Those who pay even the slightest bit of attention to entertainment news will remember the scandal surrounding comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show Ellen a couple years ago. Well it just so happens that a couple years (give or take) is roughly the turnaround time for a new episode of The Simpsons, so it makes sense that America’s longest-running animated TV sitcom would finally catch up to parodying that whole sordid affair.
In this latest episode of The Simpsons, entitled “The King of Nice,” our old pal Krusty the Clown (voiced, as always, by Dan Castellaneta) is tired of performing at celebrity birthdays and recording messages for fans on Cameo– evidently he lost all his money on NFTs (“non-funny TV shows”) and needs some supplemental income.
So Krusty takes a lucrative gig as an Ellen-like daytime talk show host, right down to the short-cropped haircut and the dancing– oh, so much dancing– to “Low” by Flo Rida. And after Marge Simpson (Julie Kavner) nearly suffers another family-inspired breakdown in the dog food aisle, she volunteers to contribute to a focus group for the show. During the session, television executive Lindsay Naegle (Tress MacNeille) is so impressed with Marge’s ideas that she hires her on the spot, replacing the segment producer who happens to be in the same room at the time. So Marge reports to work and things go swimmingly for a while, with Krusty raking in the cash, and Marge generating plenty of pitches for the series like “Baby Hat Fashion Show.” But the pressure below the surface starts to bubble up as it dawns on Marge just how many of these episodes need to be made, and as she realizes that Lindsay Naegle isn’t exactly the kindest person to work for (“Go get me a baked potato so I can throw it at you!” Naegle yells at an intern).
The clever twist here is that, as Krusty notes, for once he’s not the cause of a hostile work environment. He pretty much just shows up, dances, cracks a few jokes (there’s a subplot here about Krusty finding love in this kind of work that kind of goes nowhere), and leaves at the end of each episode’s taping to go buy truckloads of new sports cars. It’s Naegle who’s causing stress among all of the show’s staff members by cracking the whip far too hard, and Marge finds herself on the verge of a breakdown once again after all of her suggestions start getting shot down. Eventually the backstage grief at Krusty’s show leaks out through a TMZ-like gossip outlet, and the clown is forced to host a somber apology episode wherein he is brought onstage with a slowed-down, melancholy version of “Low” spun by DJ Sideshow Mel (also Castellaneta). But when Marge decides to do the right thing and publicly shift the blame away from Krusty, there’s something of a deux ex machina in the form of a judge show offer for the TV personality, which actually requires him to be mean instead of nice.
For what it’s worth, I thought “The King of Nice” was a fairly solid, above-average episode of current-era Simpsons. It earned more than enough chuckles from me, even though some of the gags came across as a bit “inside baseball” when it comes to the TV industry– and I may work as an entertainment journalist, but I think most people do pay attention to that kind of stuff, at the very least on a superficial level. The Ellen parody may feel a little less-than-topical (especially considering that the real show has been off the air for nearly six months) and I have a feeling it won’t age all that well, but that’s easy to get past when the supporting plots are so strong. The intervention that Homer (yep, it’s Dan Castellaneta) and a seemingly random assortment of attendees (Patty and Selma I get, but why is Moe there?) throw for Marge is particularly funny, and I loved the running gag of television interns basically being treated like dirt. “This King of Nice” elicited a good number of laughs– I’m just now remembering Bart’s extremely meta use of the Krusty+ streaming service to access “more than 700″ classic episodes of the clown’s usual kids’ show– and strung together a relatively coherent plot, and really what more can we ask for at this point?
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday nights on FOX.