The new double-length The Simpsons holiday special entitled “O C’mon All Ye Faithful” is now available to stream on Disney+, and below are my thoughts on the special after having attended the World Premiere last week.
35 years ago today, I had just turned ten years old and I sat down to watch the series premiere of a new animated sitcom called The Simpsons with my mom. That episode, entitled “Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire,” also served as a holiday special of sorts, after America had become associated with the family of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie via shorts on FOX’s cult-hit sketch comedy series The Tracey Ullman Show. And now here we are three and a half decades later, with a double-length episode premiering on Disney+ of all places instead of the show’s usual network-television home. “O C’mon All Ye Faithful” starts out as a pseudo-special-within-a-special hosted by famous real-life British hypnotist and illusionist Derren Brown (voicing himself, though I have to admit I had not heard of him before seeing this episode), who sets out to perform a social experiment in Springfield, attempting to reinject the abandoned holiday spirit into a town overcome with anger and anxiety.
Brown’s experiment kicks off with a successful dry run on poor old Gil Gunderson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta), reconnecting the Jack Lemmon-inspired character with his family for the holidays, and then moves on to Homer Simpson (also Castellaneta), who has proven to be incapable of picking out gifts for others, up to and including his wife Marge (Julie Kavner). At the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, Derren tricks Homer into falling down a trap-door slide built into a vending machine, and in the black void below he does such a good job of hypnotizing Homer into being a better gift-giver that the patriarch of Our Favorite Family comes to believe he is, in actuality, the honest-to-goodness Santa Claus. From there, Homer’s zeal at spreading goodwill toward men wins over the entire town around him and all of its residents, unintentionally resulting in a sort of second-hand hypnosis and what Brown ends up calling a “Santa Claus cult.”
Here’s where things get a bit darker for Springfield– Derren throws a “Christmas Jubilee” at Town Hall to de-hypnotize Homer, and hopefully everyone else… even though most of them insist they’re happier with their newfound beliefs in Homer as Old Saint Nick. But in the process of doing so, Brown manages to convince Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) that God may not actually exist. I feel like we’ve seen Ned have crises of faith before, even in recent years of The Simpsons, but this one brings everybody down so much that Marge, Lisa (Yeardley Smith), and even Bart (Nancy Cartwright) do their best to talk– or scare, in Bart’s case– Flanders out of his funk. Lisa tells an inspirational story about how miracles exist even in her Buddhist religion, but Ned is too defeated by the deaths of both of his wives (Maude Flanders way back in 2000 and Edna Krabapple in 2013) to snap out of it. Meanwhile, Homer reverts back to his Santa-like ways when his slow-witted-but-enthusiastic elf Ralph Wiggum (Cartwright again) convinces him it’s what’s best for the town, causing Homer to end up in the local jail after attempting to deliver presents to actor Rainier Wolfcastle’s heavily-guarded home.
I don’t wait to spoil exactly how either of these two plots wind up in this review, but I will say the heartwarming conclusion involves Professor Frink (Hank Azaria), a submarine, and an overall message about how important faith is in a person’s life, even if it’s faith in the wonder of the universe around us as opposed to a bearded god watching us from above. I feel like that’s a big moment for a show that’s often agnostic at best when it comes to matters of religion, and it’s a large part of what makes this holiday special actually feel like a special, and not just a run-of-the-mill Christmas-themed episode that didn’t air on FOX like Family Guy’s recent “Gift of the White Guy” (also available to stream on Disney+). The other thing that made this stand out to me was the nuanced performance of Harry Shearer, who I feel has grown more distant and detached from the series in recent years but every once in a while gives his all, especially when voicing his most relatable character, Ned Flanders. By and large I would say that “O C’mon All Ye Faithful” is at the very least worth the watch for Simpsons fans of all stripes this holiday season. It’s funny, touching, and might just reinject some of that Yuletide spirit back into your own hometown. And hey, maybe it’ll also get me to check out some of Derren Brown’s stuff on YouTube.
The Simpsons holiday special “O C’mon All Ye Faithful” is now available to stream exclusively via Disney+.