35x10 Do the Wrong Thing

[7.2/10 on a Selman era Simpsons scale] “Do the Wrong Thing” hits three of the four big targets for The Simpsons. It has a solid story, some respectable character work, and something to say. It’s just not particularly funny.

If I’m being honest, as we hit the mid-season finale, that's been a recurring issue for season 35 of the show. There’s a few good lines here. Bart’s comment that if he wanted to see Homer do nothing all day, he’d just visit him at work is clever enough, and Homer’s admonition to Lisa that many folks at the ax-throwing contest have guns is an amusing subversion. Hell, I even liked the country-fried cheater’s tribute song, which had some laugh-worthy lyrics. But a lot of the jokes here were painful (see: Homer catching his own lip with a fishhook and continuing to yank on it), and by the time we got to the more serious part of the episode, the jokes were more smiles (at best), than laughs. I wish the show could be funny while also being incisive.

That said, I like the structure of this one. I thought this was going to be a SImpsons standard A-story + B-story type deal. On the one hand, you’d have Homer and Bart bonding over skullduggery, and on the other, you’d have Lisa frantic to get into a fancy nerd camp at Springfield University. The two stories seemed to be on separate tracks, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them come together in the end.

Bart and Homer finding common ground over bending the rules at various “ESPN 8”-level sports didn’t do much for me, but the sense of them growing closer through something immoral has a decent hook to it. But that storyline kicks up a notch when Lisa discovers that someone fabricated a prowess in crew for her to get into the Springfield U summer program, accusing Homer and Bart, until Marge confesses.

The impact that confession has is tremendous. I like that Homer and Bart don’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing until they realize their example influenced someone as pure and good as Marge to break bad. And I like Lisa being mad at Marge for denying her the opportunity to succeed on her own merits. THere’s some good character work in Marge being driven to this to help her golden child succeed, and everyone taking a different lesson away from it.

But I also appreciate the social commentary in all of this. There’s the obvious social and political commentary on everything from the recent college admissions scandal that's made prominent to references to Trump's treasonous conduct around the 2020 election. On a larger scale, the show does well to tackle a culture of dishonesty, both in the sense that there’s a wave of unethical behavior that seems to cut across all corners of American life, but also the tragedy that it convinces kind souls like Marge to be convinced that they have to engage in the same sort of skullduggery in an unjust world or else they'll be putting their children at a disadvantage. It’s the argument against PEDs in sports. The biggest risk isn’t people having negative health effects due to steroids or what have you, but rather other athletes feeling like they have to do PEDs in order to keep up, whether they want to or not. In a way, that's Marge here.

While the episode is pretty over-the-top and rushed in its commentary, there’s teeth to “Do the Wrong Thing”’s conjecture that institutions like universities practically encourage such behavior at this point, in order to prepare young minds for the way the world is, not the way we’d like it to be. The sense of dishonesty begetting dishonesty begetting dishonesty is disheartening, but pointed, and it makes Lisa’s choice to do things the honest way regardless more inspiring by contrast.

I still wish there were more laughs here. There’s plenty of better comic hay to be made than just referencing a bunch of scandals and invoking other cheap gags. But at a minimum, “Do the Wrong Thing” embraces the Simpson family as recognizable characters, and uses them to address a live, ethical issue in our society today, so it gets credit for the things it does right, not just the places it misses the mark.