Episode 9 - Thursdays with Abie
25 January 2010
Review
Synopsis: Grandpa is delighted to meet a young journalist, Marshall Goldman, who offers to syndicate his stories. Homer tries to reconnect with his father but Grandpa decides to punish him for years of neglect. Meanwhile Bart is forced to look after the class mascot Larry the Lamb for the weekend. Lisa loses him and Bart is forced to search through the sewers to retrieve him.
The Good: The start of the episode seems like a promising Grandpa plot with his often joked about stories being taken seriously.
The Bad: But that’s where the fun ends. Homer getting upset about the time Grandpa now spends with Marshall makes sense. But the episode doesn’t focus on their relationship, it’s more on Goldman’s silly plan to kill Grandpa in order to win a Pulitzer Prize. There is no real character developed for Goldman so his plan has no real entertainment value.
Similarly Larry the Lamb is a somewhat pathetic story in the end. Bart goes down the sewers for a silly chase scene with rats and bats and doesn’t learn a lesson or crack any good jokes.
The jokes tell a story of how The Simpsons ability to tell jokes has disintegrated over the years. Marge taking pictures of worthless things in the car park, just because she can, is a joke about how mundane her ambitions are. But instead of making the joke and moving on we get a long list of all the things she took pictures of which squashes all the humour out of it.
Similarly we get Homer “inheriting” the right to tell ridiculous nonsensical stories from Grandpa and Mr Burns releasing “a hound” as a mark of charity to Homer. Both of those moments are jokes based on The Simpsons being a TV show, not based around those characters behaving in an amusing fashion. The nonsensical stories in particular are a symptom of Grandpa being old, confused and starved of attention. They shouldn’t really be a “catchphrase” which Homer is excited to inherit. It’s not that either are bad jokes necessarily but they show that the writers have lost focus on what made The Simpsons so funny for so long. And that was satirising everyday life and behaviour, not having characters behave in ludicrous ways that they never plausibly would in real life. Such as the gym teacher encouraging Millhouse to climb a rope that isn’t there.
Best Joke: Grandpa begins to tell the story of how he once sat on a shark: “It was back in World War Two. I was a seaman, first class, on the USS World War One. We were minding our own business when we were attacked by a heat seeking torpedo we had fired the day before.”
The Bottom Line: A very mediocre effort all round.
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