“Oh, you want a rock fight, eh?” – Homer Simpson
13
Feb
20
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Sweatpants Elsewhere
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(The crotch really does wear out too fast.)The Mob Has Spoken
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Dead Homer Society 
Here’s the thing… Although he’s definitely in Jerkass Mode here, and in most of this episode, little jokes like this are kind of funny and could work, just not for THIS episode. I rewatched it again about a year or two ago, just to see how my feelings on it might’ve changed.
What they really needed to do was make this into two separate episodes, that’s really the only way it could’ve worked. It would have been easier to tolerate Captain Wacky’s zany matchmaking schemes if it was an episode they had done later, instead of directly after Maude’s death. When it first aired, I already knew they were killing Maude off because they couldn’t keep her actress around anymore at the time (because they were cheap bastards, as it turned out), so I think that’s why I could accept the ridiculous nature of her death at the time. But upon re-examination, it was really a terrible way to handle it. As this site has pointed out, they took the death of Bleeding Gums Murphy far more seriously, and he was a fairly minor character by comparison. Whatever you thought of the character, Maude deserved better.
Then there’s the fact that Marge has a talk with Homer about helping Ned through his grief, and he concedes that this means “No more being a jerk”… then proceeds to go full-blown Jerkass/Captain Wacky mode for pretty much the rest of the episode. Did they not read their own writing? There was really no excuse. While some of the dating stuff was admittedly humorous, it made for too much mood whiplash so soon after Ned just lost his wife. It all boils down to them wanting to get rid of a character and then avoid the consequences of their actions. If you don’t want to write all the heavy, sad stuff about a grieving family, children included, then don’t write it! They could have shoved Maude into the background or made her have to fly back home to another state to take care of a sick relative, something like that. Divorce wouldn’t have been a pleasant option, especially since they already did that with Milhouse’s parents, but maybe even that would’ve been better than this. At least then they could have the two reconcile later, which would’ve been more believable than aforementioned other couple.
Well, I’m done complaining. They had two separate concepts that could have worked, in theory, but it all fell apart when they decided to cram the two ideas into one episode, killed off a regular character in a pathetically ridiculous way, and added a large dose of Jerkass Homer on top of it. This is what set them on the path to treating their characters more like props and plot devices than people.