11.1 Beyond Blunderdome
After an early preview of Mel Gibson’s new remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is poorly reviewed, Homer is hired to rewrite the ending. He gives Mel what he thinks he wants: an ending where Mr. Smith opens fire on Congress (which plays differently in 2021), but studio executives hate the new approach and want to destroy the film.
Gibson is wonderful parodying himself, and this episode does a great job highlighting all the worst of Hollywood’s excesses: lack of originality / over reliance on star power, and violence
This is a great start to a season and proves the wheels weren’t off yet as the show closed out the twentieth century.
11.2 Brother’s Little Helper
Bart is diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Focusyn, which initially makes him more studious, but eventually causes an intense paranoia: he’s convinced MLB is involved in a conspiracy to control the minds of Springfield.
I enjoyed the satire of the medical industrial complex which preys on children and parental concern for them, but he conspiracy involving baseball is less stellar. I didn’t appreciate Bart going full crazy, although I liked the Big Mac cameo.
It’s a decent episode overall, but one of the weaker efforts in season eleven.
11.3 Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner
After Homer adds food critic to his resume, he’s criticized for being too nice, so he overcompensates and becomes wantonly cruel, prompting local restaurateurs to devise a plan to assassinate him.
The plot is over the top, but some of Homer’s reviews are very funny and I like meeting the restaurant owners in town. Ed Asner is almost always a reliable cameo, and I enjoyed Homer’s attempts to pad the word count in his reviews with “Screw Flanders.”
Solid effort.
11.4 Treehouse of Horror X
Treehouse episodes are typically some of my favorites and this is no exception. Ned turns into a werewolf and is hit by the Simpson family car in a parody of I Know What You Did Last Summer. When The Collector (Comic Book Guy) captures Lucy Lawless, Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl (Bart and Lisa) save the day. Finally, Homer fails to prepare the nuclear power plant for Y2K, causing an apocalyptic event. Lisa is chosen to save humanity on a rocket to Mars and takes Marge with her. Bart and Homer hitch a ride on a second rocket filled with D list celebrities, unknowingly headed to the sun.
I love the opening homage to previous Treehouse episodes. and Lucy Lawless’s segment is ingenious.
The weakest segment is Homer’s Y2k mishap, but it’s redeemed by the celebrity cameos: Tom Arnold (playing himself), Spike Lee, Dr. Laura, Tonya Harding, and Ross Perot.
This is how you do a Treehouse episode.
11.5 E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)
Inspired by a movie, Homer begins challenging people to duels. When an offended southern gentleman calls his bluff, Homer escapes to the family farm, and, inexplicably, creates a new breed of plant by breeding tobacco with tomatoes.
The Zorro parody is hysterical. There’s an amazing Buzz Cola commercial done as an homage to Saving Private Ryan and I’d pay to watch My Dinner with Jar Jar.
This episode shines because of the tomacco plant (which has since been replicated in real life). It’s an amazing concept and will long outlast the details of the episode. Every Simpson fan giggles when they hear it.
11.6 Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder
Homer is briefly famous after he bowls a perfect 300 game. When the fame fades, depression encroaches. After a failed suicide, Homer rededicates himself to his children. Failing to bond with Lisa and Bart, he focuses on Maggie. When he tries to teach her how to swim, Maggie rescues him. To thank her, Homer takes her bowling, where Maggie also bowls a 300 game.
The Penn and Teller cameo is very funny, as is Kent Brockman’s dismissal of Homer as yesterday’s news. Homer’s chasing of fame is insightful and Ron Howard’s second Simpsons cameo is a delight.
11.7 Eight Misbehavin’
Having trouble conceiving a child, Manjula (Jan Hooks) and Apu turn to fertility treatments. When Manjula gives birth to octuplets, their children are briefly famous, until a Shelbyville couple has nine babies. With their fame and gifts gone, the Nahasapeemapetilons have a difficult time raising their numerous children. Apu meets with the owner of the Springfield Zoo, Larry Kidkill (Garry Marshall), who offers to help take care of the octuplets, but turns them into a freak show. With Homer’s help, Apu rescues his children.
Apu’s octuplets are a welcome addition to the show’s lore. Sadly, since Azaria has retired the character and Hooks has died, we will likely never see them again.
Garry Marshall’s cameo is good; Butch Patrick’s is great.
This is one of the better episodes of the season.
11.8 Take My Wife, Sleaze
Homer wins a motorcycle and forms a motorcycle club: Hell’s Satans. When the real Hell’s Satans find out, they kidnap Marge and forces Homer to shutter his group.
Motorcycle club jokes are not the freshest, but I liked John Goodman as Meathook and Henry Winkler as Ramrod. Jay North’s brief cameo as himself was a nice nod to an almost forgotten classic.
It’s not a bad episode, but it’s one of the weaker efforts from an otherwise excellent season.
