Review: The Simpsons “It’s a Blunderful Life”
Overview
Lisa recounts the story of how Homer was scapegoated for a power outage that plunged Springfield into darkness days before Thanksgiving.
Our Take
I was super excited about this week’s episode of The Simpsons when I saw the stop motion “Thanksgiving Turkey Hand Couch Gag”. As a result of the exquisite originality that preceded the actual episode, I really thought that this week’s episode “It’s a Blunderful Life”. But, then, we got a flash-forward…then two flashbacks, and then some ghosts, and that’s when I gave up on the episode being any good. This was a real bummer, too, because we got some deliciously morbid sequences, but the premise was so like a watered-down rerun of The Simpsons Movie.
When the producers work in the cynicism that the writers imbue, that starts to look like the show I love. Whether it was the horrific Thanksgiving dinner from the future or the townspeople going bananas on the house, I found myself with a few giggles here and there, but in terms of following along with the plot, I just couldn’t do it. Ironically, the last scene sees a futuristic Bart complain about how long Lisa’s story was and dying of boredom and I gotta say, that’s about as serendipitous of a conclusion that I could’ve come up when describing this week’s episode. Fortunately, this the last new episode of The Simpsons for the month of November, so hopefully the time off will allow my wounds to heal.
I'm pretty skeptical that this is really "the first animated sitcom on X"; I'd have a hard time believing that someone else hasn't posted animated sitcom-esque shorts at some point.