There's No Disgrace Like Home

I continue this string of reviews once again by repeating myself, this season of the Simpsons has a certain charm to it! It can only be the certain combination of animation style, strange yet recognisable voices and more wholesome plot lines, like this one that make for one amazing viewing experience.

When the family misbehaves at the power plant picnic, Homer grows concerned that his family is too dysfunctional and proceeds to put everyone in to family therapy with shocking results (pun intended).

As mentioned, this first season episode is a tad jarring for modern Simpsons fans to watch. Almost the entire family (with the exception of Bart, who was really the only one with a defined personality by this point) is acting out of character. Homer's concern about his family's behavior seems more like something expected from Marge, especially seeing as he's willing to pawn the family's TV set to pay for the therapy sessions. Marge getting drunk at the picnic is more like something that Homer would do. And Lisa seems more like a female Bart and is almost as bratty as he is.

With this in mind, the therapy session is clearly the major highlight of the episode. It's also the first episode where Bart utters the immortal line, "Don't have a cow", Mr. Burns first says, "Release the hounds", and it's the first appearance of Itchy and Scratchy, so it features some significance in Simpsons history.

I like the bit where they zapped each other and drained all the power.

A memorable episode which explores the Simpsons' attitudes to each other in a funny and dysfunctional way. This episode had many firsts as well, for example, Bart says "don't have a cow", The Itchy and Scratchy Show and Mr Burns threatens to release the hounds. A very good episode with memorable moments and fantastic humour!

After a Peanuts-like, Simpsons-styled Christmas special, an episode that delved into Bart's psyche (along with "The Simpsons'" relationship to intellectualism) and an episode showing us a bit more about Homer's personality, it was time to look further into the Simpsons relationship to each other as a family unit.

The family has to attend one of Mr. Burns' annual, mandatory company picnics, and doing so, in addition to observing different kinds of behavior from his family at home, makes Homer despondent. He wonders why they can't be like other families, like the ones who ride off from the picnic in glee, with exemplary etiquette, while Heaven shines a special light on them and guides them home.

As they leave the picnic, the Simpsons instead turn into demons and ride through a desolate, Hellish landscape (in one of the first completely surreal sequences of the show, promising the many marvelously hallucinogenic side-trips to come in the series, and even more literally foreshadowing the Halloween specials). After the introduction (without title or other identification) of Itchy and Scratchy to the series, and while Homer is sitting at the bar of an oddly black-haired Moe, Homer sees a commercial for Dr. Marvin Munro's Family Therapy Center and decides to--horror of horrors--hock the television so they can have a session.

It's worth noting that as in episode 3, Homer's Odyssey, this is still not quite Homer as most of us would imagine him down the road. We'd usually think of someone else in the family--either Lisa or Marge, probably--becoming upset that the Simpsons are so unruly. But again, it may be that we've forgotten about Homer's complexities as much as that creator Matt Groening and the writers have changed his personality over the years.

Of course, things do not go as planned at Dr. Munro's. The Simpsons are too dysfunctional for that. Throughout the episode, we're treated to some of the funniest family dynamics of the series, including the family's typical manner of eating dinner and their response to quickly drawing what's bothering them for the psychiatrist (the latter event is also a great opportunity to note just how subtle the show can get--look closely at the differences in the drawings, considering each character's personality and abilities). The family is so dysfunctional that even the normally well-behaved and intellectual one, Lisa, goes off the edge many times--joining Bart in a funny pushing match, goofing off in an intellectual way at Mr. Burns' fountain, and gleefully engaging in the mayhem at Munro's office.

But Groening and the writers cleverly slip in a very benevolent and understanding moral of the story in the end--they show that as screwed up as they may be in some ways, the Simpsons are really a very happy family with a tight bond who function well as a unit. They just don't function in socially normative ways much of the time. The family who earlier slipped off into Heaven did so to emphasize the myth of that kind of family. The Simpsons tend to triumph, happily, in their own manner, just like most real families do.