We don’t cover The Simpsons around here; as a matter of fact we don’t really do half-hour comedies. At least I don’t (I did, however, take a stab at Silicon Valley and Veep last year). But something about “Let’s Go Fly a Coot” bugged me enough to write about it.
It’s not exactly revolutionary to say that The Simpsons isn’t as funny as it used to be; it’s a time-honored refrain, right up there with “SNL isn’t funny anymore.” Not being funny is forgivable; after all, The Simpsons gave us five perfect seasons (4, 5, 6, 7, 8) and a couple damn good ones. But being disrespectful is something entirely different. “Coot” isn’t bottom-of-the-barrel bad like “Lisa Goes Gaga” (or even this season’s execrable “The Man Who Would Come to be Dinner”) but it’s meandering, convoluted, and ultimately pretty pointless.
Here’s an example of this convoluted plot, which doesn’t actually kick into gear until after the first commercial break: Homer, fed up with the overly elaborate birthday parties kids are having these days, goes around Springfield playing saboteur, which puts him in the crosshairs of Big Birthday. The mustachioed CEO type berates Homer in a scene that’s clearly a parody of Ned Beatty’s famous dressing-down of Peter Finch in Network, but that’s about the extent to which “Coot” is willing to go. “Hey remember this? Now a different guy is doing in it a different setting.” Anyway, in order to get his kids off the birthday blacklist (Marge’s line about Bart and Lisa staying their current ages forever is too obvious by half, but would have been twice as funny if one of the kids delivered it) Homer agrees to host Rod Flanders’ party at the Springfield Flight Museum, where Grandpa’s old Air Force buddies resolve to get Homer to treat his dad better.
Look at that up there; that’s probably the longest paragraph that will appear in this review, and it describes what is only the A-plot of “Coot.”
You’re probably thinking – wasn’t Grandpa in the Army? Well, yes in the Flying Hellfish. Wait, wasn’t it the Navy? Well, yes, and he discovered JFK’s terrible secret. So if the show is going to purposely muddy the canon I guess we have to go with it. The problem is, we’ve seen plots where Homer comes to appreciate Grandpa; it was done most memorably in “Grandpa vs. Sexual Inadequacy,” where it was resolved much more gracefully than it is here. At the climax of this story, the old Air Force veterans force Homer, at gunpoint, to tell his dad he loves him. And, well, that’s about it. There’s a story about a young Abe Simpson shooing desert turtles off the runway at a testing facility, which is evidently how he met Mona. Glenn Close is listed in the credits, but Mona doesn’t look or sound like any iteration we’ve seen of her in the past; likewise, the “big reveal” that the waitress was Mona all along doesn’t hold water. There have been two important women in Grandpa’s life – Mona and Bea – so I don’t think anyone thought we were about to meet another.
Elsewhere, there’s a B-plot about Bart falling for Milhouse’s Dutch cousin Annika, voiced by Game of Thrones‘ Carice van Houten, presumably because she has the same last name as Milhouse. Van Houten doesn’t really bring anything to what is ultimately a pretty stock role, other than getting Bart to try vaping. The Simpsons in recent years has had a pretty lousy batting average when it comes to satire – remember the Mapple MiPod? – so this plot doesn’t really go anywhere. Bart’s revelation that he doesn’t really like Annika was a nice twist on an otherwise rote storyline, but I’m still gonna ding this hard because of Milhouse’s casual admission that his parents are cousins. It’s been asked before why the van Houtens look so much alike, but if they’re related, does that mean Clancy and Sarah Wiggum are as well? It’s an icky question, but thankfully I can count on the show to thoroughly not explore its ramifications.
A Few Thoughts
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As far as parody titles go, you could do worse than The Exhaustibles
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Homer’s long list of dystopian movies was an obvious joke, but a solid one nonetheless
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Hank Azaria did good work as Grandpa’s Air Force buddy. He was using pretty much the same voice he used as Patches O’Houlihan, but he got some good lines like “If we were late in the Air Force people died. If we were on time, other people died. The right people!”
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