35x17 The Tipping Point

[3.0/10 on a Selman era Simpsons scale] This was abominable. So as I always try to do when an episode is rough, let’s start with the positives.

I like that The Simpsons is being current! The show isn’t starting the conversation about tipping by any stretch, but the increasing proliferation of tipping opportunities (and nudges) in modern American life is a topic of public conversation, so it’s nice to see the show commenting on something relevant here.

There’s also the kernel of a good idea here. The idea that Homer might lack self worth, get a self-esteem boost when he gets positive reactions to tipping, only to find out that it’s a transactional and temporary form of admiration than anything real or based on who he is, could be a strong emotional throughline. Things don’t turn out that way, but you can see a more grounded and incisive episode where they could be based on this same premise.

On the margins, I like the recurring device where Homer imagines how something will go only to flash to how things go in reality. The choice to use that framework is clever and novel, which you can't say about much in this episode. And in a comedy desert of an episode, there’s a few individual gags that made me chuckle, like Bart’s line about America borrowing things from Europe and making them our own, “like pizza and fascism.”

Which is all to say that “The Tipping Point” is not entirely devoid of positives in conception or craft...which only makes it that much more confounding that The Simpsons released an episode this bad.

The simplest criticism is that “The Tipping Point” has next to no tether to reality. I’m not one who demands that The Simpsons should never go off the wall. Elastic reality gags have been part of the series’ DNA since the beginning. But you need to maintain some connection to reality, to where the characters feel recognizable and the world/situation feel relatable, otherwise it’s hard to care or be even slightly invested in what’s going on.

In contrast, this felt like an episode of Family Guy, which a bunch of random crap happening, built around a very loose skeleton of a plot, and laden with cheap references, over-the-top scenarios, and cardboard cut out characters.

That chiefly extends to Homer, who is fucking miserable here. Again, if you wanted to tell a story of him getting too into the high of a positive reaction when he tips, there’s something there. But turning it into a cartoony addiction, to where he’s breaking into pharmacies to use their tip jar, and bankrupting his family over it, and stalking waitstaff and bounding into industry awards shows is stupid as hell. There’s no hint of humanity to it; it’s just a snootful of cartoony shtick that accomplishes nothing.

And when there is the slightest modicum of humanity involved, it is awful. Homer tipping his family into the poor house is shameful crap. Him stealing from Lisa's piggy bank and giving Bart’s bike away is awful. If you squint, you can kind of see what they’re trying to do, mapping the patterns of addiction onto something seemingly harmless like tipping. But the distance between the two doesn’t gin up much in the way of laughs, so instead we just get scene after scene of Homer being a horrible jerk with not anywhere near enough happening later in the episode to redeem him.

(Poor Marge, who’s reduced to a long-suffering prop here, and instantly forgives Homer after his dumb speech for thin, unsatisfying reasons.)

Some of this might be tolerable if the episode had anything worthwhile to say about tipping culture. This episode is absolutely toothless, throwing out the most tepid observations about prompts to tip, with a minor acknowledgment that it is, of course, a transactional enterprise. Rather than digging into the actual reasons for the increase in tip prompts and service charges, like the show did in season 33’s “Poorhouse Rock”, this episode only offers the most surface level commentary without anything deeper or more incisive and well-observed.

As with “Poorhouse Rock”, maybe the closing song is supposed to be the crowning achievement of social commentary on the topic at hand, but if so, that's just sad.

Which leads to what is, frankly, the most unforgivable sin of “Tipping Point” -- that it features three of the least funny and most jaw-droppingly terrible comedy bits in the show’s history. The truth is that, even if you have a weak story and thin or outright bad characterizations and nothing to say, you can still get by as a Simpsons episode if you can provide a constant font of decent laughs. (Hello fans of the Mike Scully era of the show!) But this episode does the opposite, stringing the audience along with awful jokes, punctuated by a few truly detestable big gags that absolutely crater the episode’s comedy. Let’s take them one at a time.

For starters, what the hell is the Austin Powers parody? It is exceedingly difficult to parody a comedy film, especially one that's already a parody! Transposing Homer into the scene where Austin flounces and flourishes his way around various settings is a big dead nothing. Austin Powers was spoofing the 1960s vibe and aesthetic and created humor and charm from the distance between the supposed greatness of this “badass” double agent and the loony world which he occupied. The Simpsons just deposits Homer into the same kind of sequence, throws in some tepid tipping gags, and calls it a day. It’s just lazy reference humor that goes on forever, and even the animation is shaky, which is not usually a problem for the show’s big sequences. What are we even doing here?

The second, and maybe worst of them all, is the “everything but the tip” gag with Homer and Moe. I don’t know what demented individual on the writing staff thought that doing a simulated sex bit with Homer and Moe over tipping would be anything but quietly horrifying, but for some reason, this exists now, and we just have to live with it. I don’t think it exceeds panda rape or some of the other nadirs of the show’s worst years, but it just stretches on and on and on, with jokes that aren’t funny to begin with and then try what little patience you might have for a passing gag. The bit makes no sense; it’s gross, and there’s nary a laugh to be had.

The third is the closing song featuring the “Planet of the Bass” crew. And look, I like Planet of the Bass! But it’s funny because the parody is specific. It spoofs a very particular kind of European dance pop in a very well-observed way. If you wanted them to do a new song about tipping, I think it could work. But just doing the same Europop song and depositing the world’s tamest gags and least clever lyrics into it, is nothing. Again, the Simpsons song not only completely whiffs on what made the original bit funny, but extends the gag for far too long.

So yeah, an episode like this one is legitimately concerning as a fan of the show. I’ve been so excited to see Matt Selman elevated to be the series’ primary showrunner, and I do think the show’s output has improved since. The baseline is higher, and we’ve had more truly stand out episodes under his short tenure than what we had in Al Jean’s much longer one as solo showrunner. But we’ve also had an increasing number of these complete and total misfires.

If that's the cost of the much better episodes we get -- the show taking a lot of big swings and not all of them connecting -- I can gladly live with it. But “The TIpping Point” was atrocious enough to leave you wondering who on the creative team was asleep at the switch enough to let something this bad get through.