Leftovers

“You gotta improvise, Lisa.  Cloves, Tom Collins mix, frozen pie crust . . .” – Homer Simpson

Have you ever stood in your kitchen, staring at bare cabinets and empty refrigerator shelves, and tried to cobble together one last meal before the next trip to the store?  You’ve got a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and hey, those two might work together.  Sometimes a bunch of scraps go down unexpectedly well.  Sometimes they do not.  “Homer the Father” is that disastrous third case where you find yourself trying to induce vomiting just minutes after sitting down to eat. 

This entire episode felt like it was made up of ideas from barely legible post-it notes that were found in the break room plus a couple of notional b-plots that were deemed too weak for any other episode.  Even having gathered every concept they could find on every discarded piece of scrap paper in the office, they still needed oceans of filler in the form of montages, dream sequences, and those less than fresh 1980s sitcoms.  When even that famine induced “waste not, want not” approach still left them several minutes short, they sent Homer to China and killed the last of the clock with an “Inside the Actors Studio” bit that was just as stale and outdated as the rest of the episode. 

The numbers are in and, with football once again dominating the evening, they’re bad.  A mere 6.50 million people choked down the cloves and pie crust on FOX last night.  That’s the second lowest number all season, a mere thirty thousand people behind last week’s “Flaming Moe”.