Original airdate: October 8, 2023
The premise: While horribly ill, Marge starts to have lucid dreams about Bart growing up, fearing his childhood slipping away and of her inevitable future as an empty nester.
The reaction: In recent years, this series seems to to have great audience response to episodes like “Pixelated and Afraid” and “Bartless,” telling stories of the Simpson family getting raw and emotional, examining their internal relationships and what they meant o one another. Some of these episodes feel more like straight dramas, where there’s light jokes peppered throughout, but the tone feels so deadly serious, unfolding a story of “real” emotional stakes. This is a pretty big one, as we start with Marge dreaming about a happy memory of the kids when they were younger, with little Bart grabbing Marge by the hand as a strong core memory of her early motherhood. This gets contraster later when Bart asks his mother to help remove a splinter, and she’s gobsmacked at how his hands are almost bigger than hers. The episode itself is partly a mystery of sorts as well, as Marge starts off incredibly sick, not remembering where she indulged so much the night before. It’s revealed that after a parent-teacher conference, the reality of Bart soon entering the fifth grade, the “last year” of him being a child, hit her like a ton of bricks, leading her to get smashed. Throughout the story, Marge is stuck in her own mind, with manifestations of Homer and Lisa guiding her through her emotions, eventually leading her to see how she needs to focus on her children as they are now, being there for them when they need it, and growing and changing as they do, as she does at the end when she embraces Bart’s new prank-happy interests from a year prior. So I don’t really have any specific nitpicks for episodes like this of “Pixelated.” Early response on NoHomers seems to be incredibly glowing, there certainly is an audience for episodes like these. But I just don’t care for them. I love these characters dearly, so an episode really digging deep into their emotional psyches would hypothetically seem like it would hit somewhat close to me. But it just doesn’t feel like this series is built for episodes like these. A show like BoJack Horseman can do episodes that really examine a character’s internal struggles, but that series is telling a serialized story with a fleshed out cast of characters with more emotional depth. Meanwhile The Simpsons is a light, episodic comedy pushing 800 installments, it just feels difficult for me to mentally shift gears to care that deeply about stories like these. To hear a 73-year-old Julie Kavner bemoaning her children who have remained the same age for 38 years to grow up… maybe I could’ve gotten on board with this story in season 9, but now I just don’t care. This show used to be the kings of the emotional punchline, where they’d really clobber you with a heartfelt climax, but it felt even better that it kind of creeps up on you, after ten minutes of laughing at great jokes. Now, sometimes we get just 20-minute-long dramas, so the catharsis doesn’t feel as impactful because I’ve already been wallowing in it for so long. It’s a net positive that this show has actively attempted to change itself in recent years after stagnating for so long, and that people are responding positively. Wonderful. But for me, episodes like these just don’t work.
Two items of note:
– Bart’s new teacher Miss Peyton makes another appearance, along with the return of her character quirk of saying something out-of-turn and nervously attempting to backpedal it. She does this twice in the episode. I guess some people like her, maybe? I just find her a very flat character. Also, she saves the day in the end by comforting Marge and reassuring her in a calm voice that everything is okay. Again, barely attempting to do any sort of comedy.
– There’s been discussions in recent years of mainstream comedy being used as therapy, especially as more stories are coming from LBTQ & POC writers, or millennials with a lot of emotional baggage, telling different kinds of stories from perspectives we haven’t seen as much of. Your mileage may vary on how much you enjoy these shows or movies, but I’m certainly all for watching things that come from a true place from a writer’s lived experience. And there’s definitely ways you can make even something traumatic or heart wrenching in a funny way. But sometimes they can just feel like the writer dumping out all of their anxieties and troubles from their past onto the floor and what they sorta learned from it and that’s sufficient enough. Honestly, this episode kind of feels closer to that. I assume that Carolyn Omine has adult children and has gone through what Marge is about to go through, so she makes that emotional journey authentic enough, but that alone isn’t enough to make it interesting or entertaining to me.
Me Blog Write Good 
Disney’s The Simpsons, folks.
