“Cigarette, Mrs. McClure?” – Waiter
“You bet! From now on, she’s smoking for two.” – Troy McClure
Once upon a time, Selma married a famous guy for all the wrong reasons and it didn’t work out. Fifteen years later, Zombie Simpsons decided they hadn’t regurgitated that plot line recently, and did it again. I am speaking, of course, of “A Fish Called Selma” and “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony”. There are three specific scenes I want to compare:
1.) Meeting Mr. Wrong at the DMV
2.) Getting Hitched
3.) The Big Reveal (wherein it is revealed that this marriage isn’t going to work out)
Obviously more than that goes on, especially in “A Fish Called Selma”, which uses Troy McClure’s resurgent career to mock celebrity, Broadway, and the movie business. But both episodes contain all three of those scenes, and they match up extraordinarily well (or poorly, depending on your point of view).
1. Meeting the Husband
Selma initially meets both Troy McClure and Fat Tony in the course of her work as one of the desk lords at the department of motor vehicles. Right away, the radically different quality standards of The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons are apparent. Both Troy and Tony are famous, and neither is very likely to walk into some gray government office and hit it off with one of the most homely employees. The Simpsons took the time to show us why McClure was there, as well as why he’d be interested in Selma; Zombie Simpsons couldn’t be bothered, and had Fat Tony (along with the rest of Springfield) be there just because.
In “A Fish Called Selma”, Troy McClure gets pulled over (in his dented DeLorean, no less) and told to head down to the DMV to get his license changed if he wants to drive without his glasses. This one scene means he’s not only got a reason to go to that drab office, but to make nice with whomever he finds behind the counter. We also know that he’s no longer a big enough star to have some lackey do this kind of thing for him.
They do kinda make him look like a nerd.
Tony, on the other hand, is a connected and powerful mob boss. What the hell is he doing at the DMV in line with citizens? He seems like he’d have underlings to go fetch dinky forms for him (which, by the way, he does in “A Fish Called Selma”). Setting that aside, the show could still give us a reason why he’d be there. And, let’s face it, if you can’t think of several funny reasons for a mob boss to need to go to the DMV, you probably shouldn’t be working as a comedy writer. This is how low the give-a-shit level is for Zombie Simpsons, they couldn’t be bothered to come up with a reason – even a jokey one – for the two main characters to meet.
It’s so transparently lazy that you can almost see them working backwards: deciding they want to do something with Jersey Shore, realizing they could use Fat Tony, casting about for a way to involve the Simpsons, hitting on marrying him to Selma, and then barfing up a poorly contrived way for them to meet (which is unrelated to everything else in the episode). There’s nothing wrong with working backwards, but do the audience the courtesy of at least trying to cover your tracks.
2. The Weddings
Having provided no reason for Selma and Tony to meet, the show doesn’t feel the need give their marriage any type of story, meaning or conflict. Their actual wedding ceremony is just that, a wedding ceremony. There’s a throwaway joke from Homer, but that’s it. Even Zombie Simpsons can’t let things proceed with nothing going on at all, however, so they manufacture a spat between Marge and Selma.
Oh crap, we forget the plot. Think . . . think . . .
The very brief disagreement between the sisters is ostensibly about Marge and Homer getting a bad table at the reception, but it’s really about the whole Fat Tony-Selma story not having any conflict whatsoever. Consider that there’s no foreshadowing about the Marge-Selma feud, it crops up completely out of nowhere, and is then resolved just a couple of scenes later as the two of them sit on deck chairs and decide to let bygones be bygones. Literally nothing happens except that Marge and Selma spontaneously decide “meh, I guess we’re not mad at each other anymore”.
Now consider the (much briefer) wedding in “A Fish Called Selma”. Obviously, there’s a ceremony and Troy and Selma take their vows (albeit with some comedic twists, “take the fabulous Troy McClure”, etcetera). But running through the entire scene are two plot threads. First, Homer has just found out something the audience has known for a while: Troy is only marrying Selma to help his career. So when Lovejoy asks if anyone has any reason why these two should not be wed, the camera pans to Homer, who has exactly such a reason. Homer’s reaction? Silently singing himself Gary Glitter’s stadium rock ballad “Rock and Roll”. Unlike Homer’s throwaway joke in “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony”, this one has something to do with what’s going on, and requires Homer to be emotionally ignorant rather than knuckle draggingly stupid.
The second way the main story is interwoven into the wedding is through Troy’s behavior. At the altar, he mugs for the cameras rather than kissing Selma back. When they reach the car, she talks about how this is the best day of her life but it’s only a “good day” for him. They kiss right after that, but his eyes are always looking up, making sure that he will indeed be “on every newsstand in the country”.
Matching pink outfits. Who says tradition’s on the wane?
3. The Endings
Since Marge and Selma mutually decide that they don’t care enough about their little disagreement to continue it all the way to the end of the episode, Zombie Simpsons needed to pull something directly out of its ass to reach the sweet relief of twenty minutes runtime. That something was an infidelity plot which they introduced – with no warning – at the seventeen minute mark. At that point they’d all but exhausted their supply of the Jersey Shore jokes that were the reason this whole episode got approved in the first place, and they headed for the nearest exit they could find.
The ending is forced to (literally) break into the episode.
“A Fish Called Selma” has a twist at the end too. But instead of a panicked swerve into oncoming traffic that results in the “real wife” driving a convertible through a fence, it’s one of those tightly controlled 180s where the hero throws the car into reverse and shoots all the bad guys while driving backwards. From the very first time Troy and Selma meet, when he exchanges dinner for a wink and a nod on his driver’s license, it’s been plainly obvious to the audience that Troy is using their relationship to restore his career. Selma’s mounting levels of denial about this set the episode up for the ending the audience has been conditioned to expect through years of phony romance in television and film: the big confrontation where she realizes that he’s using her and dumps him.
But The Simpsons is far too clever to just go through the motions like that. Instead, we get this:
Selma: You’re asking me to live a lie, I don’t know if I can do that.
Troy: It’s remarkably easy. Just smile for the cameras and enjoy Mr. Troy’s Wild Ride. You’ll go to the right parties, meet the right people. Sure, you’ll be a sham wife, but you’ll be the envy of every other sham wife in town! So, what do you say, baby?
Selma: Tell me again about Mr. Troy’s Wild Ride.
No anger. No outrage. No yelling about betrayal. Just two people coming to an agreement. And even this isn’t totally unexpected. Way back at the beginning of the episode, when Troy took Selma out for the dinner that started it all, she says, “Thanks for holding up your end of the bargain. I had a pretty good time.” Selma isn’t stupid, she knew the dinner was quid pro quo, so it’s not a bolt from the blue when she decides that the marriage can be too. All the little pieces fit so snugly together that Swiss watchmakers could take lessons.
When the inevitable break up does come, there’s no need for shock or tears or the retcon induced hair pulling that drags “The Real Housewives of Fat Tony” over the finish line. Selma realizes that Troy is willing to take the sham further than she’s willing to go, and decides to stop things. It ends on the comically bittersweet note of them going their separate ways, with microwaved roaches for Jub Jub, and an a lunatic vanity project for Professor Horatio Hufnagel.
[Updated because I can’t tell one sporting staple song from another. Originally I had Homer’s wedding song as this.]
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(The crotch really does wear out too fast.)
The Mob Has Spoken