One of the great things about The Simpsons having lasted as a half-hour animated sitcom for nearly three and a half decades now is that the show gets to flesh out some of its underutilized supporting characters. Case in point: Carl Carlson (who only recently became voiced by Alex Désert, replacing Harry Shearer)– outside of being half of the Lenny-and-Carl duo, we haven’t actually spent a whole lot of time with him as a person.
That’s the first thing that made tonight’s new episode, entitled “Carl Carlson Rides Again,” intriguing to me as a viewer. The second is that, outside of focusing on a rarely spotlighted resident of Springfield, it actually feels pretty close to an episode from the show’s Golden Age (which to me, is seasons 1 through 10), in that it takes a simple premise and executes it well, with plenty of solid jokes.
“Carl Carlson Rides Again” begins with Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) discovering something called a “Meal Train”– it seems Ned Flanders injured himself helping Homer get a free hat off his roof, so Marge (Julie Kavner) and the other neighborhood women offer to bake him home-cooked meals until his broken arm is healed. Homer sees this as an opportunity for him and his barfly friends to fake injuries and collect a steady stream of complimentary meals at Moe’s (Hank Azaria) Tavern. The only problem with this plan, as Carl points out, is that after consuming so much food the guys are no longer even in bowling shape, and the season is coming up. So Carl uses a bowling exercise video to slim down, to the point where he even needs a belt– and he dons the shiny gold belt buckle depicting a bull-riding cowboy that was the only thing left for him by his birth parents. At the bowling alley, the newly svelte Carl meets a woman named Naima (Dawnn Lewis) who is disgusted with the concept of wearing gross borrowed shoes. They’re taken with each other as Carl extolls the joys of bowling, or as he hilariously describes it, “America's slowest-dying indoor sport.” They agree to a date that weekend at the soul-food restaurant that she owns on “their side of town,” which Carl later privately confesses to his friends he’s never visited. Cue the montage of Homer and the guys taking Carl to Springfield’s black-owned barbershop and thrift store, where, respectively, he gets the “Denzel Washington” hairdo and sells his prized belt buckle for some seemingly hipper clothing.
But Carl’s date goes disastrously because Naima can tell he’s no longer being himself, attempting to lean too hard into an identity he knows very little about. This leads our sad Mr. Carlson on a voyage of self-discovery, on which the first step is to reclaim the belt buckle, but it’s already been sold to the Rich Texan (Castellaneta again), who flipped it to guest-star Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., with the historian voicing himself. On an episode of Finding Your Roots, Gates reveals to Carl the shocking history of his birth parents, and that his father was a famed bull rider. Carl takes this as a sign that he needs to prove himself at a local rodeo, considering bull-riding is in his blood (as Naima insists, that’s not how blood works). As you might predict, this goes disastrously… Carl only holds on for three seconds– that are made to seem significantly longer in slow-motion– and breaks several of his limbs in the process. But in the end Carl has learned quite a bit about African-American cowboys and is able to embrace his own version of what blackness means to him. Plus Naima donates her blood to his recovery and they kiss in the Emergency Room, so that worked out well also. And I walked out of this installment of The Simpsons feeling like I’ve gotten to know Carl better than I ever have before. That and the above-average amount of laughs (I especially like Rainier Wolfcastle deciding that being bumped from Finding Your Roots was probably for the best) contained in this episode probably makes it my favorite one this season outside of the structure-breaking anthologies “Treehouse of Horror XXXIII” and “Lisa the Boy Scout.”
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.