The Simpsons Project #4

Simpsons Project Case #4 (Season 1, Episode 4)
There’s No Disgrace Like Home
Original airdate: 1/28/90

The last two Simpsons episodes we discussed, “Bart the Genius” and “Homer’s Odyssey”, served to begin fleshing out the male characters in the Simpsons family. In the series’ fourth episode, “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”, we take a look at the state of the family at large.

If you were around for these episodes when they first aired, you may remember that the Simpsons was actually quite edgy and controversial for its time. President George Bush (the first) famously declared that America needed more families like the Waltons and fewer families like the Simpsons. My grade school teacher forbade us from watching the program (even though I did anyway), and several child advocacy groups railed against the Simpsons for providing negative role models for children and encouraging foul language. One of the biggest taglines for these anti-Simpsons groups was that the family was too “dysfunctional”. This term became the rallying cry for concerned parents and groups during the first few years of the Simpsons’ life. Today’s episode, “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”, contains one of the most famous scenes from the history of the series, and also helped to create the furor that followed the show’s first episodes.

The episode starts by giving us our first glimpse of Burns Manor (called “Heaven on earth” by Homer). The Springfield Nuclear Power Plant company picnic is being held there, and Homer desperately needs everyone to be on their best behavior or he could lose his job. Burns fires another employee on his way in because his son complains about being at the picnic, so the stakes are high for Homer and his family to conduct themselves appropriately (impossible) or he could get the ax as well.

The picnic does provide some classic C. Montgomery Burns. As he toasts his employees, he’s unable to greet them without cue cards (cue card 1: “Thank you all…”; cue card 2: “For coming!”). He also mixes in numerous hilarious insults and dismayed sighs with his usual aplomb.

The picnic serves to show us just how messed up and in trouble the family is. Bart and Lisa immediately begin running around and causing a nuisance. Homer desperately tries to keep them in line, using his trademark stern disciplinary tactics. Marge is embarrassed of the decorum and appearance of her family and decides to heavily imbibe in order to make the day more tolerable. Throughout the series, though the family always seems like they’re one problem away from disintegrating, we can usually sense genuine love between the characters. In “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”, we get the sense that they’re merely putting up with each other. As we begin, there’s no deep-seeded love for one another, just constant annoyance as they get in each other’s way.

When Homer sees another employee get a kiss from his son on the way out of the picnic (and a promise of a promotion from Mr. Burns due to the gesture), he implores Bart to follow suit. Bart refuses, saying, “But dad, I’m your kid!”. Homer later sees that employee in the parking lot and chastises him for sucking up to the boss. Of course, it wasn’t an act. The employee genuinely loves his family, and they love him, and Homer feels embarrassed and jealous of the feelings they have for each other. He then decides he needs to fix his family because he wants to experience those same feelings.

Homer goes about this in his usual half-assed way. He first drags the family to various houses in the neighborhood, and they watch “normal” families eating dinner and conversing to get an idea of how they measure up and what goes into having a loving family (apparently they have a long way to go, as Bart marvels that “the dad has a shirt on” during one of the visits). When this doesn’t work, Homer goes to Moe’s to booze away the pain. He gets into a fight with Barney due to a disparaging remark Barney makes about Homer’s family, and is soon knocked to the floor. While in a half-conscious stupor, he sees an ad for Dr. Marvin Monroe’s Family Therapy Center and thinks he finds the answer to their problems. After all, with a phone number like (800) 555-HUGS, it has to work!

Marge’s behavior in this particular episode is perplexing. Usually, especially in the earlier seasons, Marge takes pride in her family no matter what, and is constantly working to make sure that the family improves as a loving and cohesive unit. Here, she seems resigned to the fact that the family is barely getting by. She gets drunk at Burns’ party due to her embarrassment of them, and she later brushes off Homer’s genuine concerns about the family’s welfare. It’s odd to see Homer as the parent trying to fix things (however horribly) and not Marge.

Dr. Monroe’s therapy is $250, and the family simply doesn’t have that, so Homer pawns the television in order to pay for it (another moment where you realize just how bad things are for them). Monroe’s therapy is nouveaux and semi-sophisticated, so of course it goes right over the Simpsons’ heads. In the first therapy session, they draw pictures of their fears and anxieties, which lead Bart, Lisa and Marge to draw pictures of Homer, and Homer to draw a picture of an airplane dropping bombs (because he wasn’t paying attention). In the next session, they whack each other with rubber mallets until Bart realizes that the mallets work a lot better when you take the padding off.

Finally, in a famous scene, the family is hooked up to an electric generator. Each has the ability to shock the others by pressing a button. Of course, they begin shocking each other incessantly, causing Monroe’s patients to vacate the building and creating a power outage in the town. Outraged, Monroe boots them from his practice, but Homer reminds him that he promised double their money back if they were not cured. Monroe resists, but eventually pays them $500 to leave and never come back. The family feels like they’ve earned the money by failing at the therapy and become closer for it. The episode ends with the redeemed family going to buy a new TV with the money.

In watching this episode, I can actually kind of see why some teachers and parents became so upset with the show. There really isn’t any crass language and the storyline and attitudes are tame by today’s standards, but the Simpsons really were portrayed as a nightmare family here. To this point, cartoons were meant to be fun and mindless romps aimed at young children (even though they were often horribly violent; see: Tom, Jerry). People hadn’t seen anything like this at the time, and reacted negatively.

The episode isn’t fantastic, but it’s historically important and useful for taking a more in-depth look at the family. There aren’t many great one-liners or guffaws, but it is thoroughly entertaining throughout.

B

John Lacey

While saying grace: “Dear Lord, thank you for this microwaved bounty, even though we don’t deserve it. I mean, our kids are uncontrollable hellions, pardon my French. But they act like savages! Did you see them at the picnic? Of, of course you did, you’re everywhere. You’re omnivorous. Oh, Lord, why did you spite me with this family?” – Homer