TV Recap / Review: A Flashback Reveals Bart's Origins As a Ne'er-Do-Well In "The Simpsons" - "Bad Boys... For Life?"

Tonight saw the debut of the fifth episode of The Simpsons' 37th season, entitled "Bad Boys... For Life?" (a play on the title of the 2020 action/comedy sequel Bad Boys for Life) and below are my recap and thoughts on this installment of the long-running animated sitcom.

"Bad Boys... For Life?" opens with a particularly synergistic Fortnite-themed couch cag, which is fortuitously timed to the release of the popular video game's The Simpsons mini-season. I don't know much about Fortnite, but apparently there is a banana person involved, and the Simpson family decide to eat said banana person like a banana split. Then we cut to a funny-but-decade-late parody of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee called Comedians In Cars Kvetching, with Jerry Seinfeld (voiced by Dan Castellaneta, I think) driving an old car stolen from Mr. Burns (Harry Shearer) interviewing Krusty the Clown (also Castellaneta) about how college audiences are too sensitives these days. Then they crash into Jay Leno and the "carpool karaoke" car from The Late Late Show with James Corden.

This leads to a bit where the Simpson family members take turns flipping through all the content available on streaming, although the TV is in a different room than it usually is... I think they needed the characters to be gathered around the fireplace. Eventually Lisa (Yeardley Smith) gives up on TV and asks Marge (Julie Kavner) to tell a story about their past. Marge has a funny meta line about how they've done that a number of times already and are running out of stories to tell. But they settle on flashing back to four years earlier, when Bart (Nancy Cartwright) was 6 years old and Lisa was 4.

Apparently this was the age when Bart starting acting up and Marge began to worry that he might be a "bad seed." But Homer doesn't really see the problem, and of course he really doesn't recognize that he might be the one making Bart do bad things. There's a scene where Homer tries to "cure" Bart of his left-handedness by repeatedly spraying him with a water bottle, and at this point I thought that would be more of a focal point of the episode, but it doesn't really pay off until the end credits, which play over portraits of famously accomplished left-handed people throughout history.

Instead we get more examples of Bart's misbehavior, a fun Rube Goldberg-inspired sequence as Bart's first prank, and eventually a visit to a family therapist named Dr. Stern (voiced by guest star Matthew Modine from Full Metal Jacket) who suggests that Bart might be a "P-S-Y-C-H-O"... of course young Lisa is immediately able to understand what Stern is spelling. Anyway, the plan is to take Bart away from the family and lock him up, which causes Homer to have an extended dream sequence of him visiting his son in the "big house" and having to talk to him through a pane of glass.

So instead of turning him over to Family Services, Homer decides to dodge them (as Marge says in the present, for the first of many times) by taking Bart to a treehouse where he himself used to hide from Abe Simpson (Castellaneta again) as a kid. There's a cuddly skunk, a windowless van disguised as an ice cream truck, and some lessons learned here at the end... until Homer has a beer and promptly forgets them. I thought this episode was fine overall-- it looks really nice (keeping with the trend of gorgeous animation in recent The Simpsons season) and has some tender father-son bonding moments, but other than a stray gag here or there, I didn't find myself laughing all that much after the first act. So consider this another good-but-not-great installment in season 37. As always, I'll remain optimistic that next week's will be better.

New episodes of The Simpsons air Sunday evenings on FOX.