[5.5/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] God help them, they’re trying. Milestones have come to be pretty hollow if you’re a Simpsons fan. The show’s hit pretty much every round number that matters at this point, and the show’s efforts to commemorate these occasions have fallen flat since (at least) Tony Hawk’s pointless appearance (oh god) more than 300 episodes ago. Beating Gunsmoke’s record is significant, but an episode like this really underscores how this is an achievement of quantity, not quality.
The best you can say for “Forgive and Regret” is that, for a big episode, The Simpsons chooses to focus on sentiment. At its worst, the show is a bunch of cruel or weightless gags with no root in the characters or their emotional cores. The results are middling, but this episode at least tries to wring something out of Homer’s complicated relationship with his father and yearned-for relationship with his mother.
The big reveal in the episode is that Homer and his mom, Mona, had a special set of pie recipes that represented Homer’s sense of being loved and emotional well-being, and that Abe secretly threw them away in a fit of pique after Mona left. Grampa makes amends by helping Homer find the box the recipes were kept in and Homer miraculously discovers that the recipes survived (despite a headfake) and all is reconciled and forgiven.
If you squint and try hard and think back to when the show actually imbued these characters with depth and emotion, you can almost feel something at this intended bit of sweetness. But the path to getting to that succor is a long and unpleasant one, where Homer and the whole Simpson family revels in hate for Grampa, so many gags are overly long or uninspired, and the episode gets so overwrought with the effort at Tennessee Williams drama that it forgets to be funny. Nevermind the usual forgotten first act setup, the exhausted and lame NCIS parody, and cartoony gags the show doesn't have the skill to pull off anymore.
It’s hard to believe The Simpsons has made it this long, long enough to take the record for most episodes from a show made in a time when television installments were cranked out like factory products. 600+ episodes into the series’ run, it’s nice to know the show is still shooting for emotional moments that suggest it’s not soulless, but unfortunately it’s still mostly inept at this point anyway.
A really sweet episode. The NCIS parody is about gun control but how shows still make guns look cool. At least I think. Wasn’t too clever how it was done though and had zero to do with the episode itself.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2018-05-18T03:58:55Z
[5.5/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] God help them, they’re trying. Milestones have come to be pretty hollow if you’re a Simpsons fan. The show’s hit pretty much every round number that matters at this point, and the show’s efforts to commemorate these occasions have fallen flat since (at least) Tony Hawk’s pointless appearance (oh god) more than 300 episodes ago. Beating Gunsmoke’s record is significant, but an episode like this really underscores how this is an achievement of quantity, not quality.
The best you can say for “Forgive and Regret” is that, for a big episode, The Simpsons chooses to focus on sentiment. At its worst, the show is a bunch of cruel or weightless gags with no root in the characters or their emotional cores. The results are middling, but this episode at least tries to wring something out of Homer’s complicated relationship with his father and yearned-for relationship with his mother.
The big reveal in the episode is that Homer and his mom, Mona, had a special set of pie recipes that represented Homer’s sense of being loved and emotional well-being, and that Abe secretly threw them away in a fit of pique after Mona left. Grampa makes amends by helping Homer find the box the recipes were kept in and Homer miraculously discovers that the recipes survived (despite a headfake) and all is reconciled and forgiven.
If you squint and try hard and think back to when the show actually imbued these characters with depth and emotion, you can almost feel something at this intended bit of sweetness. But the path to getting to that succor is a long and unpleasant one, where Homer and the whole Simpson family revels in hate for Grampa, so many gags are overly long or uninspired, and the episode gets so overwrought with the effort at Tennessee Williams drama that it forgets to be funny. Nevermind the usual forgotten first act setup, the exhausted and lame NCIS parody, and cartoony gags the show doesn't have the skill to pull off anymore.
It’s hard to believe The Simpsons has made it this long, long enough to take the record for most episodes from a show made in a time when television installments were cranked out like factory products. 600+ episodes into the series’ run, it’s nice to know the show is still shooting for emotional moments that suggest it’s not soulless, but unfortunately it’s still mostly inept at this point anyway.