Last night saw the 36th season premiere of The Simpsons, entitled “Bart’s Birthday,” debut on the FOX Network, and below are my recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.
The Simpsons is no stranger to meta-commentary on itself across its three-and-a-half-decade history: see the “138th Episode Spectacular” (hosted by the late, great Phil Hartman as washed-up actor Troy McClure) from season seven, or “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase” from the following year… not to mention season 13’s “Gump Roast” clip show, which concluded with an oh-so-prescient Billy Joel parody entitled “They’ll Never Stop The Simpsons.” And now the 36th season– holy crap, how has it been that long?– has kicked off with returning guest star (and former series writer) Conan O’Brien hosting an all-star, “A.I.-generated” pseudo-series-finale for the television institution that seriously doesn’t feel like it could ever possibly end at this point.
Conan welcomes celebrity guest voices from every era of The Simpsons to the Dolby-Mucinex Theater in Hollywood (can’t wait for that prediction to come true) and starts the proceedings by providing a chronicle of the show’s near-cancellations– excluding, rather ironically, the episode that was actually written as a series finale (season 23’s “Holidays of Future Passed”)– giving us hilariously violent alternate takes on early outings like “Bart the Daredevil” and “Little Big Mom” in which Homer is repeatedly, unceremoniously killed off. But, O’Brien explains, the debt incurred by FOX owner Rupert Murdoch in paying for the Bart Simpson balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has prolonged the series’ life indefinitely. Until now– and this is the point at which Conan introduces a computer named Hack-GPT (voiced by What We Do In the Shadows star Mark Proksch), “the latest in plagiarism technology.” This A.I. is trained with every previous episode of the show, plus every series finale of every other show from television history, and the result begins to play out on the auditorium’s big screen.
What we get is an instantly, and intentionally, phony-feeling installment in which Homer (Dan Castellaneta) has forgotten to mail out the invitations to Bart’s birthday party, so Bart (Nancy Cartwright) must go around town handing them out in person. But along the way he starts to realize that everyone in Springfield is getting an “ending” to their own supporting-character story– Principal Skinner (Harry Shearer) has apparently achieved spinoff status by relocating to the Pacific Northwest and acquiring Groundskeeper Willie (Hank Azaria) as a roommate, Comic Book Guy (also Azaria) and his wife Kumiko (Jenny Yokobori) are having a baby, and Mr. Burns (Shearer as well) has accidentally passed away and bequeathed his vast fortune to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant workers. Plus Bart realizes how out-of-place the sudden arrival of John Cena is, despite having interacted with countless celebs over the years, and there’s a great running gag referencing the final scene of Cheers in which pretty much everyone in Springfield is “gonna miss this place.”
Soon reality begins to break down for Bart, Twilight Zone-style, culminating in him returning home to find basically every recurring character from the show’s history in his living room for a surprise 11th-birthday party, and this is what finally breaks him. This computer-simulated Bart becomes self-aware, knows he’s always been ten years old and comes to understand that turning 11 would mean the end of his family’s adventures. So by having a meltdown, getting Homer to break his newfound good-father act, and crashing into his own birthday cake, he resets the cycle, reverting the world of The Simpsons back to the never-ending, Groundhog Day-like existence it has always inhabited. It’s heady, mind-bending stuff, but the star-studded audience back at the Dolby-Mucinex isn’t having it, with Tom Hanks especially upset that he rented a tux for this event that turned out to be just another season premiere for a show that won’t end. Conan O’Brien is fine with the situation, however, as his deal for hosting means he finally gets the sweater back that he left in the writer’s room 30+ years ago. And we in the real audience at home, prepare for another round of twenty-or-so episodes, all the while wondering if, when, and how the powers that be at this three-and-a-half-decade-old series will ever let it die. For now however, “Bart’s Birthday” was a pretty clever way to hang a lampshade on that particular conundrum– packed with more Simpsons in-jokes and Easter Eggs than probably any episode prior. But at this point it’s admittedly difficult to keep an accurate count.
New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX and become available to stream via Hulu the following day.