11.9 Grift of the Magi
To solve Springfield Elementary’s budgetary woes, Skinner sells the school to Kid First Industries which uses students as market research to develop their new toy: Funzo. Bart and Lisa discover the scam and enlist Homer to steal all the Funzos under Christmas trees and destroy them, but for their plan to succeed, they have to get past Gary Coleman.
If you like the show’s shift to absurdity, you’ll like this bizarre episode. If you don’t, it might not be for you.
I always love Fat Tony. I loved the Coleman cameo, the Clarence Clemons narration, and the deus ex machina ending.
However, the episode is too disjointed, veering from one elaborate gag to another, like an Airplane version of The Simpsons.
With a little refinement it could have been top notch, but this is clearly a show in transition.
11.10 Little Big Mom
When the family goes skiing, Marge is injured at the lodge, leaving Lisa in charge. Unable to corral her dad and brother, Lisa tricks them into going to a Hawaiian leper colony.
The Simpson men at the leper colony is one of the most memorable bits of the show’s storied history, but the rest is forgettable. It’s not a bad episode, just unmemorable.
11.11 Faith Off
Homer’s reunion at Springfield University ends poorly. After a series of mishaps, he drives a parade float into the star kicker, upsetting Fat Tony who placed a large bet on the hometown team.
This dovetails with Bart’s itinerant career as a faith healer.
Once again, Fat Tony (Joe Mantegna) is a delight and Don Cheadle’s cameo is good, but it’s a middle of the road episode for me.
11.12 Mansion Family
When Burns is feted as the oldest man in Springfield, he considers his mortality and goes to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup. While he’s away, he asks the Simpsons to housesit.
Through a series of contrived events, Homer winds up on Burns’ yacht in international waters buying liquor.
There’s some dark humor with Burns at the Mayo Clinic and the Britney Spears cameo at the beginning is fun, but it’s one of the weaker, more disjointed episodes of the season. Frequently, during the shows transition from grounded family comedy to absurdist satire, it struggled to find the right tone. There are parts of several good episodes here, but rather than giving each room to grow, they’re jammed together haphazardly. There’s enough funny stuff to keep it from being horrible, but not enough to make it memorable.
11.13 Saddlesore Galatica
A flashpoint for critics, this is frequently regarded as one of worst episodes of the series. It’s not one of my favorites, but it does not deserve its reputation. The Simpsons owning a horse and the ensuing financial worries is retread material, but the show makes clever meta references to this via Comic Book Guy (frequent source of the show’s self-awareness).
Elves as jockeys feels like a low blow more at home in Family Guy or South Park.
There are some signature fun cameos: horse race caller Trevor Denman and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
I really liked the throw away gag at the end when President Clinton gives Lisa a plaque rectifying the school’s unfair loss in the music competition.
I didn’t love this episode, but I didn’t hate it like so many others do.
11.14 Alone Again, Natura-Diddily
A T-shirt gun mishap kills Maude Flanders.
Behind the scenes pay disputes with Maggie Roswell, who voiced the character, led to the unfortunate decision to kill Maude. A part of the appeal of animated shows is they exist in a perpetual state. Everything resets each week with the characters immune from the realities of the world around them.
Killing Maude was a jarring departure from this ethos. From a storyline perspective, it allowed the show to explore what a dating Flanders would look like, but the way her demise was written was a petty way for the show to take out dissatisfaction with Roswell.
It’s easily the worst episode of the season for me.
11.15 Missionary: Impossible
When Homer can’t afford the $10,000 he pledged to PBS, he ends up as a missionary in the South Pacific where he corrupts the indigenous population.
Betty White as the PBS telethon host is a delightful cameo. The references to angry PBS stars and bookending the show with a drive to save Fox (with White once again serving as host) are wonderful touches. The self-referential digs at Fox are funny.
I enjoyed Homer’s pleas to “Jebus” and use that quote all the time. In Homer’s hilarious farewell to his family, he promotes Bart to “man of the house,” Lisa to “boy,” Maggie to “smart, nerdy girl’ and the toaster to “Maggie.”
It’s a solid half hour of television.
11.16 Pygmoelian
Upset his face is censored in a promotional calendar, Moe gets plastic surgery. His new face lands him a job in a soap opera, but, as always the case with Moe, he ruins his good fortune: an accident reverts his face to its original form.
In the subplot, Bart and Lisa chase down Maggie’s runaway pink elephant balloon.
Moe’s misadventures are always fun. I wish he would grow out of his shallowness, but that may be too much to ask of a cartoon.
However, the subplot is a little too obvious when the pink balloon floats into the office of a gay Republican group looking for a new mascot.
It’s a fun episode because Moe centric episodes usually are, but subplot laziness holds it back from being truly great.
11.17 Bart to the Future
When Bart gets in trouble at a casino, the Native American manager shows him a vision of his future to convince him to mend his ways: Lisa will be elected President, but Bart will be less than successful.
Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, this episode has been frequently cited as an example of The Simpsons predictive abilities because President Lisa offhandedly mentions a budget crisis left by former President Trump. It is jarring to hear now, but at the time the show as riffing on the flirtations Trump had made with running as candidate on the Reform Party ticket.
It’s a fun episode, but nothing spectacular. It has assumed an outsized reputation because of the Trump reference, but like a lot of the hypothetical future themed episodes, it’s hit or miss. Episodes which puncture the show’s bubble of suspended reality, placing it in a specific time or era, make it less fantastic and more real, which diminishes my favorite aspects of the show.
11.18 Days of Wine and D’oh’ses
In the second episode to fundamentally change a character this season, Barney sobers up. Meanwhile, Bart and Lisa accidentally start a wildfire while trying to win a photo contest.
Teetotaler Dan Castellaneta wrote the episode alongside his wife Deb Lacusta. I assume he wrote the episode as a counter to the show’s tendency towards glorification of alcohol as “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
While I applaud the sentiment, it doesn’t work within the confines of the show. Barney is a drunk. We, as an audience, don’t recognize him as anything else. And in subsequent episodes, when Barney falls on and off the wagon, it doesn’t help the episode’s argument.
In the eleventh season, it’s understandable the writers wanted to stretch the characters, but it’s difficult to portray growth and change in an animated show, and not really what the audience expects.
It’s not the worst episode of the season, but it’s a very close second.
11.19 Kill the Alligator and Run
After a medical test reveals he has three years to live, Homer takes the family on a vacation to Florida. During a raucous party with Kid Rock, Homer accidentally kills the state’s alligator mascot, Captain Jack. To avoid the ire of Florida residents, the Simpson clan goes on the run and morph into hillbillies.
It’s a bonkers episode, like it was written in a fever dream, or (more likely) a drug induced haze. There’s a lot to process, and ultimately, I agree with many who thought it was too chaotic and unfocused. I enjoyed the cameos and Bart’s comment about his prowess in whittling, but there’s not much else to like.
11.20 Last Tap Dance in Springfield
Inspired by a movie, Lisa enrolls in dance lessons. Her lack of natural talent is obvious and the former showbiz dancer turned teacher Vicki Valentine refuses to allow Lisa to participate in the recital. After a pair of mechanical tap dancing shoes invented by Professor Frink goes predictably haywire, Lisa learns to accept her limitations.
Meanwhile, Bart and Milhouse ditch summer camp to live in the mall. For some contrived reason, Chief Wiggum lets a puma loose in the mall to sniff them out.
I love Vicki Valentine, and I enjoyed Frink’s invention, but I didn’t care for Bart’s story: Wiggum’s behavior is bizarre even for him.
Overall it’s a decent effort and slightly above average for the season.
11.21 It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge
Otto gets engaged, but chooses heavy metal music over his fiancée, Becky. Marge feels guilty for encouraging Otto to chose between his music and his bride, so she invites Becky to stay with her family.
Soon, Marge questions Becky’s intentions and thinks she intends to kill her and replace her as the Simpson matriarch.
Parker Posey brings it as Becky, and I loved Otto’s decision to stick with his true love.
Unfortunately, Marge’s mental health has been explored before, usually related to the stress of being the only sane person making decisions in her family. Paranoia doesn’t suite her. Multiple “Marge in a mental hospital” episodes is too many.
It has moments of humor, but nothing spectacular. Not the worst episode of the season, but far from its peak.
11.22 Behind the Laughter
This parody of the popular VH1 series Behind the Music is a highlight of the show’s run. A self-referential, outside the box look at the show, it’s a masterclass in how to roast yourself.
Equal parts fan service, mockumentary, and satire; it’s hilarious and could have make a perfect series finale if they had chosen to end the show after eleven seasons (a respectable number).
Thankfully they didn’t, but this is a high point which rivals even the best of the show’s golden years (proving it has more to offer).
Season 11 Ranking:
- Behind the Laughter (11.22)
- Treehouse of Horror X (11.4)
- E-I-E-I (Annoyed Grunt) (11.5)
- Beyond Blunderdome (11.1)
- Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner? (11.3)
- Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder (11.6)
- Eight Misbehavin’ (11.7)
- Missionary: Impossible (11.15)
- Last Tap Dance in Springfield (11.20)
- Pygmoelian (11.16)
- Saddlesore Galactica (11.13)
- Little Big Mom (11.10)
- The Mansion Family (11.12)
- Faith Off (11.11)
- Grift of the Magi (11.9)
- It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge (11.21)
- Bart to the Future (11.16)
- Take My Wife, Sleaze (11.8)
- Brother’s Little Helper (11.2)
- Kill the Alligator and Run (11.19)
- Days of Wine and D’oh’ses (11.18)
- Alone Again, Natura-Diddly (11.14)