A Springfield Summer Christmas for Christmas

One of the worst episodes in years. Nearly as unwatchable as the Lady Gaga.

I usually can't stand new Simpsons, but this epsiode was great. It's entirely a parody of Hallmark movies so if you've never watched one you might not enjoy the episode. I thought this was one of the best new Simpsons in a while!

A conceptually interesting episode that, by its very nature, was always going to polarise viewers. "A Springfield Summer" is a Simpsons metanarrative: the kind of experimental idea that has been tried with increasing regularity as the series has grown older, but has rarely worked. The classic era writers seldom tried this stuff and when they did, they made damn sure it was going to work -- right up until, arguably, "Principal and the Pauper".

The main problem with "A Springfield Summer" is not the idea but the execution. I agree with other reviewers that the guest star, and primary protagonist, is unremarkable at best, annoying at worst. While the writers try to poke fun at their personification of urbanite elitism, you feel like their hearts aren't really in it -- and it's not overly surprising given that the lead is an avatar of them to an extent. When they do offer what seems to be an olive branch (or fig leaf?) over the trite conceit of a big city vs little town culture clash, by finding in favour of the latter, it feels like a patronising contrivance (yes, the contrivance is dressed up as satire but I don't wholly buy it). (As a Briton, I'm somewhat qualified to give a neutral take on that cultural element.)

I don't think I laughed at all during "A Springfield Summer". But I also didn't cringe at the deadpan repetition of liberal talking points from a decade ago -- because there wasn't much (any?) of that here. In that sense, the episode made a pleasant watch. I was one of the loyalists who didn't strike The Simpsons off my essential calendar until it became a combination of intolerably bad and relentlessly political circa season 30, so I'm still happy to give episodes a fair try, and my standards for a good one have been suitably tempered by years of mediocrity. Having reached the end of "A Springfield Summer" without feeling dejected or irritated, I'm obliged to give it an above average score (which may say more about the show's decline than the episode itself).

So the thing about the political criticisms of Simpsons is that it's true that the show has always been political. But to deploy that as a catch-all counterargument is disingenuous. For one thing, the messaging has never been as ubiquitous or unbalanced as it has been over the past few years. Where earlier seasons made a token attempt at bipartisanship in their parody, season 32 told you who to vote for with a level of contempt for dissent that had me visibly cringing. As numerous liberal, Democrat-voting Simpsons fans pointed out at the time of this year's "Treehouse", the show was essentially telling you to quit watching it if you don't agree with its electoral suggestions. Sage advice. (Some of the aforementioned Democrats, by the way, were being disparaging of the show's attitude.)

The other aspect is that Simpsons has always occupied this sort of space of "as liberal as we can go while maintaining a TV viewership on a commercial network". Since (Anglosphere) society in general has been trending more liberal and at an increasing rate of increase throughout The Simpsons' entire run, the show has moved its own position very significantly by simply tracking trends. Additionally, the writers have pushed this process further themselves at times and have never made any substantive attempt to resist it -- but then, why should they? They like the zeitgeist and its heading. A lot of people don't, however. In fact, I'd suggest that a supermajority don't.

As an aside, if you've ever wondered how society seems to keep changing in opposition to the will of the majority - almost as if democracy is a sham - read some of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, like Gramsci, Derrida and Marcuse. Their philosophies were driven by an ideological desire to end Western civilisation, by - and this is the critical part - subverting the will of the people to create the kind of atomised, diverse, globalised and nihilistic societies we have now. Most of those guys were very upfront about their goals in their own writings: Gramsci described the process by which it's still happening as the "long march through the institutions", and, hell, Derrida was more or less motivated entirely by being bullied at a French school. Their work has infinitely more explanatory power in terms of why entertainment sucks now than anything with the word "woke" in it. Have you noticed that losing money on projects doesn't seem to bother the producers? Could it be that ideology is actually more important than profit? "Get woke, go broke" is a fantasy.

Many people feel that as society is leaving them behind, so is The Simpsons with "jokes" about "mansplaining" and entire episodes about, for example, how historical literature fails to live up to the liberal standards of contemporary literature. I don't see a way Simpsons could ever really recover and retain the kind of mass following it had in the past without becoming iconoclastic and swimming back against the tide (in the way that it arguably used to, to some extent, yet in reverse). But nobody on the staff team wants to do that. Fair enough: their show and, potentially, their bed.

Be prepared, however, because The Simpsons has become the cartoon canary in the coalmine: if you want a look at where its edgier competitors are going to be in ten years, look no further. Such is the nature of political forces beyond the understanding of you or I: forces that are in no way subject to our whims and are actively hostile to our best interests.

Anyway, I wanted to discuss "A Springfield Summer" but because I haven't reviewed a Simpsons episode in so many years, I had to cover all of the background detritus that burdens any serious discussion of the show today. A solid episode by the standards of the day but almost solely by virtue of its inoffensiveness. To call the episode remarkably polite is accurate and yet profoundly mocking of a show that was once considered a genuine work of counterculture. To look at it now, that'd seem an incredible claim -- and it is as much a reflection of the trajectory of The Simpsons as the trajectory of our civilisation.

Guest star Ellie Kemper sounded like she's doing a table read. Great actress in general but terrible voice work.

Literally the worst Simpsons' Christmas show ever, and one of the worst episodes of The Simpsons. The main characters hardly appeared and the main guest character was so annoying.