Overview
Bart celebrates the most shocking birthday party of his entire life — one that might just change everyone in Springfield forever.
Our Take
I love it when The Simpsons roast themselves and everyone and everything around them by obliterating the fourth wall and showing their bare ass(literally a plot point of the season 36 premiere). Anytime the show takes on the current state of show business I’m all for it. In an episode with shades of the legendary “The 138th Episode Spectacular”, “Bart’s Birthday” is pitched as a series finale that showcases what it would be like if the writers of The Simpsons came up with the lamest and most cliched series finale ever.
The result is a star-studded affair with a who’s who of hilarious guest stars both in real-life and even from the pantheon of classic characters that the show has seldom seen again. John Cena gets a big part as himself helping deliver a baby, Mark Proksch devastates as Hack-GPT, and here to host it all, Conan O’Brien. “Bart’s Birthday” is a smorgasbord of silly ideas all rolled up into one which mostly works though if we were REALLY going to burn up Hollywood, there are places the producers could’ve gone, but the Disney-era of The Simpsons has long blunted the sharp pokers that helped make this series famous and, as such, the insults are pretty safe.
In any event, the season premiere of The Simpsons is here and we’re all better for it. The show has already blown through most of its announced guest stars in one shot, the franchise is going multi-platform with debuts of episodes happening on Disney+, and we’ve still got TWO Treehouse of Horror episodes to get through. This looks like a great season coming down the pike and we got a solid season premiere to help kick things off.