Why “The Frying Game” Is a Dark Horse Contender for The Simpsons’s Worst Episode Ever

Spare me your jockey elves. Forget your spring break alligators. Cast aside your amorous pandas and bar rags and even your Gagas. My poor lost souls, I beseech you to look upon thy screamapillar and weep — weep for us all.

Because “The Frying Game” may very well be The Simpsons’s worst episode ever.

As I discussed on The Simpsons Show podcast, I don’t make that pronouncement lightly. It’s hard to call “The Frying Game” overrated exactly — forgotten is probably more accurate — but it’s rarely brought up in discussions of the series’s nadir. And yet it deserves to be ground into the dirt like the fetid excuse for televised refuse that it is. What the episode lacks in the casual cruelty of other contemporary Simpsons outings, or the aimless racism of the show’s more regrettable international jaunts, it makes up for in being emblematic of everything wrong with the series at this point in its run. It is a nonsensical, irritating, embarrassing blight upon the face of what was once the greatest show on television.

Normally I like to give a brief rundown of the premise when writing about a Simpsons episode. But “The Frying Game” has no premise. Instead, it only offers a heap of miscellaneous stuff that happens in some vague, undefined order. The Simpson family deals with a screeching insect and the hassles of the EPA. Homer performs court-ordered community service. He and Marge end up doting on a kindly but needy old lady. The pair are, out of nowhere, suspected of murder. The Springfield judicial system convicts them and puts them on death row. The whole shebang turns out to be part of a giant, implausible ruse. Shrug. Angry yawn. Move along.

None of it matters. None of these developments have anything to do with one other. None are given the slightest amount of time to breathe or matter or, god forbid, elicit a laugh. Instead, “The Frying Game” just races through them, one after another, with airless scene after airless scene until the credits mercifully roll. The episode is a Frankenstein’s monster of stray plot points and lame gags. My wife genuinely wondered if it had been cobbled together from other episodes’ leftovers.

We know the show's writers can come up with better EPA gags than this, because they pulled it off in The Simpsons Movie.

And why not? At least then there would be a solid explanation for “The Frying Game” — something about cost savings or good ideas that don’t quite fit together or some consideration of commerce and creative resignation that could account for this steaming pile of crap. Instead, we’re left with an effort from all-time great Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder that looks and feels like the show’s shame-ridden death rattle.

Examine any individual piece of this episode and the whole thing falls apart. For instance, start with that damn screamapillar escapade. The level of sheer annoyance that the shrieking little bug achieves becomes the natural focus of the viewer’s angst, but that glosses the fact that the whole routine amounts to a feeble dig against the Environmental Protection Agency (and, I guess, the Endangered Species Act?). Swartzwelder’s libertarian bona fides are well established, and it’s not as though these entities are above reproach, but is the best satire the writers could come up with on this front the notion that regular citizens will be ordered to pamper irksome insects upon the threat of an all-seeing EPA task force?

But before you can even wrap your head around what abstract point the show could possibly be trying to make here, the episode’s on to Homer’s community service and eventual servanthood to Mrs. Bellamy, a seemingly nice octogenarian, with hardly a glance in the rearview mirror. Why does Homer go from being her helpful friend to her literal butler, with Marge in tow, despite both of them resenting every second of it?

Guilt, I guess? Because it’s supposed to be funny to someone who’s somehow unfamiliar with the concept of comedy? Because the plot just needs both of them in the house when she’s murdered? Who cares! Certainly no one in the writers’ room.

Plus we get a laxative joke! Old ladies love to stay regular! The cutting edge of humor!

What follows from there is the only half-decent part of “The Frying Game”, where Homer and Marge labor under suspicion of Mrs. Bellamy’s murder. There’s some solid gags about the pair subsisting as town pariahs while the rest of Springfield walks on eggshells. But even there, as the episode pivots to a vague riff on The Fugitive, all kinds of nonsensical details of the crime pop up for no other reason than that the plot needs them to. The only thing worse than the random, out of nowhere murder mystery that follows is its execrable explanation, which is just part and parcel with the haphazard way this episode is built and executed.

All of this is aside from the bumbling attempts at connective tissue that nominally tie together these disconsonant bits. Homer thinks Mrs. Bellamy’s place is haunted and that she’s trying to eat him, a topic that’s dropped after roughly forty-five seconds. The Spucklers adopt Bart and Lisa, which feels like the start to an abbreviated B-story or at least some sprinkling of recurring comic relief, but is instead all in service of a single dumb joke and another dead end. Homer and Marge’s arrest and trial is completely lacking in substance, quickly becoming yet another time-killer before the (theoretically) more significant events happen.

What’s especially frustrating is that after the avalanche of lazy, aimless crud, the show tries to use this cockamamie setup to gin up some measure of unearned emotion. After Homer and Marge are sentenced to death, Marge has a weepy monologue about all the beautiful life events she and Homer are going to miss (after a gross proposition from her husband, no less), and Homer confesses to being the sole murderer to win her freedom. Setting aside the implausibility of this, and the strange line deliveries that muddy the waters of what’s actually happening in these moments, “The Frying Game” doesn’t come close to earning that kind of heart and pathos after the shoddy clown show it put on to get to that point. If anything, it feels insulting to try to tack such a maudlin beat onto this formless mess.

Some of these sins could be forgivable if, god help me, any of this were funny. Plenty of dumb, rudderless outings from The Simpsons still have the saving grace of some good cheap laughs. All “The Frying Game” can offer is a bawling caterpillar who acts like a human baby, Homer rolling through every consonantal variant of “zuh”, and an abortive reference to The Green Mile. The gags in the episode are consistently dumb and uninspired, lacking in the cleverness, timing, and layers that once characterized the show’s peerless sense of humor.

Timeless comedy!

