33x01 The Star of the Backstage

[7.4/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] Not bad! I’m a sucker for a good musical, so watching The Simpsons parody and pay homage the likes of Rent and Wicked and other 1990s/2000s musicals was right in my wheelhouse.

And the parodies were good! The lyrics weren’t necessarily on par with the joke-a-minute cleverness of the show’s golden years, but musically they were on point, and there was even some clever wordplay in “Remember the Times.” The team that cooked these up clearly had affection for and knowledge of the musicals both classic and modern they were spoofing, and it showed. (Plus a Y2k-based Rent parody worked much better than I might have hoped.)

I like the emotional undercurrent of this one as well. As is often the case, with Matt Selman running the episode, there’s a better sense of an emotional core for the main character that sustains the episode. In this case, having Marge fondly remember her time as a stage manager in high school, realize in the present that she was actually excluded by the other theater kids, trying to get revenge and then making peace with it works as a nice psychological trajectory for the Simpsons’ matriarch.

My one beef is that this one skates over some pretty rough behavior. If this was all just about the members of the high school musical cast having fun without Marge, that would be one thing. But them having a party at Marge’s house when she was away, causing enough damage to get her family sued and forced to declare bankruptcy, is pretty serious. Marge has a right to be angry about it, and the show tossing it in and then glossing over it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

THat said, I like where this one ends. Marge doesn’t fix the past. The cast (including a pinch-hitting Homer) still has fun without her in the present day. But despite feeling unheralded and underappreciated, Marge gets her laurels from current high school students, who admire her behind-the-scenes work and view her as a legend. It’s a nice way to give her some validation without pretending that the old wounds could be healed with the same old medicine.

Overall, this was a solid jumping off point for (gulp) Season 33, with a good Marge story and fun musical spoof to get the season off right.

(As an aside, I get why the show has stuck to the “floating timeline” idea which now places Marge and Homer’s high school days in the 2000s. But it still just feels weird and off to me. It’s not a serious criticism of the show, but the strange feel of it can make it hard to settle into an episode.)