That screen shot looks so weird, like Marge and Lisa were just crudely photoshopped onto that background.
I’m sorry this – and other episodes like it – don’t work for you, Mike, but I understand your reasons. For me, the emotion and human truth is what The Simpsons has always been about – it’s inexhaustible source of magic. It’s great when it just so happens to be funny, but it’s not essential to me and it never has been.
Boring…… so very boring.
Not as boring as Pixelated and Afraid. This at least felt like it was as long as it should’ve been (22 minutes) and not as if we had an extra half-hour after only the first act which is only 7 minutes.
Oh God, I barely made it through that one. One of the most boring half hours of television ever.
I wonder how I would’ve felt about this episode had it aired at least 10 years earlier when Marge still sounded about the same as she would’ve been in Season 9. Because as is, it was impossible for me to be invested in the plot even though it was fine I guess despite it’s lack of jokes or the plot itself being a little depressing (with Marge’s voice not helping).
It’s kind of like anime dubs….. a lot of them are poorly dubbed into English with bored-sounding actors, making it impossible to care about the story….
It’s crazy how much better modern Simpsons’ dramatic episodes are from their comedic ones.
Yeah, it would be nice to have both good drama and good jokes, and the drama that is here is still really overwrought with scenes that drag on and on and on … but I can overlook those problems here in a way that I can’t in something like Homer’s Crossing.
I’m guessing that’s because in a drama, writing a compelling plot outline is half the battle, and that’s what the current Simpsons writers are best at. In a comedy the plot is largely a springboard for good jokes, and The Simpsons has no idea how to write jokes anymore. When they try to be funny and the end result turns out as incompetent as it does, that frustrates me on a deep level. That’s when it feels like there is truly no excuse for this series to exist besides money, and that’s such a cynical way to view work in any art form.
These half-decent character dramas are at least competent and offer something to some people. Just look at all the praise from No Homer’s. If this is the form The Simpsons is evolving into, I can respect that, even if it’s still not exactly my cup of tea.
This one worked great for me. Creative animation (I really like Otter Homer even if he can’t quite measure up to Space Coyote, but who could?), supportive no jerkass Homer, no marriage crisis, no jokes about Bart growing up to be a loser. Is it sweeter than most Simpsons episodes? Yes, but I liked Blowfish and Homer’s Triple Bypass in the classic days so I feel a precedent is there.
I am glad to see you still cover Simpsons and that even when an episode is not to your taste, you will still say the effort was there.
(greetings from No Homers)
Well said! I thought it was quite a touching and worthwhile episode, similar to Lisa’s Belly. It was pretty tear-inducing and quite funny, and Bart/Lisa were written quite well, which was a plus! I would have recommended it to my mom except for the fact that the vomiting scenes were way too graphic and gratuitous in my opinion. I understand they wanted to differentiate ‘fever dream Marge (regular)’ with ‘sick Marge (pale and baggy-eyed)’ but I don’t see why there was a need to make Marge completely white, sweaty, sweating thru her clothes, with sweaty hair, and literally animate her vomiting in the car. It was just kind of extraneous, I felt.
I agree with what you wrote about Ms. Peyton. As I’ve said in previous comments, her design continues to feel superfluous, but also the way she is written isn’t goofy like previous characters. Unlike Miss Hoover and Edna, she doesn’t seem flawed, and that’s an issue because ALL (funny) Simpsons characters are flawed/evil somehow. I think it’s worth mentioning that the author of the episode is the same one who wrote Peyton into the show, and it feels a bit like sticking her OC in there just for funsies, LOL. Like in her first appearance, this is now the second time Ms. Peyton is the ‘angel’ seen when a Simpson wakes up from a traumatizing experience (both written by the same writer, may I add). I don’t like the idea of Ms. Peyton being a magical…figure. I would rather Marge had shared the emotional moment with someone funny and unexpected – like Willie, Skinner, or Chalmers. Imagine how funny it would have been to have Chalmers get all flustered and describe his own anxieties about Shauna growing up, before snapping out of it and forcing her to sign a ‘release of liability’ form, LOL. Anyway those are just my 200 cents.