the chemistry between Wiggum and Skinner, which is genuinely delectable; both characters are equally at sea in their tough new environs, with the result that their mutual hopelessness manages to sell the absurdities of the spin-off as outright endearing. An anti-actioner with a King-of-Square Vladimir and perpetually clueless Estragon itching for a reckoning with a Godot to whom they can't get remotely close; don't tell me you wouldn't all watch the shit out of that.
"Wiggum" ends with a callback to the comical freeze frames that populated the opening montage, with Skinner making some lame wisecrack and the cast reacting uproariously. Freeze frame endings were another technique heavily favoured by Miami Vice, although "Wiggum" subverts the aura of uncompromising cool that accompanied its model series, using it to segue into the territory of cheesy sitcoms (also partial to a final freeze), with glib humor substituting for closure and an upbeat leitmotif that's every bit as phoney as any of the Pavlovian devices deployed in "The Love-Matic Grampa". It's always struck me as immensely significant that, in the specific frame they freeze on, Ralph doesn't look as though he's laughing so much as screaming. It's in his wide-eyed, tortured outburst that the segment lets us in most prominently on the cry of desperation that's manifest all throughout the episode, proving to be just as evident in the phoney-baloney laugh track of "Love-Matic" and the fixed plastic smiles of the family in "Smile-Time". A fraught compulsion to stave off a beckoning oblivion is the motivating factor behind every single ill-advised gimmick within the showcase, but there is, as Abe will shortly illuminate in "Love-Matic" with his "suffered so long" admission, a certain horror in the realisation that there is no end, that you have to keep on going, jumping through an interminable line-up of hoops for as long as you continue to draw a sufficient-sized crowd. What's articulated by Abe and hinted at in Ralph's expression is that each of these spin-offs constitutes a different vision of purgatory for the ailing series, a means for the media machine to carry on exploiting the property long after its dignity has expired (the freeze frame itself can likewise be seen as a signifier of such stagnation, with the characters trapped in a single moment ad infinitum). Of all of the Death Trilogy, "Spin-Off" comes off as by far the most pessimistic in terms of what lies in store for The Simpsons' future, the churlish frustrations of "Poochie" and the dark cynicism of "Enemy" having been supplanted with a queasy contemplation of the stalemate aligning on the horizon. As the swan song of this particular chapter in the series' history, it certainly goes down swinging with all the creative defiance it can muster.
