The Simpsons, season 18, episode 399 '24 Minutes'
August 6th 2007 06:03
One of the most baffling TV series, drama or otherwise, to come along in the last few decades, surely has to be ‘24’. It is the television equivalent of ‘Die Hard’. How can the same man experience the same number of calamities on so many occasions? Does CTU agent Jack Bauer ever just sit back on the couch one night and chill out with a good book? The first season of ‘24’ was silly yet enjoyable. You could just about buy the high concept…almost. As the years went on, however, it all became faintly ridiculous. Every episode needed to have a surprise cliffhanger at the end, to the point that it felt the creators were doing it out of necessity rather than because of any particular significance to the story. Not helping matters along at all was the fact that it seemed the writers were not pre-planning their story arcs.
Unlike densely structured genre series like ‘Buffy’ or ‘Babylon 5’, there was a noticeable amount of ‘making it up as they went along’ antics creeping into ‘24’ episodes. Season 5 was the final straw for me. After setting up a story about a terrorist plot to assassinate political candidates, we discover that the President was behind all of the day’s events! This was utterly inconsistent with the character’s blissful ignorance earlier in the season. Obviously, the producers changed their mind halfway through the writing process.
This is all well and good, you might say, but what does it have to do with ‘The Simpsons’, America’s longest running animated series, and indeed, sitcom of any type, of all time (only a few Japanese anime series have been around for longer)? No, the headline is not a misprint. This episode is a pitch-perfect parody of ‘24’, right down to using that show’s opening title graphics, the ticking digital clock, the split screen visuals, and even enlisting the vocal talents of Kiefer Sutherland!
Principal Skinner and Lisa are heading up a Counter Truancy Unit at Springfield Elementary, to weed out bullies and troublemakers from the school. They have to bring Bart Simpson out of detention (in a great spoof of Jack Bauer usually being driven out of retirement or alcoholism at the beginning of most 24 seasons) to help them catch delinquents Dolph, Kearney, and Jimbo before they detonate a potent stinkbomb device during the upcoming school bake sale. Meanwhile, Marge is out of raisins as she prepares her cake for the said bake sale! Hilariously, as we see in a split screen montage sequence, Marge rabidly fights off Helen Lovejoy in the supermarket for the last packet.
The in-jokes, and homages to standard ‘24’ clichés come thick and fast. Scholarly smarty-pants Martin Prince is the mole within the counter truancy unit, helping out the bullies because they are holding his cherished ant farm hostage (Everyone from Asimov to Zarathustra!). Curiously, Lisa and Skinner conduct their operations from within a set which looks decidedly unlike anything we’ve previously encountered in Springfield Elementary’s halls in its 18 year heritage. Their office instead is modelled on ‘24’s CTU Los Angeles branch. Bart accidentally calls Jack Bauer when attempting to contact Lisa. Jack responds gruffly (he answers the phone in the middle of a fire-fight) with Bart’s classic line ‘I’m Jack Bauer, who the hell are you?’ Bart, ever the prankster, cannot bear to miss an opportunity to indulge his Machiavellian side, and so tells Bauer his name is Imada Doodie, which in turn prompts Jack to ask anyone if they know ‘I made a doodie’!
Jack shows up at the primary school to arrest Bart for wasting precious government time, just as we see a gigantic mushroom cloud arise in the background. Bauer is quick to pacify the worried crowd by saying ‘Don’t worry. That was Shelbyville’, at which they all let out a relaxed sigh!
Occasionally, ‘The Simpsons’ devotes an entire episode to ripping apart a particular subject, rather than fitting dozens of pop culture parodies within twenty four minutes (isn’t it amusing how the standard running time of ‘The Simpsons’ episodes coincidentally happens to be that particular number?). In bygone seasons, we’ve borne witness to fantastic spoofs of ‘Mary Poppins’ and the 007 movie series. This one, I think, ranks up there in the grand pantheon of heavenly Simpsons greats such as those. ‘24 Minutes’ deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. Although the plot of this episode is admittedly quite similar to their ‘Run, Lola, Run’ mickey-take several seasons ago (Trilogy of Error), it forges its own path rather nicely.
Simpsons naysayers have been crying ‘the end is nigh’ for several years now. True, the quality of the more recent offerings has been sadly wanting compared to the legendary ones (for many, seasons 3-8 were the golden years). We may never see a return to those halcyon days. Common complaints often include the notion that the show used to deal with real life social issues, and that it had heart. It was a ‘Wonder Years’ style slice of life drama, which happened to be animated, and feature four-fingered yellow people. Do you recall episodes such as the one where Maggie utters her first word, or when Lisa aches over her decision to become a vegetarian, or when Bart tries his hardest to pass a history test but still fails? The show used to have real emotion. Despite the fact that they were cartoon characters, you cared about these people and you laughed and cried with them. I, too, miss the pathos of early Simpsons episodes.
Unfortunately, the modern era of ‘The Simpsons’ tends to focus too profoundly on the latest pop culture references and celebrity cameos (both of which will probably date terribly in the future). Too often do we see Homer performing ludicrous and banal acts of stupidity. The newer seasons rely too heavily on his silly antics. He used to be a bit dimwitted, clumsy, and lazy, but his heart was always in the right place. Remember all the way back in the first season when he pawned the family TV and took his spouse and kids to a therapist? Can you ever imagine latter-day Homer doing that? He’d be more likely to sell his children into slavery! Homer used to be a loving father with a couple of character flaws. Now he’s just retarded, childish, and selfish.
However, this instalment goes some way towards fixing the Simpsons’ problems. If wonderful, funny, and imaginative satires like ’24 Minutes’ continue to be made, the Dark Ages may soon be over. It still hasn’t recaptured the heart of the earlier classics, but at least it made me laugh, and isn’t that what counts? (In the school’s ventilation system, we see boxed of banned 1950s textbooks with an accompanying label proclaiming them to be ‘too racist’, next to a box of vetoed 1990s textbooks which are ‘not racist enough’! Also, foreign exchange student, the chocolate lover Uter is up in the vent, trapped in a spider’s web. I wondered where he’d gone to in the new seasons!)
The jokes make a lot more sense if you’ve seen ‘24’, so if you’re a fan of that series (or even a detractor of it) you’ll get a real kick from this episode.
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