[8.0/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] Color me crazy, but I really liked this one. Yes, this feels like a retcon, and something about the misdirect feels a touch uncomfortable. But by god, it has a good emotional throughline, an affecting story, and some quality gags. I’m more than pleased with what is, frankly, a pretty ballsy episode to try to pull off.
Rooting the episode in Lisa’s emotional state is one of the most canny choices in the episode. It would be easy to make the frame story in the present little more than a shell for a page from history. But this one provides something more. Lisa is on a desperate hunt to prove that the Simpsons were not all thieves and ne'er do wells. She wants something to hang her hat on, to show that there’s some decent spark within her family tree. That's a relatable impulse, and something that makes us sympathize with her as she's combing her family history to find evidence of something noble among the ancestors.
I also like the historical story this one tells. This is going to sound a bit silly, but in a way, this felt like one of those American Girl Doll stories -- a diary of the life of a girl in a historical period. The small lived-in touches, and the chance to transpose the Simpsons into a different time period pays dividends. But what I like about it is that it doesn’t shy away from the harshness of all this.
“The Color Yellow” isn’t exactly Twelve Years a Slave or Roots or even the movie that provides its namesake when it comes to the horrors of slavery. But it’s frank about the system that reinforced it, with a sense of everyone having to be deferential to the moneyed, landed gentry, even in the face of recognized injustices. This is ultimately a happy story, of a slave escaping and sharing love with the woman who helped him escape, not to mention Lisa discovering something decent on her family tree. But it’s also a story about a Lisa analogue (the not-so-creatively named Eliza) regretting that she capitulated to such a system when she could have spoken up and done good. There’s power in the regret that balances out the triumph.
The twists are good too. The emotional rollercoaster of Lisa thinking all her ancestors are terrible, only to find evidence that they’re decent and back and forth and back and forth brings the audience on the same ride Lisa’s on. Some of it’s a touch contrived, but on the whole it succeeds in what it sets out to do -- make us feel what Lisa feels with the rise and fall of her excitement and sadness over everything.
Aside from the storytelling here, the humor is much better than average for this era of The Simpsons. We get some hilarious freeze frame gags with the Marge analogue’s footnote in the family cookbook. I laughed out loud at Colonel Burns asking for a waltz to be played in four-four time, only for the dancers to crash into one another and fall down amidst everything. And even the pointed commentary in elder generations dancing around the fact that many of them are racist has some teeth to it in a way not a tone of Jean-era Simpsons does. Plus hey, the joke makes no sense, but the interlude with “Honest Abe” is a hoot.
I don’t know. This is undoubtedly a big swing. Making the Simpsons (or Homer and the kids anyway) part-Black is a little cheap, but also a little bold. In truth, I don’t know how to process that, beyond half-admiring it and half-wondering if it was necessary. Despite all that, I felt for Lisa on her emotional journey, I liked the creative piecemeal storytelling that built up the Virgil Simpson story, I audibly laughed much more than the typical Simpsons episode this period, and I appreciated the show doing something bold with its characters history and a bit of baked-in commentary. I can't pretend that the show was pitching its fastball in season 21, but I appreciate post-classic episodes that blend the laughs, the feeling, and the narrative moonshots like this one does.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-03-01T20:36:06Z
[8.0/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] Color me crazy, but I really liked this one. Yes, this feels like a retcon, and something about the misdirect feels a touch uncomfortable. But by god, it has a good emotional throughline, an affecting story, and some quality gags. I’m more than pleased with what is, frankly, a pretty ballsy episode to try to pull off.
Rooting the episode in Lisa’s emotional state is one of the most canny choices in the episode. It would be easy to make the frame story in the present little more than a shell for a page from history. But this one provides something more. Lisa is on a desperate hunt to prove that the Simpsons were not all thieves and ne'er do wells. She wants something to hang her hat on, to show that there’s some decent spark within her family tree. That's a relatable impulse, and something that makes us sympathize with her as she's combing her family history to find evidence of something noble among the ancestors.
I also like the historical story this one tells. This is going to sound a bit silly, but in a way, this felt like one of those American Girl Doll stories -- a diary of the life of a girl in a historical period. The small lived-in touches, and the chance to transpose the Simpsons into a different time period pays dividends. But what I like about it is that it doesn’t shy away from the harshness of all this.
“The Color Yellow” isn’t exactly Twelve Years a Slave or Roots or even the movie that provides its namesake when it comes to the horrors of slavery. But it’s frank about the system that reinforced it, with a sense of everyone having to be deferential to the moneyed, landed gentry, even in the face of recognized injustices. This is ultimately a happy story, of a slave escaping and sharing love with the woman who helped him escape, not to mention Lisa discovering something decent on her family tree. But it’s also a story about a Lisa analogue (the not-so-creatively named Eliza) regretting that she capitulated to such a system when she could have spoken up and done good. There’s power in the regret that balances out the triumph.
The twists are good too. The emotional rollercoaster of Lisa thinking all her ancestors are terrible, only to find evidence that they’re decent and back and forth and back and forth brings the audience on the same ride Lisa’s on. Some of it’s a touch contrived, but on the whole it succeeds in what it sets out to do -- make us feel what Lisa feels with the rise and fall of her excitement and sadness over everything.
Aside from the storytelling here, the humor is much better than average for this era of The Simpsons. We get some hilarious freeze frame gags with the Marge analogue’s footnote in the family cookbook. I laughed out loud at Colonel Burns asking for a waltz to be played in four-four time, only for the dancers to crash into one another and fall down amidst everything. And even the pointed commentary in elder generations dancing around the fact that many of them are racist has some teeth to it in a way not a tone of Jean-era Simpsons does. Plus hey, the joke makes no sense, but the interlude with “Honest Abe” is a hoot.
I don’t know. This is undoubtedly a big swing. Making the Simpsons (or Homer and the kids anyway) part-Black is a little cheap, but also a little bold. In truth, I don’t know how to process that, beyond half-admiring it and half-wondering if it was necessary. Despite all that, I felt for Lisa on her emotional journey, I liked the creative piecemeal storytelling that built up the Virgil Simpson story, I audibly laughed much more than the typical Simpsons episode this period, and I appreciated the show doing something bold with its characters history and a bit of baked-in commentary. I can't pretend that the show was pitching its fastball in season 21, but I appreciate post-classic episodes that blend the laughs, the feeling, and the narrative moonshots like this one does.