[4.2/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] I very much want to give The Simpsons credit for this one. Its heart is ostensibly in the right place. At the core of “Hostile Kirk Place” are some good observations about people wanting to erase historical truths that make them uncomfortable, and the ego boost they get from feeling aggrieved and listened to. That sort of sentiment has fueled more than one hateful political and social movement, and taking aim at that perspective is a righteous cause, in line with the show’s past critiques. I even like the core observation of the B-story -- that you have people who don’t really care about the issue du jour, except to make money off of it.
But there’s a few big problems. First of all, there’s a big false equivalence here. The show rightfully wants to poke some fun at both sides of the debate, but ends up creating a false equivalence, where the parents who want to acknowledge the hard truths of history are treated as just another comical alternative viewpoint to those who want to erase it. It’s a tricky balance to strike for any show, but “Hostile Kirk Place” botches it here, which undercuts the message.
The bigger problem, though, is that this is a really ridiculous and unsatisfying way to dramatize the crazies railing against “Critical Race Theory” as a boogeyman for everything they don’t like. Milhouse’s great great grandfather building a gazebo that fell down, making his family feel bad, is a weak stalking horse for the point. The ensuing debate and jokes about “critical brace theory” are full of tepid-at-best barbs.
And good lord, the third act where Kirk turns into a fascist dictator leaves reality so far behind that it becomes hard to take any of these points seriously. The show severs its connection with the real world, to where its argument from consequences seems so overexaggerated and ridiculous that it almost plays like unintentional satire. The Simpsons has long taken real ideas to absurd lengths to highlight their essential absurdity, but this goes too far, divorcing Kirk’s status as a concerned parent so far from any real life outcome that it’s hard to care where they’re going with it.
More than anything, it’s just not funny. The best Simpsons political episodes, like “Much Apu About Nothing” and its take on immigration, do use the show’s satirical edge to poke fun at the facially goofy or hypocritical parts of the opposing view. But they manage to wring much more humor out of it. All “Hostile Kirk Place” has is a few stock observations about the discourse without much in the way of chuckles, let alone guffaws.
There’s some mild cleverness to the finish, with Kirk not wanting to recall history and thereby repeating it with another big gazebo crash. And I guess there’s setup and payoff with Homer’s big copper-based late night crap empire being the thing that sparks it, leaving him ruined too. But it’s all just so cartoony and tough to take seriously.
There’s so much hay to be made from this topic! Anti-CRT trolls are rife for satire, and you could do a lot with people trying to get rid of history they don’t like. But “Hostile Kirk Place” goes in some bizarre, not especially amusing directions when trying to do so, and it results in the rare low light under Matt Selman’s watch.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-04-07T01:26:38Z
[4.2/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] I very much want to give The Simpsons credit for this one. Its heart is ostensibly in the right place. At the core of “Hostile Kirk Place” are some good observations about people wanting to erase historical truths that make them uncomfortable, and the ego boost they get from feeling aggrieved and listened to. That sort of sentiment has fueled more than one hateful political and social movement, and taking aim at that perspective is a righteous cause, in line with the show’s past critiques. I even like the core observation of the B-story -- that you have people who don’t really care about the issue du jour, except to make money off of it.
But there’s a few big problems. First of all, there’s a big false equivalence here. The show rightfully wants to poke some fun at both sides of the debate, but ends up creating a false equivalence, where the parents who want to acknowledge the hard truths of history are treated as just another comical alternative viewpoint to those who want to erase it. It’s a tricky balance to strike for any show, but “Hostile Kirk Place” botches it here, which undercuts the message.
The bigger problem, though, is that this is a really ridiculous and unsatisfying way to dramatize the crazies railing against “Critical Race Theory” as a boogeyman for everything they don’t like. Milhouse’s great great grandfather building a gazebo that fell down, making his family feel bad, is a weak stalking horse for the point. The ensuing debate and jokes about “critical brace theory” are full of tepid-at-best barbs.
And good lord, the third act where Kirk turns into a fascist dictator leaves reality so far behind that it becomes hard to take any of these points seriously. The show severs its connection with the real world, to where its argument from consequences seems so overexaggerated and ridiculous that it almost plays like unintentional satire. The Simpsons has long taken real ideas to absurd lengths to highlight their essential absurdity, but this goes too far, divorcing Kirk’s status as a concerned parent so far from any real life outcome that it’s hard to care where they’re going with it.
More than anything, it’s just not funny. The best Simpsons political episodes, like “Much Apu About Nothing” and its take on immigration, do use the show’s satirical edge to poke fun at the facially goofy or hypocritical parts of the opposing view. But they manage to wring much more humor out of it. All “Hostile Kirk Place” has is a few stock observations about the discourse without much in the way of chuckles, let alone guffaws.
There’s some mild cleverness to the finish, with Kirk not wanting to recall history and thereby repeating it with another big gazebo crash. And I guess there’s setup and payoff with Homer’s big copper-based late night crap empire being the thing that sparks it, leaving him ruined too. But it’s all just so cartoony and tough to take seriously.
There’s so much hay to be made from this topic! Anti-CRT trolls are rife for satire, and you could do a lot with people trying to get rid of history they don’t like. But “Hostile Kirk Place” goes in some bizarre, not especially amusing directions when trying to do so, and it results in the rare low light under Matt Selman’s watch.