It’s telling that the few funny bits in “The Frying Game’ have almost nothing to do with what can charitably be called the plot. Instead, they’re just random asides, chock full of the pleasing absurdity (Swartzwelder’s calling card) the show could still muster after a decade on the air. Shtick like Mr. Burns “filling in” for Homer and receiving shocked reactions from Lenny and Carl, or Chief Wiggum muttering like a criminal that he’ll be back on the streets after being arrested for basically no reason, or the Blue-Haired Lawyer declaring that Duffman’s party-hearty attitude is a registered trademark of the Duff corporation, all manage to be amusing enough little bits. But they’re also just grab bag gags in an episode whose grasp on story and character is too loose to harvest any laughs from either.

But that malady pales in comparison to “The Frying Game”’s god awful ending, arguably the worst in the show’s history. Just as Homer is about to be executed by electric chair, an announcer reveals that the prior two-thirds of the episode were all just a part of “Frame Up”, a new Fox reality show that set up Homer and Marge. Are you kidding me? Taken with the utmost charitable view, you can squint and see that finish as a Running Man-style critique of the craven lengths reality T.V. producers will go to. But viewing it with even a modicum of skepticism reveals it as a complete ass-pull that makes zero sense and renders the audience dumber for having participated in this idiotic charade for the last twenty minutes.

How is it that the city’s courts and prisons and police force apparently weren’t in on the ruse and yet somehow still reached Frame Up’s desired outcome? How come nobody checked to see whether Mrs. Bellamy was really dead? Why did it seem like she was old friends with Agnes Skinner and the town’s other older ladies? Who would go along with this, even in the outsized reality of Springfield? I’m not one to nitpick a series that’s always had a loose sense of reality, but this ending doesn’t even pass the faintest of smell tests.

Worse yet, It renders every minor beat the episode offers until that ending a complete and utter waste of time, all in service of a farce that doesn’t begin add up. And to add insult to injury, “The Frying Game” reveals that Mrs. Bellamy was secretly Carmen Electra the whole time, managing to pack in a shameless chest-staring joke and yet another pointless celebrity cameo to put the cherry on top of the traditional post-classic Simpsons turd pile.

Boorish men stare at women's breasts! Another trenchant insight!

It’s all abominable. This episode has no reason to be. It’s about dozens of things — EPA regulations, town pariah-hood, old people guilting others into free labor, reality show excesses, murder mysteries, and scores of other unfinished thoughts — to the point that it’s really about nothing. It’s rife with lame jokes about bug vomit, smelly underwear, and the race card. And it contorts Homer from bro-y everyman to dopey manchild to self-sacrificing martyr to leering jackass in the span of a whiplash-inducing twenty minutes.

All the other contenders for Worst Episode Ever have a claim to fame — some terrible element that makes them recognizably, transcendently awful — whether it’s a ridiculous finish or a fawning celebrity appearance or a head-scratching premise. But the thing that gives “The Frying Game” a claim to being the worst of them all is that it doesn’t even have that. There’s nothing memorably, enjoyable bad about this episode. It’s just a random assortment of miserable crap, jammed together with minimal care and lackadaisically delivered to viewers as though it’s anything other than a waste of time and an insult to their intelligence.

“The Frying Game” isn’t amusingly bad, or spectacularly bad, or ambitiously bad. It’s just thoroughly, tediously, unimaginatively bad. That’s the thing that’s kept it off so many “worst of” lists over the years, but also the thing that should secure its place on them forever.

Odds and Ends

– Positives! Positives! Positives! The design and animation of the koi pond is lovely! Marge peeking out of her blindfold is a silly but solid visual gag! Minor bits of wordplay like “aggravated buggery” and “Ho. J. Simpson trial” were worth a chuckle!

– In keeping with the hate for the Endangered Species Act evident in this episode, “The Frying Game” also contains an odd streak of animal cruelty, from Homer giving Santa’s Little Helper a cat to harass, to a gag about an imperiled goldfish, to the Kent Brockman line about the elephant being put to death. I can appreciate some dark humor on The Simpsons, but it’s a weird motif to include.

– The speed-dating gag with Moe getting four-hundred “NOs” in two-seconds feels like the lamest sort of T.G.I.F.-era sitcom joke.

– One of the few saving graces of this one is that there’s minimal Jerkass Homer present, but he does steal cobbler from Meals on Wheels recipients, and the episode balances it out with Agnes Skinner being needlessly cruel to Seymour.

– Marge’s “darn her socks, well I say darn her” line is a quaint enough grumble to tickle my funny bone.

– The episode’s funniest stretch of the episode comes when Homer and Marge are merely under a cloud of suspicion and trying to live their daily lives. Moe trying to drown out his murderous thoughts with “I’ve been workin’ on the railroad”, Homer playing murder-y simon says to get some peanuts, and him taking the murder tour bus because it “stops right near our house” are all decent-at-worst laughs.

– The vaguely rap-esque sting that plays over the sign gag explaining that death row is not affiliated with “Death Row Records” is bizarre.

– Maybe it’s just the breathless pace of the episode, but Dan Castellaneta delivery of Homer’s lines about Marge “loving too much…the crime I did” and “Now you do it for me” always felt off to me, and stifle what appears to be an effort at humor within a theoretically heartfelt pair of scenes.

– To give “The Frying Game” one more small bit of credit, I like that not only does the ending of the episode tie back to the beginning with the screamapillar attending Homer’s execution, but the animators even put Homer’s old foe George Bush in the audience.

– It’s impossible to replace Phil Hartman or Lionel Hutz on this show, and I feel for the writers trying to fill that void. But man, Gil as the Simpsons’ lawyer just doesn’t cut it. Like so much in this episode, it comes off like a futile attempt to substitute and recreate something that used to be great.