What Makes a Great Homer Episode? ‘Simpsons’ Showrunner Matt Selman Talks About the New Homer-Centric Disney+ Stream
In March, Disney+ launched a 24/7 streaming channel of The Simpsons, which plays every episode of the show in order, allowing fans to simulate the experience of watching it as it aired on TV. Since then, all 800-ish episodes of The Simpsons have played in a continuous loop.
That, however, just changed.
This morning, instead of playing every single episode, the Disney+ Simpsons stream switched to the 200 best Homer-centric episodes of The Simpsons — called “Homerpalooza” — as determined by online lists made by fans of the show as well as Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman.
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Below, I spoke to Selman about how the episodes were chosen and what makes for a truly great Homer episode in the first place.
So, tell me about this new Simpsons stream.
Well, to get the Disney+ Simpsons stream started, we began with just playing every episode in order all the way through. Then, for the update we thought, “How should we curate this?” There are so many fun ways to rearrange the episodes. Like, we could do them in backwards order or a fan’s top 100 list. We could do so many things, but we thought, “Let’s just do the top 200 Homer episodes.”
So, the team at Disney+ and I curated what we hope are the top 200 Homer episodes, but they’re not in order from worst to best or anything — they’re in chronological order. Although, now I’m thinking they should be in random order, but I don’t know. It might be too late to pull that off.
What was the process for picking the episodes?
Disney+ sent me a rough draft of the list compiled from various online articles, and then I went through and spent way too much time curating it and making sure that each one was really Homer-centric. For example, I took “Flaming Moe’s” off the list even though it’s very Homer-centric because I thought, “Well, this is one of the first episodes to really explore the inner life of a side character.” Maybe this will spark public discussion. Who knows? I’m just trying to generate more controversy after we killed Marge.
I was going to ask, how many of these episodes does Marge die in?
She dies in all of them. She’s dead forever now. She’s permanently dead.
What’s an episode that you included on the list even though you thought fans might not agree?
I love one episode called “Go Big or Go Homer,” where Homer gets an intern who thinks he’s the greatest guy in the world and Homer tries to be a mentor to him and it goes horribly wrong. It’s a big Homer-tries-to-get-respect episode. A lot of episodes are about Homer feeling like he’s not respected in the world. I like the ones that are a little more emotionally grounded.
What makes for a great Homer episode in your opinion?
I think it’s if you really care about what he cares about and he’s not just being insane. Even in “Deep Space Homer,” which is a very crazy episode where he goes to space, Homer feels like he’s not respected in some form or another — the inanimate carbon rod gets more respect than him — so, I think it’s emotional.
Also, I have another Homer theory that people probably think is terrible, which is that Homer is usually dumb, but sometimes his intelligence is in direct proportion to his greed. So, the greedier he is for something, the more clever he can become.
There’s an episode called “The War of Art,” where Homer realizes Marge bought a painting at a yard sale that’s very valuable and they debate what are the ethics of telling the people with the yard sale that they actually sold them something incredibly valuable or trying to share the money. Homer comes up with all these incredibly ingenious, devilish philosophical arguments for why the right thing to do is not to tell the Van Houtens that they sold them this valuable painting for $20.
His arguments are quite good, and I feel like it’s all in character because Homer’s greed is stronger than his stupidity.
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