Review: The Simpsons “The Tell-Tale Pants”

Overview

Marge comes upon a surprising windfall and, angry with Homer, spends it secretly on herself.

Our Take

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Marge spend a little money on herself and in fact this week’s episode entitled “The Tell-Tale Pants” shares a lot of the same beats as the classic “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield”, the legendary episode where Marge buys an expensive jacket(that is considerably marked down) that makes her feel so good that she nearly forgets what’s most important. Likewise, “The Tell-Tale Pants” revolves around Marge buying an item that she wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise and instead Homer is the one feeling like she’s earned it.

Personally, I thought the Al Jean-written effort was all over the place. For starters the episode takes a while to get to the meat of the episode and when it finally does get there we really don’t even spend THAT much time with Marge’s ring by the time we get to the end. In fact, the item in question only spends about 30 seconds with Homer that allows the doting husband the amount of time necessary to come to a foregone conclusion that wasn’t that big of a deal in the first place and seems like something that could’ve been stretched out a bit more had it not been for the excessive first act (what was even the point of the awards show?).

We get to the middle of the episode and to further drive home the unoriginality of the plot, we’re introduced to an unoriginal family member of Comic Book Guy’s who comes off a bit lame in execution and then we get a few flashes into the future about what would happen if Marge spent this not life-saving money elsewhere. Later, Marge is in the car singing along to a weird ass cover of Levon by Elton John and Bernie Taupin as sung by Kipp Lennon which, wasn’t bad, but changing the lyrics was a bit of an odd flex.

Overall, this week’s episode of The Simpsons was like a bad mish-mash of ideas that have been done previously. I’m sure the internet will talk about Larry’s ashes getting a cameo but not for long because Marge also stars in a new short for The Simpsons coming to Disney+ later this week, hopefully it’s more original than this one.