Every week before I watch these shows, I read the synopses provided by FOX about each new episode, because I take these cartoons seriously, man. Based on the write-ups of tonight's shows, I was expecting a good-to-really-good Simpsons (a Bart and Lisa storyline! Score!), and a ho-hum-to-ugh King Of The Hill (oh God, Enrique AND hipsters? Why, why, why?). Turns out I was 100 percent wrong on both counts.
Actually, the part of tonight's Simpsons that excited me in the preview, the Bart and Lisa story, was quite good. It's been a while since there was a good Bart-Lisa team-up on The Simpsons (or much Lisa time at all, for that matter–I get the impression that a lot of you commenters don't like Lisa plots, but I tend to enjoy them, and I've missed that whiny little overachiever this season). But the episode's other plot line made me realize that if Homer and Marge were actual living actors, they would have zero onscreen chemistry left. All of their recent stories seem to focus on them acting in exact opposition to each other, with varying degrees of zaniness/malevolence, before a vague, last-minute reconciliation that's supposedly meant to reassert how much they love each other. There have been very sweet, even complex, Homer and Marge episodes in the show's history, but rehashing the same formula over and over again has left it more than a little limp. While I did like how it contributed to the episode's overall theme of secrecy, Marge's suspicion of Homer cheating on his diet, and her enlistment of a shady gotcha-type reality show to prove it, seemed ham-fisted and trite (especially compared to other classic "is Homer cheating?" episodes like "Colonel Homer" and "The Last Temptation of Homer"–probably because this plot was at least 200 percent more asinine than those). And that montage of Homer's tryst with a lamb roast in a shady motel was so uncomfortable it actually turned my stomach a little bit–thankfully, it was reprised, with an even higher degree of absurdity, a few moments later. (In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.)
Maybe that's why the Lisa and Bart story line was so much more watchable–its weirdness never crossed the line into awkward lameness (except, perhaps, for that final inexplicable Mystery Movie parody). Even with the specter of a supposedly dead Martin Prince and a suddenly sharp Nelson Muntz investigating the Simpson kids for his murder, there was enough innocent silliness to keep it grounded (Bart's incessant bell-ringing to drown out his guilt, the return of the Happy Little Elves). Of course, the fact that Martin had obviously survived–thanks to a wedgie-resistant waistband and a particularly springy tree–was also a significant factor keeping the whole thing from getting too dark (that and a fabulous slo-mo memorial montage, courtesy of the Springfield Elementary A.V. Club. )
King Of The Hill, on the other hand, managed to prominently feature one of its creepiest auxiliary characters, Enrique, without becoming too cringe-inducing. The last Enrique-intensive storyline, "Enrique-cilable Differences," was probably one of my least favorite episodes ever, simply because he's weird and awkward without being particularly funny about it, like Bill or Dale. At first I was afraid this episode was going to go in a similar direction when Enrique asked Hank to speak at his daughter Inez's quinceanera, despite the fact that he hardly knows the girl. (I do like how Enrique's inexplicable adoration of Hank mirrors Hank's own Strickland-worshiping tendencies.) Thankfully, even though he hovered throughout the episode, Enrique's odd behavior acted more as an accent to the main goings-on, rather than being the focus of the episode.